On a gloomy, lonely, rainy, foggy evening, I drive my class 323 slowly to a lonely platform off the four-lane expressway to Birmingham. My train is completely empty, and it seems that in such weather not only all the passengers decided to stay at home, but the usually very busy line also seems unusually deserted, as if I alone mustered up the courage to make a trip in such bad weather. Stopping, I opened the doors of the train with a habitual reflex movement, as if someone had to get out or come in. I've been driving for quite some time and haven't seen a single sign of life. Suddenly, I hear the slow steps of a lone passenger on a damp platform. Why do I hear them, I'm in the cockpit? In slight confusion and surprise, I opened the driver's pneumatic door and got out of the cab. There was still a lonely train on the platform and an absolutely empty platform as far as I could see. Sitting in the cab, I remembered that a sound like steps could be made by an electro-pneumatic brake. I closed the doors, moved the direction selector forward, another green traffic light on an absolutely deserted highway, one of the series already passed, still inviting me to continue my lonely flight. Flight into the desert rainy dullness of this endless evening. Well, if in essence, then in my humble opinion, the main problem of the game is the lack of AI trains. Let them be uncontrollable by the player. It is important that they are. So that when arriving in Birmingham, the player does not feel as if he has arrived at the gates of the underworld. This is a station that handles hundreds of trains a day, and you don't even have people there. This is a laugh and a shame. And so on all routes. I think that instead of the endless release of unfinished routes, it is necessary to complete and expand the existing ones. On most routes, trains travel from nowhere to nowhere. I really like it when it is possible to drive along the route back and forth without restarting the game. Walking at the final stops from cabin to cabin, poking the buttons carefully made by the developer in the cabins, but there are only a couple of such routes that have such an opportunity. I apologize for my bad english. I did my best))
The problem is, with a route like BCC, that those trains don't exist in the game. London-Brighton is a very different experience, as are most of the German routes, because the trains exist with which to populate those stations.
Several things I want to say. Many people want variety. So only expanding and completing existing ones is not a good idea. You see this with sehs, ecw and bml and the associates loco dlc. Too much content was made in Southern UK with a bunch of electrostars, so people got mad there was no variety. Did you know there is a whole south, east and west of the uk? Surprise surprise. So with the new license they had with west midlands and people demanding a new region in the uk, bcc was chosen. And it got a lot of love for the 323 which is one of the best uk emus ever made. We could have easily gotten another electrostar route in the South with zero variation. And some routes are several hundred miles long so a route will never feel complete. I wouldn't want the same route to get endlessly extended cuz that takes away the variety. I want routes from different regions and new trains and new liveries Like previous said, there are zero trains in game that can run on bcc. People don't want a completely wrong train running the ai services that another train would run. The uk trains in game are too different from the ones that actually run on bcc. Then you need the appropriate licenses which dtg do not have or are unable to obtain. And you can't have 5 new trains in a single dlc either cuz they would all have to be built with the correct simulation, physics, sounds and features and dtg don't have all the time in the world to create a dlc. So until a loco dlc comes out or another route that has the appropriate train with correct livery, you're going to have an empty route. Once you start building a route in a new unexplored region, it will be empty cuz it's the first route. As you build more routes in the region, the routes can build on each other and make it feel busier. German routes for instance all run under db so basically dtg can build any route with any train and the same train runs on basically many different locations and routes. So you get busy and varied routes. Bml has all the trains available in game making it busy. Even with just the 377 and 387 included, you get thousands of services cuz that's how busy it is in real life. And the other services such as the 375, 166, 313, 465 ai are all appropriate for bml.
I absolutely do not understand what the problem is - to create a route in the region and all the rolling stock corresponding to this route, with the corresponding traffic schedule under the control of artificial intelligence. After all, it's an integral part of the experience the player needs to get on this route if you're so keen on realism. To do this, you do not need to study in detail each movable block and its physics. The AI does not use the physics of locomotives, it just moves them, even if I, being in the cab of the train under AI control, lower the panograph, activate emergency braking and turn off the AUX, making the train completely dark and cold. And only then, perhaps with paid modules, add the ability to control certain units of rolling stock with well-developed physics, systems, detailed internal sounds, and so on. This is what most simulation development studios do. The map modules are separated from the modules of trains, planes, cars, or whatever else the simulator is about. You are right about the relative completeness of Germany's routes. But there is the same problem. On most routes, in order to see all the trains implemented on a particular route in the timetable, you need to purchase most of the routes, otherwise there will not be all the trains that the AI should manage, since they depart together with another route. Again, the problem of flies and cutlets, which cannot exist separately in any way. And okay, me and most of the active speakers at the simulator developers forum. We're fans, we're used to it. But how do you explain to the newcomers who came for a beautiful picture with trains and atmosphere that you could get much more impressions from the point of view of the same picture and atmosphere on this route if you buy this or that route additionally?
Unfortunately, a route can't have additional ai if there no appropriate train. Trust me, people will get angry for the wrong trains running around, especially this tsw community. Can't have the completely wrong train running the services. If it's similar, fine. But don't want a 377 running 700 services for example. Can't create low poly models either to add in ai cuz wasted potential. You would have to then pay for it. If it's any train on the map, players would expect it to be fully modeled and drivable. And they can't create all the trains for a region in 1 dlc. Can't create multiple new trains either in 1 dlc. Like I said, each new train is several months of work and you need a whole team and with internal deadlines, they don't have the time to create multiple new trains for each dlc. So the only way to get busier routes is to get more dlc. It's something we have to get used to whether you like it or not.
"all the rolling stock corresponding to this route" is a MASSIVE amount of work. I don't think you quite understand how many people and how much time it takes to make a single locomotive for Train Sim World. Possible? Sure. But to cover the costs, Birmingham Cross-City would have had to be priced at 100 quid.
