I mentioned this in the Discord chat, Ever since the developer diaries and online articles disappeared, we have received increasingly less information and virtually no communication from the developers and DTG of what is to come for Train Sim World. Roadmap anyone? The articles were detailed and used to offer a very interesting read of what work had been going on and what bugs had been fixed. It also provided the ability for us to comment and make suggestions with most of the questions being answered with a detailed response. Nowadays, if we’re lucky, we’ll get a response from an admin on here maybe once or twice a week with pretty generic comments simply saying “We’re looking into this” or “The team are working hard to fix this”. Many threads and questions often go unanswered and it is up to us to find a fix (lighting bug for example). DTG have always struggled with communication, at least with TSW, but it increasingly feels like we’re talking to a brick wall.
I whole heartily agree that these should be brought back it was the one way they kept us up to date. It would be nice once again to watch what was going on. They can show us glimpses into projects of new routes coming down the road, as well keeping us informed of the updates that are being worked on.
I've voted "Yes" mainly because there wasn't an "Other" option. We recently had the article about Diesel-Electric improvements which seemed reasonably detailed and interesting to me. It would be interesting to know how much effort and disruption is involved in producing the diaries. The impression I've gained over the last couple of years is that DTG is very reluctant to announce areas they're working on in case it subsequently turns out that it's not possible to deliver it for whatever reason. Perhaps we should be pushing for the twitch streams to provide more of an insight into what's involved in developing for TSW e.g. Simugraph, the process for producing artwork and bringing it into TSW etc. The relevant subject expert lead could appear on the stream along with Matt and provide an overview and answer some questions either submitted previously and/or live on stream.
I personally believe that a monthly "update post" would be more than sufficient to detail what they ARE working on directly, what they've got that they're leaving for now and then people can spend that month arguing over "why they got left out"...
On the one hand, forum members constantly criticize DTG developers for not working hard enough to fix every "error" they encounter; on the other, there's this request for daily diaries. Weekly strikes me as a frequent waste of energy and time; monthly, as suggested by ARuscoe above, makes more sense; when there's something worth reporting strikes me as a far more logical use of available resources. After all, who would want to have to take the time to write a diary entry each and every day? SamYeager270 also offers some sound ideas. "Talking to a brick wall" is far less likely than "pestering someone who is busy trying to cope with lots of insistent, impatient "gimmes".
I would agree that monthly diaries are sufficient enough anything more would be a waste of time with nothing to new to report.
Often the feedback on the dev diaries specifically is that they take a lot of work with recording, then utter gobs of editing (which I find to be frankly unneeded, as if they are trying to make it difficult) so they are just too hard to consistently fit in with everything else. That’s understandable, but my main problem is that there has not been anything else done. If that style of dev diary is too much work....then just do something more simple, gosh darn it. There are other solutions to this than doing (almost) nothing at all.
It would not hurt much to report that some issues are really difficult to solve and show some of the trade offs and choices hey need to make. But if you strat asking people what route we like, this is asking for trouble of course. You get so many different answers, that this cannot but lead to disappointment. A better way might be to uses a multiple choice poll. Some clverness helps in communications, but keeping your mouth shut seems not very helpful to me. Maybe we shuld remember the disaster with the first betat test of TSW, which into my opinion was far away from the beta level. Manage expectations but involve the communitiy in testing.
I would imagine that DTG have a programme plan that the head of development would regularly report upon. A sanitised version (for public consumption) of the monthly management report would go a long way toward addressing the complaints about a lack of communication, and could reduce a number of speculative threads appearing in the forums.
Coincidence or are they really listening a bit? https://live.dovetailgames.com/live/train-sim-world/articles/article/train-sim-world-june-studio-update
