Dresden - The Definitive Feedback Thread.

I don't disagree.

Part of the problem in designing a freight layer is that there isn't usually a RL timetable, and even when there is it's confidential, not the public passenger timetable. Although scheduled intermodals and unit freights are becoming more common, even in Europe, a heckuva lot of freight runs are extras, not part of a regular schedule at all.

What this boils down to is that the passenger schedule has to be hashed out first, with freights then stuck into the gaps manually and one at a time.

 

I assume you're being sardonic. A gimmicky collectable over some genuinely interesting trains and gameplay? Hope not.

A little bit of tinsel will not assuage those who are still very miffed.

 

But presumably you'd accept that modelling a ticket machine in a station is going to be a lot less work than modelling several entire stations and the scenery between those stations? So, the choice probably wasn't between modelling a ticket machine and keeping the branches.

 

It is not easy, but it's also not completely impossible to get to freight schedules. They're not public, but they're not a super-secret thing that can't be shared. It's more a set of "reserved time slots" than a schedule. DTG should be able to get these probably. Not Germany, but a neighbouring country - once I got a phone number, I was able to call a dispatcher and get a time and locos involved in a freight train I wanted to take a photo of.

Even if you couldn't get this, you should be able to find gaps in the timetable you recreate you can put them in. The freight train can literally leave 5 minutes after an RE and get all the red lights the RE creates. And during the night it's practically free for all on the tracks, a true opportunity to use the night lighting they've created. Freight trains run crazy during the night in Germany.

 

Not sure about Germany but it's really quite easy to get freight movements and schedules in the UK.
Railcam has its own interactive schedule (I prefer this for freight over RTT as it says what kind of freight it is if it's not exactly clear from the origin/destination): Railcam DATA 2 - Search

Network Rail also publishes its own Working Timetable detailling every train scheduled (of course it doesn't account for all movements, that may be put in at short notice, like railtours, the royal train, or some engineering trains: Working timetable - Network Rail

They're really easy to find through Google - you just have to know what to search for.

 

What about with sehs?

 

I remember Matt mentioning something in the preview, but do you remember/know what signal type is used on the route? Is it the same signal type all the way through the route or does it change and if so where?
Thanks.

edit: Ahh, Matt said in preview 1 that the Riesa end of the route uses Hl signalling. That's why I was looking at him driving at the Dresden end and thinking, "It doesn't look like wikipedia says!".

 

At the time of release, SEHS was felt to be both underwhelming and rushed. Hoo Junction, for example, bares little resemblance to the real one - in the game, it's missing a staff platform and a lot of vegetation, and the HS1 section was criticised similarly - I seem to remember someone likening it to a nuclear wasteland (perhaps a bit harsh, but still) and felt to some like they'd used auto generation for the area (technology they'd tried on LGV to mixed results) and just left it. To some, it felt like they did the classic lines section to Strood and then realised they were starting to run out of time so rushed the rest as they were doing a route the team couldn't really deliver in the given time frame without cutting corners.

In the first preview, there were no freight or North Kent Line* services, and Hoo Junction wasn't accessible at all, HS1 was also missing quite a bit of fencing, now to their credit they did rectify some of those issues between the first and second previews, but they didn't and couldn't fix it all - the route has also since been criticised for not having Ebbsfleet Lower Level accessible.

*They were actually saving it for the 465 DLC, which was then criticised for not adding any services - sometimes they just can't win.

What I'm saying is with the branches, it is likely Dresden scenery would not be as dense, it would be more generic, and in many cases either very wrong or just plain missing - it would simply be too much track for them to do justice and they realised that mid-way through making it. However, I don't think the missing services would be more numerous if the branches were included, since they're two very different teams.

 

I've no idea what the consensus is now on SEHS but with the additional services and particularly the lovely 465 it's now one of my favourite routes. The high frequency of services between Rochester and Rainham is brilliant. In the long-term it would be fantastic to have the route as part of a greater merging of modern London routes out of Victoria, London Bridge/Charing X or St Pancras (although fully appreciate this is probably several years away at best while more content is generated first and other technical hurdles are overcome).

Point being that what is seen in the first previews is not necessarily indicative of how a route will end up in the long-term, and there is at least some history of routes continuing to be worked on and improved well after release.

 

Not sure if that could be considered "consensus", but I picked the route a lot later and I'd say it's a great route... once you install about 4-6 mods for it. A truly interesting example of what mods can do. With those the route is a solid 8-9/10, without them... a 6, maybe 7 with a lot of benevolence?

Also, might have missed it sooner, but to me, it seems the 465 substitutions got fixed with 4.26. Prior I wouldn't bump into a single AI 465, now they're pretty much half of the services, nice variety there.

 

Unfortunately SEHS is one of the few routes in TSW that are a downgrade over their TS versions. I get an overwhelming feeling when playing the route that it's just not that good, like with Oakville Subdivision and Rapid Transit. The TS version was in many ways a better version, with the Sheerness Branch extension (which will almost certainly never come to TSW), Ebbsfleet platforms 1-4 in a semi-functional state, and not looking like a fire in a landfill site. TSW's 395 sounds horrible in every possible way (and possibly a downgrade over the TS version), the 375 was dated and also sounded terrible, albeit less jarring than the 395, and the 465 had simply stupid mistakes: how they managed to get the seats the wrong colour simply amazes me, and ruins a near-perfect train. SEHS falls into the group of TSW DLCs that are 'not bad, but a little bit sad'. If we are able to uninstall DLC for games on PlayStation in the future, it's probably going to be one of the first that goes.

 

Who's still very miffed? Judging from the lack of recent posts about the branch lines, it seems like most people have calmed down, gotten over it, accepted reality, and/or moved on.

P.S. The ticket machine is a nice bit of tinsel, and some of us appreciate little touches like that.

 

Well, first go back and read the post I was responding to. I have no particular problem with the ticket machine per se.

Secondly, of course most of us have "calmed down, gotten over it, accepted reality". What choice do we have? On the other hand, I think I can guarantee that the response to Dresden would have been many decibels higher if those branches had not been subtracted.

 

Agreed.
The lack of posts on the branch line doesn't mean we are satisfied now. We have posted some threads and arouse concentration on this problem in previous weeks, but make no difference. We are just tired and have to accepted this fact.

They said they made the decision to cut the branch line to guarantee the quality, but after watching 2 preview streams, I didn't get the connotation "rush hour" in this route. I wonder if they really did what they promised before.

 

They didn't what they have promised....

It is a shame considering how good this route seems to look visually.
Sad enough that Sam said it right during the stream... He noticed nearly no AI trains and only a very few passengers and asked Matt how this can be as it misses the whole point of being a rush hour route.
Matts awnser is really horrible....
Yes we have to look into that, but this is the state we release the route anyway, maybe we will fix something later.

Honestly...every TSW2 fan should stop buying this unless they understand that this is fraud!
Or they should mark every route as early access development build.

 

Comparing the avdertisement to the latest empty stations on stream I looked up UK law a bit....

https://www.faradayssolicitors.co.u...al-law-solicitors/fraud-solicitors-in-london/

I am not english but what is with fraud by false representation?

 

Oh stop it. The Boston route is busier as it says it is. I don't know if the part about freight trains having to wait for passenger trains is there, but if not then that's a bug not "fraud by false representation".

btw, faraday solicitors are presumably a commercial company. They have a marketing department as well, and you seem to have fallen for their marketing.

 

Maybe....
But it is truely frustrating to see how DTG are handling the situation with the unfinished routes, known bugs before release and how they write it is super busy and then you see nothing more than before.

As said, I am not an UK person, so I dont know this company, but I am sick of beeing lied to all the time and hold back with false promises.

You know, I have the feeling that DTG has a severe problem with all the different routes, versions of them, operating systems on consoles and pc's and keeping them either up to date or taking care of them.

The senior producer of them showcases a route where 75% of the freight services are not working because they are missing, where rush hour features are not working as they should, where cars are driving on the wrong side. When people raise thire eyebrows and start asking what is going on, the awnser is, "we have to look into this, but it will be released in this state".
This company has serious issues IMO if they have to make business like this.

 

The TS1 version didn't come with the Sheerness extension - I think they laid the track but didn't add any scenery. You had to buy the scenery extension later (I think it's one of, if not the, first extension they did in TS1).

 

I'm surprised it's taken this long for someone to pull the "fraud" card in this thread.

If they were committing fraud, they'd have still been telling us the branches were coming, and constantly released misleading promotional material, and probably not done the gameplay streams they have, and if they did they certainly wouldn't have shown the map, or would've put up a wrong map showing the branches. Here's what the law actually says about Fraud by False Representation in the UK:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35/section/2 Notice the key words "intends" and "knows"

Dovetail is in the clear, because they had the intention of making the branches when they announced them, they rolled back on that announcement when they realised they couldn't deliver them, they also rolled back before the route, or Rush Hour, could be bought - if they'd backtracked since the launch of Boston, then you'd have a point because people could've bought the RH season ticket thinking they'd get the branches for Dresden. The gameplay stream EXPLICITLY SHOWED the route and the 'empty' timetable (this is subjective anyway), and Dovetail even responded to, and accepted, those criticisms.

For goodness sake, by some of your standards, a bus being late is fraud by false representation because the timetable says the route's every 20 minutes, yet a delay means they can't meet that and there's a 25 minute gap between some services.

 

PeterNeutron (I'm saying this just as a customer, I have no relationship with DTG other than as a customer). Don't buy the routes if you don't like their approach. But it seems like you want to make sure that no one else can buy the routes either. I watched the preview streams. There's other discussions here about the freight services, but some of them just haven't been added in yet. Not present isn't the same as not working. The traffic on the wrong side was embarrassing and you could hear in Matt's voice what he thought about it. But it isn't something that if left that way would spoil my enjoyment of the route and I'm sure it is just a flag that they need to set somewhere. I'd be disappointed if posts like yours stop this route from being released on Thursday, but keep pushing, eh?

 

Pretty sure Matt on Friday said the road traffic had, or at least was being, fixed. Did he also say the team would try and get some of the catenary fixed too? Either way, it's a pretty alarming bug (if it is a bug with their OHLE system), whereby it randomly deletes gantries etc when you place one - surprised it's not come up yet.

 

Oh no, i absolutely dont wanna influence other people.
I am just a customer as well as you.
The reason why I am so direct and maybe a little harsh in criticism is easy...
The idea of TSW is genious and I honestly love the gameplay possibilities and the idea that you could run around a route 24hrs a day with the underlying timetable.

The reason I am so upset is because not only DTG does not make the most out of it but they repeatetly release unfinished stuff with even gamebraking stuff.
Criticism is acknowledged somehow but not really taken care of in many cases. Remeber MSB Route? There was a scenario (the first one you can play) which did not work for 100% for the people because it was faulty. They acknowledged the bug, put it on the roadmap (why on a roadmap????), deleted it from the roadmap and after nearly one year they fixed it.
Poeple paid money for that!!!

I never want people not to buy the stuff here but want to clearly state that Dovetail Games needs to drastically improve its quality control before they take our money for bugs they already have known before!

Why do I do this?
Because I wanna enjoy this grat game and not be one of thousands, distracted by unreadable gauges and faulty signalling on an empty plattform!

And by the way:

I have some 600 ish hours in TSW, so I certainly dont belong to the sort of hater you might expect. I even published an excel based EBula for Hamburg Lübeck on rail.sim becuase I love the route and the TSW community!
I guess it is fair to be scpetic and critizise stuff which is not acceptable.

 

The fact that people stopped complaining about branches is for two reasons:

1) DTG will never make those because of their unrealistically tight release schedule
2) There are more serious bugs to acknowledge

 

Thanks for the awnser on that!
I am looking foreward to the route anyway but as said, criticism is an inportant tool to improve the work in areas you may have overseen or not have thought of which would be important to us as customers.

Happy sunday

 

Matt, thank you for above, it’s appreciated as always. The scenery is one thing and I appreciate the importance to many. I probably wouldn’t have twigged about the cars to be fair as I’ll be too involved in the pzb tango.

I wasn’t overly fussed about the branch lines, namely down to being uk based and I can’t miss something I’ve no awareness of as such.

The missing freight though was the thing that did give me the “ah man “ moment and there hasn’t been any official comms here since. I critique, support and try to join you and Sam for all your streams but that did take the rush out of rush hour a bit. I’m concerned this will be a bakerloo services fix now and forever pending (I played a service earlier and saw 4 trains so I’d be gutted if this transpires the same).

BML I’m really looking forward to because of how busy everyone has said it should be (I’m an ECML user so have no idea)but now it’s concerning me what this will be like and how much sweeping up will be done before Penzance and the year of new routes are being drip fed to distract me.


Will you be able to give any solid assurances on the number of services or additional freight in the coming week please.

I continue to support, enjoy and appreciate the streams and games but some clarity would be good. Please make the new night lighting core build too please. Looks incredible

 

Not sure if you are referring to the interactive G/P-switches? If so, plenty of people were voicing their disappointment that these were *not* in the game (previously, this was before the stream).

Quite frankly I don't understand your post. You are against DTG implementing more realistic features?

 

Will we get this fixed version for release then? Especially on consoles, it usually takes a bit longer for updates to get through the controls at Sony and MS.

 

From what you've mentioned on the stream it seemed those services were in though and THEN got lost. How far back in the process did they disappear?

 

I know, but in TS it was added quickly after launch (and was included in some versions of TS2014) and was very popular in its day, because it came with a Networker and was a very good addition to the route. That is very different to the extension in TSW, which will never ever be added. If TSW gets route extensions, that'll be a few years by now, long after SEHS is even on DTG's radar.

Spoiler: bUt WhAt AbOUt THe ReIGatE extENSIon????

It is true that London To Brighton received a route expansion almost ten years after it was first released. However, this really isn't in the same league as the Sheerness Branch. It was done (quite lazily) by Rivet Games, but not as a route extension - they said themselves that they see the pack as a scenario pack and not a route extension. The negative reception to the extension would have been mitigated had it been marketed as a scenario pack with a bonus expansion. The route was also very short and the track was already there, ready to use. The pack was also one that should have been included with London To Brighton by default (as it will be in TSW) as many trains terminate at Reigate, which cannot be fully replicated despite the lack of time required to make the extension - Danny even added it in one of his route merges.

 

Not schedule; budget. Every additional km of track and scenery, every additional station, every additional signal, costs £££. Doesn't matter whether the work could be done in five days or five weeks: only so much dev time can be invested in a project before it loses money at 25 quid a copy.

 

Very interesting insight. Well, hopefully they can make it back in. Space for possible DLCs is great, but 28 freight runs really don't do this route justice.

 

Thanks for clearly stating that, your intentions seem sincere and open so I have faith this route will improve timetable wise, I fully understand the complexity of the timetable so take your time, slow and steady wins the race.

 

Let me explain my post to you.
I am not against DTG implementing more realistic features. But first they need to aknowledge the errors on XboX platforms and fix it ASAP. The sounds and textures are broken. If these basic game elements dont work properly on my platform (xbox) these fancy brake GP switches are not relevant in my opinion atm.

 

Matt recognised the xbox sound issues on the preview stream iirc. He said it isn't an easy fix but they are trying to fix it.
They're also trying to fix the texture pixellation issue, if that's the one you mean.

 

You're under the mistaken assumption that it is a zero-sum game in development time. Different people at DTG implement features like the GP-switch compared to those that would fix issues on Xbox. If DTG didn't implement the GP-switch the Xbox fix would not be released sooner and if DTG fixed the Xbox the GP-switch wouldn't get delayed etc.

I don't use an Xbox but I'm very keen on more realistic features so to me the GP-switch is much more interesting than a fix for Xbox, but at the same time I wouldn't object if DTG had release a fix for Xbox because I understand that for people that use Xbox (like you) a fix for that platform is most prioritized. I wish you would show the same courtesy.

 

Well im not going into further discussion with you. But maybe one day your game will be broken for whatever reason and you are posting about it here, while i am enjoying my in-train announcements in TSW

 

The alternative is just talk to yourself and say where you are and where your going. Other than some calories burned talking it’s arguably more immersive.

Good afternoon passengers… my name is “insert forum name here”. This is the - —. Service to London Paddington calling at Slough…..

That’s it. Done

Bonus is you don’t need to mention bags or alcohol or transport police as no one carries anything in game.

 

Bonus points if you do DB passenger announcements auf Deutsch... not that I do that or anything.
Bitte achten Sie auf den Abstand zwischen Zug und Bahnsteigkante!

Cheers

 

Hamlet on the forum?
Must be a first.
Hmm, I wonder what else from the Bard would describe this game? I'll have to give it some thought.
Something from The Scottish Play?

 

Ok then, so let's continue in the infinite pattern: release a dlc too early -> lots of bugs to correct, not to mention cut features -> bugs need time to be corrected, but there's the next dlc coming -> release the next dlc too early .... etc.

 

It used to be called the DTG Flywheel, as in there's a perpetual motion effect that seems unstoppable

 

Very funny Nathalie already replied in a more professional way on the Xbox forum.

Goodmorning passengers! And welcome onboard, we wish you all a great day. Thankyou for choosing to travel with us, if theres anything we can do to make the journey more enjoyable we are here for you!

10 calories burnt

 

I am going to be the odd one out here regards the lighting, the light spread is still too on-off imo, you have buildings that have no ambient light reflecting off of them, there are houses/apartment blocks that are just black holes of pitch darkness in a sea of light; doesn't UE4 handle light diffusion? It looks very odd to my eyes. Are you using bounce cards for diffuse lighting?

Would this resource help?
https://www.hdri-hub.com/hdrishop/hdri/outdoor/itemlist/tag/city light