Enough Is Enough!!! The Ongoing Saga!!! It's Almost The 3 Year Anniversary

Nah, they quit and took up vaping instead.
Feel free to groan

 

I had a model train that smoked… but only once

 

Usually when the motor got full of fluff and/or slightly over oiled!

I also had many years a Triang Hornby Jinty with the Pseuthsmoke I think the trademark was. A very thin oil you put in a heater hidden in the chimney which emitted a wisp thin light smoke as the train ran round. Amazed it never caught fire, especially when I experimented with 3 in 1 oil instead!

 

As a make good for the poor state the game released in. I'd love to try and play that, but it's too open for me. I like structure and linearity. Outer Worlds is about as open world as I can get.

 

Are you enchanted by prison's rigid routine?

 

I've tried the Escapists and couldn't get into it. If I play a Fallout or Elder Scrolls I get bogged down by taking side quests from everybody. I much prefer the "while you're doing this main story mission could you also do this?" approach The Outer Worlds takes with its side quests..

 

I found that on my last Fallout 4 playthrough. By the time I’d done all the side missions and DLC, I didn’t have the heart to resume the main storyline. Plus I was so OP by that point, I was basically an unstoppable killing machine!

 

Haha after a couple of playthroughs I used to make my own missions in Skyrim. My favourite was The House Of Cheese, where I built a big house in the middle of the map and then proceeded to round up every scrap of cheese that I could find and dump it in the house. Killing anyone who got in the way, obviously

 

On a more positive note, the Class 70 is coming soon, with its preview stream next week.

Finally, some good bloody food

 

Assuming it works.

 

So… as this is now our de facto Off Topic thread, how are people finding Transport Fever 3? Particularly interested to hear the experience of anyone running at the minimum spec as to whether a bit of tweaking is giving acceptable performance. I’m still a bit reluctant to take the plunge and in the meantime have contented myself with a foray back into TF2.

 

Posted this in the Stuttgart route feedback thread, but relevant here:

Just played this route again [Stuttgart] after a very long time on Series X to see if any improvements following last week's small update for the 147 memory optimisation pass to reduce blurry issues.

Well, having just played two services, I won't be playing this route for a long time again. First service the textures went blurry after just a few minutes and remained the same until the end. Second service, blurry textures appeared again but then towards the end of the service, the game froze and closed to the Xbox home screen. Without doubt the worst route on Series X - even other memory-intense routes like Frankfurt-Fulda are not as bad as this.

Still completely unacceptable it's like this.

Whatever happened to TSW on console... It's a real shame.

 

Oh, this will be a good place for my ramblings...

Yesterday, we were chatting with an old mate about the general quality of modern games, and of course I mentioned the TSW series as one example. In particular, I complained about the community, which, instead of demanding quality, buys pretty much anything that comes along and even makes excuses for the developers.

The point he made gave me a bit of a revelation.

As a long-time user of 8-bit computers (my computer turned 44 this year!), I’ve become accustomed to expecting the impossible. The things I used to see on the 12-inch screen of my 8-bit computer should never have been possible, because that computer had neither sufficient processing power nor sufficient memory! And yet the programmers constantly pushed the hardware beyond its limits. I don’t recall any patches ever being released for any of those games either XD

My problem is that I expect the same from TSW and other PC software.

The overwhelming majority of DtG’s customers have never had any experience with 8-bit computers, and programming well below the hardware’s capabilities is something you regard as perfectly normal. You consider the expectation of pushing beyond these limitations to be utterly absurd. You even make fun of the few players who demand higher quality (as this thread amusingly demonstrates). Yet the creator of the game ‘Running Trains’ proves that in 2026, this is still possible.

Well, up until now I’ve been angry with you lot for ruining the market and not letting developers move forward. After talking to a friend yesterday, though, I’ve started to understand you better. So I’m not angry with you anymore

But please try to understand my point as well. If, ever since I was a little boy, I’ve been getting more than I hoped for (when it comes to computers), it’s hard to accept that suddenly the quality has hit rock bottom and everything has become impossible or financially unfeasible.

I hope I haven’t bored you.
Have a great day, everyone!

 

J.T.
I can well understand how you feel.
I started out back then with a Commodore 64, and even then there were games that really shouldn’t have been possible, but the various developers kept pushing the boundaries further and further.

Then, with the Amiga 500 and Atari ST, there were games that were so good that it really shouldn’t have been possible to create anything like them.

Then I bought my very first PC – that was in 1989 – and in 1999 the simulator called Falcon was released; I think there was one patch for it a few years later. However, back in 1999, you could play Falcon’s multiplayer mode with 16 players simultaneously, and the manual alone was 500 pages long – thicker than a normal book.
And even today, hundreds, if not thousands, of players are still flying their F-16s through the skies in Falcon. The game still works today, thanks to improvements made by modders.

And now it’s 2026, and a company like DTG can’t even manage to properly implement passengers, the weather, or even summer and winter time in TSW. If DTG had released TSW in 1999, they’d probably have gone bankrupt.

 

Old 8 bit games did have their bugs - I seem to remember Jet Set Willy was not completable (not that I was any way near that regardless) - but the ability to patch digital downloads easily has no doubt encouraged just releasing broken and patching later.
My issue with DTG is that they don't particularly patch later either a lot of the time and things are just left broken. I have to say for balance that I do still enjoy TSW most of the time regardless - I picked up Blackpool Branches in the Steam sale and it seems excellent for example (not a DTG route of course).

 

Kicked off my gaming with an Amiga A600 and later A1200. The developers then really had to work to get the best out of the hardware, but I loved titles like F16 Combat Pilot, the various Microprose mil sims (though they later went to PC only, after F117 I think). And who can forget the delights of Lemmings 2 - hours spent trying to save those little critters. Strangely the one thing we didn’t have was many transport simulations. At best we had the text based SIAM and Simudrive and by the time Paul Robin’s Train Driver 3 came along the Amiga was dying. However it ran quite well under emulation on the PC.

 

The idea people are less picky I can't behind, I remember reading developers complain that games like Balder's Gate 3 & Hollow Knight Silksong are creating unrealistic expectations for them. People did not take those sort of comments well, I've seen even well respected people who used to work at places like Valve get flak for defending more modern developers even.

Also in general I can think of many long standing franchises that have have newer games that struggle with sales because the players of that series reject it. Or heck, I could point to a new IP like Starfield, which is just sci-fi Skyrim, yet despite the latter being a culture icon the former was a dud despite to my understanding being about the same quality. But expectations for RPG's have went way up since Skyrim, particular in terms of polish, which Skyrim distinctly was not.

None of that reads as people just "Expecting games to not push boundaries", frankly why would they? There's more variety in the games you can buy, including many retro and indie titles too buy, which might not push hardware, but can push other interesting boundaries.

 

The thing with 8 bit computers is that devs firstly had to know the ins and outs of their particular target machine, and coding was done on bare metal, modern games and software aren't running on bare metal and have to go through APIs and whatever limits (in the case of the consoles) Sony and M$ want to put on them like the number of CPU cores you can use, how much ram is locked away for background tasks etc, Unless you are running something like TempleOS you have so many layers of stuff running before you even open a game. And devs like DTG are using unreal engine where what they do is limited by epic games, they can't go through the source code and gut whatever they don't need or want. Modern games and software just are fundamentally not comparable to pre 90s software.

 

I got 30 hours of really enjoyable gameplay out of Starfield, but when you are in the same underground biolab on the other side of the galaxy for the 10th time it starts to wear. I think I still have a character side quest to do so one day if I get FSR4.1 working I may actually go back and finish that. 100% Bethesda jank of a game though.

Train Sim Classic is similarly afflicted, many many many UE4 games are not similarly afflicted. We would need to wait for DTG's third train game to make a correlation but just saying, they didn't fall down the performance hole when they moved to Unreal.

 

Actually, they can and have, because UE itself is open source. DTG has heavily customized their version of UE4, including backporting some features.

 

It's like DTG are actively trying to destroy customer engagement. Personal timeline:

• Up to and including TSW5 — I've bought every route and most locos that had achievements. I've 100%'d TSW4 and 5 (except the Thomas DLCs, I mean, come on).
• TSW6 — route-based achievements were removed. Now I've only bought routes that interested me, and none were bought at full price. DTG have missed out on ~70% of the money I'd have spent otherwise.
• TSW7 release — route-based masteries were removed. Now I've not even bothered to install the free update, never mind buying any of the paid editions. Tadami and the people that made it can go pound sand. DTG are missing out on 100% of my money at this point.
• ...And it's announced that monthly Masteries for October, November, December will be available until January. I think I'll take a break from TSW until, say, Christmas. And that's if I don't decide to free up the 400+GB it's taking up on my hard drive before that.

To quote Clarkson, "how hard can it be"? Having a checklist to complete or a goal to strive towards is one of the most basic types of gameplay mechanic there is. Text-based RPGs had it in the 80s, for god's sake. What I mean is: more and more standard good features continue to be removed while buggy messes most players didn't even ask for such as Freight Hauler get added in, and years-old bugs remain unaddressed (no wonder — DTG have admitted that managing a single spreadsheet merely listing the bugs is too difficult for them).

Even 3rd party routes are now lauched without core features and it just gets treated as normal. No apology, no "we'll add it later", no nothing. Forgive the hyperbole, but at this point one could probably simulate a significant portion of the gameplay "experience" of a premium-priced route by watching someone else play it on YouTube for free and pressing "A" or "D" every now and then. What a disappointment.

 

Oh, don't get me started on the Achievements thing.... DTG removing route-based Achievements, and then more recently stopping backwards compatibility (so I now can't play an old route on, say, TSW5 if it has TSW6 or TSW7 branding), has done more to curtail my spending on DLC than any number of bugs. I'm afraid that DTG just fundamentally don't seem to 'get' Achievements (and nor to be fair do many people posting on this forum) which has lost them sales and goodwill.

 

And Mastery, ever since....I think North Transpennine, Every route has had a Mastery role for people to work towards. A lot of the time it was the only way to get me to play a scenario.

Now even that has been stopped. With the Monthly masteries now running late.

 

My immediate reaction to that pic was "who put a mirror on my TV screen?"

 

Looking at the Thomas images also brings to mind, yet again DTG launch a spin off and pretty much forget about it. By now Wonders Of Sodor should have seen the island extended with more route sections, more trains, more stories. But it seems to be Apathy 101 in Chatham these days. Is the company being run by AI and all these names we see just generated. Or maybe it might be better if it was run by AI at this point!

 

"I've got a fun task for you today, pinxtonpaws", said Sir Toppham Hatt

pinxtonpaws scowled at Sir Toppham Hatt, as they knew that Sir Toppham Hatt was not telling pinxtonpaws the whole story

 

It could be me, but I notice a lot of negativity from players here on the forums, more then before. I totally get that with all kind of changes for the worse, more and more problems without solutions and this all for a higher price. Yesterday I watched a bit of the Class 70 live stream, interesting loco but I'm not gonna buy it anyway, because I have to install TSW7 for it. TSW7 means more bugs, the interface change with bigger font and overly bright menus, terrible camera control on controller and AI conductor problems for example. So why should I switch to TSW7 and why would I bring my money to DTG?

I also noticed the lack of DTG employees on the forums to engage with the discussions and to reply on the negativity around TSW7, so players are be heard. For me TSW7 feels as the next rushed LOVE-up in the series and every iteration seems to be worse. But without actually listening to the players and change the game for the better, I'm afraid it will not end well for TSW and DTG.

 

Have to admit I'm responsible for quite a bit of the current negativity I'm so sick of seeing these bloody BLACK SQUARES IN THE 805 CAB that I'm just kicking off about it to see if anyone at DTG actually notices and cares to respond.

Over the years I've seen others getting similarly wound up, yet up until now I've been relatively laid back about it. Something about these damn squares just totally winds me the WXYZ up, so I figured yesterday I'll crack and actually submit a bug report and see how they react. So far they've asked for a DxDiag dump and a video, as if they can't even reproduce the problem... That winds me up even more, so I figure this is my last gasp - when they finally close the bug report with some fobfluff I guess my only option left is to just shut the hell up and go away. I'll buy Carlisle-Whitehaven and probably whatever else JT put out, as they're the only ones who haven't disappointed, but I figure I'm just shouting into the void here and it's all a bit pointless. DTG just don't have the capacity to even respond, let alone fix anything, and it's time I stopped kidding myself. It's only a bloody game, and I'm fed up of being fed up with it.

 

I feel you, the only thing they have to do is fire up TSW and see it for themselves. Why bother a player to deliver them proof, this issue is already mentioned multiple times on the forums including screenshots. I guess they also have multiple bug reports about this issue, so to me this is just to hold off.

Last week I said on here about TSW and blurry textures, fool me once (TSW5), fool me twice (TSW6), well they don't fool me a 3rd time with TSW7.

 

They streamed two errors in one of their console preview stream, so they know there are problems. It just feels like they'd rather bury their heads in the sand and hope the next buggy mess of a DLC route will be a sufficient make-good for paying customers. As nice as Carlisle to Whitehaven may look I'm not sure how it'll play on my XBox Series S. Heck last week I was worried if I did buy and install a new route it wouldn't show up in the main menu. I'd love to pick up Preston to Crewe or Carlisle-Whitehaven, but I just worry if I do I'm going to end up getting kicked back to desktop goodness knows how many times while I try and drive it. There's a LOT of work to do on TSW. There has been for close to a decade. No game should release saying "(Console) players can look forward to a massive core update three months after release" as that's hitting deadlines rather than satisfying paying customers.

 

Don't get too excited about any mention of a "core update" though because the one they did for TSW6 last year was just a patch containing a larger than normal amount of general fixes....and absolutely nothing to do with core issues.

 

DTG itself is the core issue, so they should fix their own organisation first.

 

Here we are, nearly a month since TSW7 launched, and the Class 150 is still unusable. Anyone else raised tickets about the missing bogies which are now stuck half way between the floor and chassis? *continuing eye rolls*

 

Hello. In the frankenbahn route aroudn stuttgart, my fps sometimes lokcs into severe lag. It seems to be the gpu doubling its usage. Does anybody else has this?

 

Here we are, nearly ten years after TSW launched and passenger behaviour is still terrible...

 

What do they mean whit Summer update? Tsc model from next year?