If the community wants TS1 to be improved, then it is important to keep up the pressure. The longer that TS1 is left to fall apart..... the harder it will be to retain/recruit anyone with the expertise to even keep it maintained. Maybe they should just drop the whole TS1 suite into open source... and let the community figure out how to fix it. I suspect that TS1 would then be working perfectly within weeks/months.....
I would love to see some core upgrades to make the sim more stable and run with more recent technology, however I would caution against anything which will render older content unusable, although I doubt DTG would go down that road anyway. Something which made the despatcher a little more "intuitive" and something where you weren't frightened that, that one extra piece of AI traffic won't suddenly cause the sim to crash would be great. I can only see DTG putting much time and effort into the TS1 if they are still benefitting from it financially and plan to have it around for sometime.
Lack of Standard scenarios- or, rather, why cannot each Career scenario have an unscored Standard clone? It wouldn't, it seems to me, be very hard at all to implement that. Sometimes I like to drive a train for fun and watch the scenery, not constantly monitor my speedometer and sweat the timetable. And, no, QD doesn't really take the place of actually having a goal- especially if it's a freight-shunting thing.
Oh, and a big one- although easy enough to implement. Give us access to the 2D map from the pause menu, like TSW does. I really hate trying to drive a train while changing a dozen switches before I hit them.
Pressing F9 will bring up the track map, From there, you can click on the manual switches as well to manually align them.
Considering the OP was 02/06 and DTG Steve was going to report on this thread the same week I doubt whether DTG are even looking here.
If I am making a scenario which involves yard work and the setting of manual points, I put a stop at destination instruction at a marker for sufficient period for the driver to go into the map to set the manual points. If it is freeroam it doesn't really matter as you aren't again the clock. I suppose the only issue is if you don't want your train to stop before getting to the manual points.
Then there are scenarios where the points to be set manually are all along the route, often after multiple instructions so you don't know what the route is going to be until you're on it. And sometimes I just want to see where I am. What's so hard about providing access to the map from the pause screen? TSW does it.
Yeah, THAT one. Poor implementation, which should be (but probably won't be) patched. The solution is to manually click on the loading chute (little red and white rollover cursor appears). That's the "correct" answer the scenario is looking for, and it doesn't register if you use an alternate command, whether the T key, the HUD button or the load button on the F1 overlay.
Brilliant, a very comprehensive post! Can you tell me what ef and tc are by the way? From where I am sitting TS is far from dead. Judging by the amount of new freeware and payware being developed for it, it is very much alive and in rude health.
Thanks, I could have checked but was feeling lazy, I have no interest in those so don't know how they are doing. I wouldn't even say TSW2 is dead either. So I can only assume it was an anti-DTG mini rant not a statement of fact!
Pookeyhead I understand your sentiment but is there really any need for that language? As far as I can tell this is intended to be a family friendly forum, should we not show that we are better than those that come here to troll or disrupt by being level headed and mature?
Agreed lets keep this family friendly otherwise the Protagnist will shut this thread down and there is no need for that.
Apart from the horror of operating within the workshop screen mode, already mentioned by someone previously on this thread. I am having an issue that I have contacted DTG support about, which they are investigating, but I cannot find a route listed in Quick Drive which is QD enabled.
I reported him too. I agree with the above, there is no need for bad language, it is possible to show dissatisfaction without it.
The two things DTG need to fix are: 1: The constant Out Of Memory errors 2: Move from DirectX 9 to DirectX 12
Well 2 might fix 1, although 2 isn't a fault it is just the age of the game and I think moving to DirectX 12 would break too much and isn't as simple as you think to be honest. I would like to see a fix to the OOM crashes but I have a suspicion that DTG don't really know what is causing them.
"Move from DirectX 9 to DirectX 12" Unlikely as TSW and the latest TSW2 only use DirectX 10.0. (Introduced in June 2007) FSX was also DirectX 9.0c (circa 2004) but it took a huge corporation like Lockheed Martin to update it DirectX 12.0 (circa 2018/19) - DTG haven't followed suit with their Steam version FSX. "I would like to see a fix to the OOM crashes but I have a suspicion that DTG don't really know what is causing them." I agree, they probably don't!!! My theory is that it is probably due to the relationship between the Virtual Address Space (8 terabytes in TS 20XX 64-bit) and the Physical RAM and the method the DTG team used to convert TS from 32-bit to 64-bit. In doing that they may have "locked/blocked/restricted" (unknowingly) certain addresses from the VAS to the Physical RAM and some add-ons (eg Workshop scenarios) cause an access violation to an address in the RAM - OOM/SBHH/Memory Mismatch/0xC0000005/Access Violation, etc error. The error may well be idiosyncratic ie pertaining to a particular PC and/or set up. To give an example 16GB of RAM has around 4,300,000 x 4KB "pages" and if just one of those pages is "wrong" ie already occupied, protected, restricted, or not a valid address" you will get an OOM/SBHH/Memory Mismatch/0xC0000005/Access Violation, etc error. So, basically the error is saying; I found that I could not access just one 4KB block of RAM out of 16GB installed, (ie there approx 4.2 million x 4K addresses in 16GB Physical RRAM) so I had no alternative but to crash, aka "Invalid Page Fault". pH
After reading through this thread from the start, I must agree with the majority of the suggestions, and comments. I do like to create scenarios, but find it incredibly frustrating on 'loading times' and OOM errors when trying to recreate complex real world scenarios, and then testing them before uploading to the community. OK, I haven't got the latest hardware, but it's a decent setup (a 2nd gen i7, 1060ti gfx, 16gb RAM and SSD), but surely it's time for DTG to look into multi-core operations? It would be a big plus for me to continue my TS hobby if anything can be done to the core engine - I'm not ready just yet to move over to ETS2!
RSC/DTG made TS "multi-core capable" circa TS 2012/13 and to my knowledge that hasn't changed. It is not true multicore but it uses all 4 cores (monitoring with Logitech ARX in real time) on my quad core machines. I don't believe that there are many true multicore games out there and being true multicore may not improve performance or stability. Multi-threading might help with performance - but who knows.
I have recorded benchmark of TS with MSI Afterburner, only 2 core is being used. Looks ugly in benchmark overlay only 2 core/thread is being used from 16 threads Because of DX9.0 frame time is also too high 24-25 ms this need to generally less than 8 ms as my system specification. Really TS need core update to latest DX version. I am ready to pay again for that great update.
As Peter said above TSW only uses DX10 - there is no chance of the game being rebuilt to DX12 without breaking it
I did not see any wrap up, so I may add my points: 1. Frequent game crashes, mainly caused by memory exceptions. Each time the game crashes to local files are corrupted, so this is really bad. 2. The workshop. There is a bug introduces in TS2019 with he 64 bit upgrade. It looks like a debugging popup that is not removed after debugging. It makes the workshop tab unusable. 3. Also the workshop. The download function corrupts the downloaded files in an unpredictable way. You can only download one at a time. This is very annoying. I reported it, but because it is somewhere between Dtg and steam nobody feels responsible. 4. It would be nice to order workshop items by route or alphabetically. They are now completely unordered. 5. When uploading workshop items, if something goes wrong the error message does not give any clue on what is so wrong. Much better error reporting may help. 6. There is an issue, that only a limited number of screenshots are shown in the upload function. This also is very annoying. 7. An test=test cycle for the scenario editor would be a nice feature. Now testing and changing scenarios is cumbersome, apart from the frequent crashes and unexpected results which cause me in many cases to end up with a completely different scenario that what I designed.
Is it not a Steam workshop and the ownership of it is with Steam - not DTG? I doubt DTG could fix the Workshop problems
The issue does appear to be with TS1's validation routine for required elements. So I would think it is an issue on DTG's side.
Easy enough to fix. Do away with the workshop. There are plenty of third party places to host scenarios, all of which don't have the limitation of needing to only have DTG posted content in them
Yes. There are quite a few good places for Scenarios, Repaints and other items - We don't need the workshop as it seems to cause a lot of problems when the Author has an error in their upload
The class 378 'Capitalstar' on North London Line has had a problem for a few years now, which I did submit a ticket to DTG! It is that when you are driving along and you go into neutral, all sounds in the cab disappear until you hit the throttle again or start to brake. Now when braking, there is also an issue in that once you slow to about 15 mph, there are suddenly no in cab sounds again! These problems arose when DTG issued a patch to fix something else, and inadvertently broke this causing these issues as described.
Just fix the bugs. Some are years old RE: Penn coal locomotive blocking the track. A quick look using the search function on Steam forums will bring up many more.There is a list somewhere in the bottom of someones desk drawer with all of this information. Pull it out, dust it off and check off each item as complete. This was instigated about 4 years ago, over two weeks some issues were fixed then the program was dropped. I have a feeling this attempt will go the same way.
Allow me to Disable FXAA. I'm able to run 2x2 Supersampling, in such scenario FXAA doesn't contribute to AA in any meaningfull way, it is just blurring the image. I was able to force-disable it by recompiling my own, empty, shader, but this isn't the most user friendly way
The problem stems from when the devs upgraded their operating systems last year from Win95 and corrupted the backup floppy disks with all the bug issue files on, that's a mind boggling 256kbs of data they'll never be able to retrieve.