I noticed on the DTG corporate page that they are looking to hire an Executive Producer for the Train Sim World franchise. Isn't this currently Matt's role? Is he leaving due to the whole Riesa Dresden debacle? He did look rather defeated on stream yesterday (as did Sam, by the way...)
They don’t work pretty well Hand in Hand with the Community since Years. People want 150 or 200 kilometer Routes and DTG bring always short Routes, or not changing the product like adding the right Dostos, Intercity Cab Car and Riesa Dresden is there biggest mistake to lose all the Customers
Mr. Peddlesden's official title is Senior Producer for Train Sim World. An executive producer sounds like a job title given to someone who can take Mr. Peddlesden's and Jackson's visions for the game and act in tandem with Mr. P to make the visions a reality. Of course, this is just what jumps out to me. I have my doubts that Matt is going anywhere any time soon. Cheers
It’s been discussed on streams before. This is not replacing Matt, it’s a level above. They know we wouldn’t accept the departure of the pink ears!
To be fair, they did need to address the Riesa-Dresden subject and other RH related negativity...and I doubt they were going to do that with a smile 5 miles wide.
No plans for Matt to leave. Anybody who joins the team will be here to help rather than replace. Matt is currently our senior producer and an executive position would rank them slightly higher than Matt.
Executive producer (as has been mentioned on a previous stream) is Matt's boss. Maybe that's because they were discussing a subject they knew the community weren't happy about, and arguably themselves weren't happy about.
I love Matt as a guy, he is a great humanbeing, BUT - a new executive could always shake the boat and replace people....Matt might apply for the job himself but I assume it has already been through an internal vacancy stage before being advertised.
Matt or Sam for exec producer. Make Tsw2 great again! interal and external recruitments will normally run in parallel for EDI reasons
I'm pretty sure he said he was offered the role and turned it down. He likes to be more involved than the executive producer would be.
New person might decide the current structure isnt working and move people around, I wouldnt blame them if they did.
Senior Producer is as high as I want to go to be honest - beyond here lies spreadsheets and less direct closeness with the game. I want to have someone to debate with to get budgets and resource allocated for our favourite features and routes - not be the person who has to say no, basically Our previous EP was great and i'm looking forward to welcoming the next one at some point. I have no plans on going anywhere, this is essentially a dream job for me, coming from the community as an avid player of train simulators for the last 21 years and being given the opportunity to join the team and for the last few years help define and create the new simulator from the ground up has been an amazing experience and I am keen to continue that. The headphones are staying. Period. As far as looking down, defeated etc - honestly, i'm just a bit tired. I have a tendency to overwork myself because this is my hobby and i'm spending lots of hours building and playtesting, doing designs etc and most of that happens outside of my "senior producer" role which happens during the day. ... and before anyone asks if i'm being crunched by the business to meet targets etc, not at all, nobody is asking for this and in fact i'm regularly asked NOT to do it by my boss... that said, this is my hobby, it's my pleasure, I love it, and that leads to poor decision making when it comes to how to spend my time Building something like Train Sim World is not an easy process, it's difficult every step of the way with lots of tough decisions on a daily basis. This one is just more publicly visible than 99% of the others. It's how game development works, and to be honest, this is still significantly better for a process than any other company i've worked at in my career as a software engineer previously (which I realise isn't a glowing comment on my previous companies but it's the harsh reality out there). I won't comment on the messaging side of things as that's outside my remit entirely and I know that team have a really tough time with everything going on as well. TLDR; it isn't easy, i'm not leaving, the pink headphones will be in your nightmares for years to come, and i'm not in the slightest bit defeated or downcast, i'm just tired because i'm having a bit too much fun at my job! Hope that clears things up. Matt.
I am sure most of us appreciate the fact that you are a passionate enthusiast as well as an employee of DTG, but don't work yourself into the ground. Thanks for what you do for the hobby.
It's good that what started out as a probable troll was turned around by all the very positive and well deserved accolades to MP. I join the chorus of gratitude for what you have contributed to our hobby, Matt. Is it really only 21 years since you started UKTS? Seems like a lifetime ago.
It's less than that since I started UKTS - I can't remember when it was exactly, year or two later I think maybe. Originally you had Trainsimfiles as the main community site and my little site was "Neutronics Repaint Workshop" where I put up my own doodlings for sharing. So it was a bit later when I got a call from TSF admin saying they were shutting down permanently and suggested if I was still interested in going wider with my site that now would be a good time... (I'd originally thought about setting up UKTS much earlier, but at the time felt that setting up two competing sites like that would probably do more harm than good for the community, and had instead offered TSF support and just said if you ever have a change of circumstance, let me know). But yes, MSTS kicked off around 2000/2001 if I recall, and yes, it does seem a lifetime ago
Matt is not the CEO he is the Senior Producer. Here is his is signature at the bottom of his posts: Senior Producer, Train Sim World Dovetail Games
Look after yourself chap, no one irregardless of the fun and stress the game gives us wants to see anyone on team burn out.
I actually agree it would be cool if he was the CEO, then things wouldn't get a screwed up as they do.
About now in 2001, Matt. I remember getting invited up to the big unveiling next door to Kings Cross (where the model railway club is/was located). Turned out to be fairly low key, who would have thought what would follow! Of course that didn't beat being invited out to Fanstock in Seattle a few months earlier, as one of the relatively few people at the time running a train sim site. Hard to reconcile it's now 20 years ago.
June 2001. I know because I was on holiday in the US (travelling coast-to-coast by Amtrak, as it happens) and picked up a US copy (with the BNSF on the front rather than the Scotsman) shortly before the UK edition came out, slightly cheaper, too .
I'm glad to know that Matt is still with DTG, spreading his enthusiasm for trains to all of us. Great professional and a better person.
Yes, I remember being in a Best Buy, I think it was, shortly after it came out and the front cover caught my eye. I installed it later that day and was blown away. I thought it was the best thing since the proverbial sliced bread. I uninstalled it long ago but the discs are still in my desk drawer gathering dust along with all the 3rd party add-ons.
Anybody else get the MSTS Book? I've still got my copy. Was just looking through it the other day. It was a very comprehensive guide to the sim. Something you don't get anymore...
This happens with most simulators nowadays. 20/25 years ago any good simulator had a good old printed user manual.
Agreed, sadly you don't great manuals for anything anymore. In the 90's and early 00's I worked for an engineering company specialising in public transport. We had this collection of old dudes who wrote all our manuals. They were beautiful to read. The best of them could make a dry topic of configuring the 10,000 options of a control board interesting. They spent years developing manuals in parallel to us building hardware and the embedded software for them. Some how they kept up with us, I was always impressed. That kind of time dedication simply doesn't exist in this era of your community doing your support for you for free. Why make manuals - smart cookies will figure it out then publish it then sit in forums answering questions. There is on obvious small bunch of very helpful people here. I try to do it too. I'm a volunteer moderator in another forum for a company with more money than most countries - I do it for the community not for the company. TrainSim-Matt for the record, I was grateful for the stream and the honesty and empathy portrayed by the people delivering it. You managed to stay communicative and civil while delivering bad news that some in the community are challenged to accept. It would have been really easy to simply shut that stream down when people started getting nasty - especially that one person who started to use multiple accounts to spam (I've reported all those accounts in the YouTube creator support forum - one advantage of having the magic tick - if they all came from the same IP as is likely then that was a TOS violation). I liked that you kept the demo of the new features in the new build to near the end because the grumpy ones who had fled by then missed out on the good news and missed out on the good progress. Their loss. I live in the software development world every day in a senior design position so I know the deal. Everything starts out so big, and everyone has their view and tries to drag it in their favourite direction. People across the business try to jam in their needed thing and before you know it a million dollar project has failed to deliver and questions are being asked. I'm the guy at work that stomps on scope creep and maintains the team's focus. I know exactly how hard that is and the only good approach is to use honesty and frankness when dealing with your business and user community. Be transparent and open to feedback. This is exactly what you're doing as a team and in the long run it will work. It will take some time to rebuild trust after learning the lesson of pushing out the story before the story was fully developed. Life is like that. Keep going we really do appreciate it. Deep down even the grumpy ones if they thought about it would prefer the shock now than after they shelled out money. Now they can make an informed choice. One suggestion I could make that might help, we use Jira for all our work and predominately work on an agile sprint based approach. We have a filtered views that show tickets that are tagged with a particular label to our user community depending on their interest (usually product based). We don't show them the nittty gritty every day tasks and minor defects but we do show them the big stuff that matters, the stuff that affects user experience, delivery or time frames. We use another attribute rather than the tickets actual internal status to show where it is in the life-cycle. The architect (me!) and business analysts set the visibility label and the PM or sprint god sets the public status attribute on those items as work progresses. If you're already using Jira (or any similar tool) then this approach might help with the roadmap. Instead of working out of spreadsheets as Sam alluded to to build up the roadmap every two weeks consider using the label & attribute approach. Its the same work to decide what is and not in the roadmap but its done at the source of the data so only has to be done once and reviewed from time to time. Then you could fairly easily tweak a Jira report to show planning, development, upcoming through the public status attribute on the selected items for the roadmap. This would enable the roadmap person to spend their time working on messaging and formatting instead of data crunching. Paul
Well it wasn’t all roses of course. We soon discovered the warts with the physics and inertia simulation, with trains derailing on curves even when running under line speed and the awful track sound. Oh and the doozy was Cutbank syndrome, as it became known, when trains would derail - sometimes spectacularly - when they reached a set of points if the distance from the previous “node” was more than about six miles. The much vaunted editor turned out to be not quite finished and had fairly scant instructions. We soon learned about the disappearing track and road sections, the track database rebuilds or the dreaded “end on end” vector error, blue pole sticking in the air and your route trashed if you didn’t repair the error very carefully. It turned out to be very much a fire and forget release on the part of both Kuju and MS with only one very minor official patch. Both attempts by MS at a sequel also foundered, which of course is when EA stepped in with Kuju to bring us Rail Simulator, which became Railworks and now the TSW spin off. Still yes it was good fun if a tad frustrating at times and the game’s legacy continues with Open Rails and the TSRE route editor.
Having just gone through the fun of making it work "today" you really have to jump through some hoops. If you don't like the idea of turning off most of Windows 10's security better build yourself a Windows 7 machine .
That's what the moderator team are there for Its far more fun doing whack-a-mole on spammers than having to timeout or ban regular members who won't take a hint when asked to put a question in the forums etc. We had our usual open voice chat and had the pleasure of having Natalie join us. I think she was surprised at how quick we were dealing with spammers with 1 moderator keeping score of who had been banned. They have all been reported by us as well.My count is about 20 of them.
What was it that Sam said talking about Matt's over-enthusiasm? Idiot I think was the term! Glad Matt took it like a good old stick.
Thing is, when you do tell people to put their questions in the forum, there's little to no chance of them getting an answer there either. I know that everyone's individual questions cannot be answered, it's not possible or practical. So I can see the frustrations of those who have a genuine question rather than just being disruptive. Neither do I have a better suggestion than what you have in place currently. Edited by DTG Natster - removed inappropriate language.
Yeah, that's the one. Mine's still in perfect condition. True. I remember reading the manuals of my F-19 Stealth Fighter and A320 Airbus back in the Amiga days. As you say, as time has progressed, the need for such manuals is offset by better designed software. But the MSTS book was actually a separate purchase. For those who want to get the VERY best from their new Train Simulator.
I miss the days of the "Strategy Guide" - they gave some great insights into the game, some good more wide explanations than the manual might have, and usually had some nice printed reference like maps, key charts etc. I don't think I ever bought a GTA or equivalent without buying the strategy guide at the same time!
I still have lots of strategy guides on my book shelf from past games I’ve played. Essential for getting the very most from a game. Some of them are really nicely made too. Hard backed with ‘gilded’ page edging.