I feel like Dovetail is shorting Routes on TSW When you compare it to Train Simulator. You can drive a Amtrak train from New Jersey beyond Newark International to New Haven. It looks like Train Simulator is better than TSW In expansion. It’s not only NEC It’s also GWR. In TSW you can only drive from London Paddington to Reading when you could go more back in Train Simulator. It feels a disappointment when The routes are shorter, Making it more fun for Train Simulator when TSW Was made to be like an more realistic and more fun thing than Train Simulator. Hopefully the devs of Train Sim world can notice this.
The thing is currenty TSW is still pretty new. Building a Simulator up from scratch is alot of work. So they need to get more familar / used to the UE4, building assets, getting around limitations and all that stuff. Creating those routes takes more time now until they get more familar with it. Since they need the income of new DLC they are going for the compromise atm: Building shorter but more detailed routes so they can release new DLC regulary. Further they need to get more routes into the product so it gets more attractive to players. If they would do longer routes atm they wouldnt have that needed income, it would take longer and some people would probably complain that there are just a few routes and that it gets boring pretty quick. So they go for some smaller which still take a decent amount of time to create but is still within their timeframe for new relases to get that income. Expanding the game step by step. I´m pretty sure once they have a base with some routes and get better in UE4 we will see longer routes and / or maybe expansions to the one´s you mentioned. At the moment its just the compromise of developing time,needed income and expanding the game / adding variety.
Existing routes from Train Simulator can't be reused for Train Sim World, as the underlying technology is completely different. So DTG have to rebuild everything, which is a resource intensive and tine consuming process. Take signalling for example: in TS2018, DTG have a rich set of signals at their disposal in all sorts and sizes. If they want to build a new route, they can use them. In TSW they do not yet have such a library and have to build everything from scratch. Once more routes have been made for TSW it should become simpler for DTG to release new content as the amount of development effort required to build a route decreases.
Yep, totally different ones. Unreal Engine 4 is used for TSW while TS is using a proprietary Engine developed 10 years ago.
TS and TSW have totally different engines. TS uses a engine that’s decades old whereas the unreal engine is brand new.