One area of TSW I think massively suffers from is the lack of variety when it comes to track visuals, as well as the lack of track foliage. The wrong types of tracks are often placed in yards too. Most of the time it is pristine continuous welded track, when it should be jointed track, with a mixed of used and rusty variants. The rusty variants should have weeds growing through them too. Yards in particular always look so pristine, clean and identical looking, when in real life they are very much battered and full of weeds. Talking of weeds, why are DTG always so reluctant to add them in between tracks as well as on the tracks themselves, for lines which are little used? Ironically they over compensate by placing too many lineside trees next to well used lines, to mask the lack of scenery. Below shows the big issue with the way yards are built and look in TSW:
TS1 has separate tracks for yards, often oily and dirty so I cannot see why the same cannot apply to TSW.
It's funny that yard tracks that are often overgrown have little to no foliage, but when running mainline, you can frequently see grass overreaching into the track, branches going through the cab etc. Agreed that there need to be more types of track textures (even more than two). With a colourful palette, the track would be greatly enhanced, even on frequently used tracks the colour is not the same throughout as you have replaced sleepers, wooden sleepers on overpasses, etc.
This is especially apparent on SEHS. You’ve actually got trees and foliage blocking signals and speed boards on the mainline, whereas yards are virtually spotless and empty. I do wonder if the person(s) who lays the scenery actually knows what it’s supposed to look like, or whether they just spam the lineside with trees…
That’s true, I forgot about that. Perhaps there should be some inspections after the auto-gen has done its job, to prevent things like this from happening.
In Poland is pretty greeny in yards. My town's small yard is true green hell too. Here, an example, plus, an extraordinarily rare train with EU07 (year of production: 1983!) leading the whole intermodal party \o/
Totally agree, especially track rust, battered rails, ballast etc. I'd suspect that tall weeds might be somewhat "expensive" as far as the performance budget goes, especially since they'd look weird if not animated, also maybe issues with clipping into the vehicles as mentioned above. Hope the UE update and eventual move to next-gen consoles will allow for more of this because it really does add a ton of atmosphere and immersion. Edit: there was a mention in today's article about "superelevated junctions"- maybe whatever technique is being used for that could help with yards appearing to be so flat and uniform? IRL there are often many little dips and rises throughout a yard from the ground settling. Maybe TSW's invisible MOW crews have an unlimited budget to keep everything so pristine lol
While playing SEHS last night, I noticed many shrubs being so close to the third rail, that they're actually touching the third rail. Can't be safe, can it?
Don't get me started on buildings either, why they don't do some research and supply country-specific housing for example instead of using brit buildings in European countries, shatters the illusion for me does that. Germany as an example suffers from this generic type of architecture that isn't even Germanic, landmark stuff is fine but not housing, I took a video of me playing on the main spessart on my phone, I was riding on the top deck of a dostos, I sent the vid to my sister and said "where am I" bearing in mind that she has been to Germany many times as have I, she replied that she didn't know because she didn't recognise the buildings! As for veg totally agree.
Hah Hedges are my bugbear. Move past them at speed and you have an annoyingly repetitive pattern. A little more variety in shape and colour please.
Yes, I’ve noticed on quite a few occasions on SEHS that the foliage is far too close to the tracks. I reckon this is because of auto-gen and it hasn’t been properly checked.
I hate this too. The same goes for the repetitive trees. It really narrows your view out of the window, as they put more trees than they should to hide the emptiness of the world.
I would say the biggest elephant in the room is the missing trackside paraphernalia, such as cabling and concrete trunking. There are occasional grey location (S&T) boxes some of which are collectables, but generally things are too pristine and tidy which does reduce the immersion somewhat. The track on cane creek looks like it just rolled off the production line, but hopefully they will dirty it up.
When I toured Poland by train in 2014, it seemed every other loco was an EU07. I'm surprised to learn they're now rarities.
Totally agree. Hope so too with Cane Creek- they've done weathering on the locos and rolling stock- seems like the trackage always gets forgotten.
