As I sat and watched the kids playing roblox over Christmas I couldn't help wondering why low quality train games have live announcements in real time on both trains and stations, yet a high quality game like tsw does not?
Yes. Many train companies have released their anouncements track to the public so it shouldn't be too hard to implement them. Even if DTG don't want to use IRL voices then the staff could record themselves doing the anouncements for the game. They already did that for the safety anouncements. Why not the others?
I didn't know the real life announcements are so easily available. Even if there are some copyright issues, yes dtg staff could record the announcements. Or rent a recording studio and employ someone to record the announcements.
Renting studio is not cheap and hire someone to record the announcements will cost a lot of money as it is usually working like per product (so for each route licence ). And then those licences are not usually unlimited (everybody wants money) so they can have rights for a year, two and then if they dont pay again then they will have to remove it (know couple of games releasing updates which remove for example music from the game as the studio dont want to pay the rights for the music anymore) - so best option for them is record it by themself. Basically it can be the same problem like why they dont use FMod.
They need to fix the visual PIS before implementing announcement sounds linked to it. At the minute we have no PIS showing on some, incorrect station stops, saying out of service when it's not and probably more PIS issues that need addressing
Wouldn't announcements become massive in terms of how much storage it takes up or memory? I would assume safety announcements aren't that large compared to what you would need for actual in train and platform announcements cuz those announcements are relatively short and plays every once in a while in a loop. Cuz you would need longer recordings for live announcements which can become large. You would also need them to play at the correct time and for each specific service and then if you are running late, etc. And with sounds cutting out in tsw due to like lack of audio channels, wouldn't that cause issues. You can't hear all the sounds at once.
Er no, this is total nonsense. The normal contract for a game voice actor is for them to sign over all rights to their performance.
There are over 192 destinations on London Commuter, and even more station in between. Having to record an announcement for that would be a lot of effort. Then whenever there's a layer or a loco DLC, you would need even more announcements.
Excellent idea but when it comes to the German routes they would exactly sound the same because of the announcer being Ingo Ruff. SNCF Simone Hérault. Example is S8 Hagen Hbf Wuppertal Steinbeck RRO Further announcements on the other German routes would sound the same as this one LGV Méditerranée Service originates from Frankfurt Am Main Hbf (Francfort sur le Main Gare Centrale This would have been said by Simone Hérault)
I think its more of a "what would it add". Sure it would be cool hear "the next stop is ....." but after the 3rd playthrough, I know I'd get bored (and frustraited) of hearing "The next station is Mount Florida, this is the Scotrail service to Glasgow Central via Cathcart".
I couldn't find where ScotRail originally posted their anouncements track but here is a website that arranges it into individual sections and tracks. https://scotrail.datasette.io/scotrail/announcements
I know I certainly wouldn't! It would be alot better than just hearing “Wet weather at this station” every 5 mins. It would also improve realisim!
As difficult as it would be, I would love station announcements! I don't think they would be that annoying (but I kind of like the "See it, say it, sorted" slogan). Although as a priority, I would like to be able to control in-train announcements like you can in World of Subways 3. "Please Mind the Closing Doors"
As someone who hears "see it, say it, sorted" almost everyday (when they aren't on strike) it gets annoying in reality. Plus the nanny state announcements about being careful on platforms due to inclement weather after it has rained for five minutes! However I guess it would add immersion in the sim although not personally sure it is something I want them to prioritise. If they do we could have announcements on some of the back dated routes, stations like Leeds and Darlington would have had an actual human being making announcements.
Just the announcements for destinations and next stations is all that's required. See it, say it, sorted and other meaningless stuff can be left out.
Try being on the platform at Rainham or Gillingham when a Thameslink service is coming in... there are 34 stations listed as "calling at" And along with the time, platform, operator and "there are usually many seats available on this train" etc etc it goes on a while.
Sounds gruelling to be honest. The longest I hear is on Smethwick Galton Bridge occassionally when a Holyhead service is due, that can go on a while but not 34 stations worth.
It should be noted that the only announcements DTG have implemented are generic filler announcements of this nature.
All I hear is blah blah blah as I zone out and focus on the birdsong and admire the beauty of Gillingham train station. ARuscoe have you ever taken a stroll down the disused chatham dockyard spur?
They add to the emersion a little, although they have worded them totally different to the ones in rl.
I do hope you're kidding... The station is in a cutting, with roads to North and South and a road bridge over the Western end. The closest you come to birds are the anti bird poles at the back of the station building, but two of those have lost their kites Try being on one of the trains! 32 stations at Gillingham and it stops at every station between there and Dartford (10 stations) then fast to Abbey Wood, Woolwich Arsenal and Charlton, then every station to Luton... I've been on them to St Pancras and besides the ironing board seats I also wanted my ears to block up or stop working from the constant barrage of interminable announcements
Next time you are at Gillingham focus on the birdsong, you can hear it almost everywhere. That's the thing I like about Gillingham station, it's a cutting, one can stand on the platform without seeing the medway town or the roads that surround it!
My Birmingham Cross City mod includes a few ‘different’ announcements if you’ve not already heard them. I could do a whole lot more if DTG had a proper announcement system in place. Something to consider for the future if/when that happens as a mod.
I live 100 yards down the road from the station. It's entrance is on Victoria Street which I also live on... True, but then Medway extends out over the Hundred of Hoo and to the Thames Estuary so you can be in Medway and several miles from a town! There's even an abondoned railway and a few old stations around up there if you know where to look
Yea I've been along the old hoo line, it's rather interesting. Didn't get as far as Allhallows though. There's a junction near the aggregates, i think that's where the branch was?
The annoucements for Luzern-Sursee are on Youtube but two of the stations, Rothenburg Dorf and Rothenburg were renamed to Emmenbrücke Kapf and Rothenburg Station so the annoucements are not possible to implement as of today and the PIS is not really implemented so Rivet need to do that first before the announcements.
German routes are going to be the same as each other due to Ingo Ruff This example is from RRO S8 Hagen Hbf Wuppertal Steinbeck on a Mönchengladbach service
If you see something suspicious tell a staff member or report to the transport police and they'll sort the issue...
Really depents on the compression format and way of encoding. If the base of the files are mono (which halfs the needed memory) you can do a lot! I am working myself in game development as Sound Lead, I get around 700 voicelines in a 15-20 Mb audio bank (FMOD Studio). Let's say it like that: If "memory space" is the reason for not doing the announcements, than this is just a stupid excuse. I think a reliable and working system for the announcement is, given all the other issues with timetables, a way bigger problem to get fixed first!
As a reference, the on-train announcements for World of Subways 3 number 127 (37 "The next station is", 72 "This is", 2 "The next station is closed", 4 "This train will not stop at the next station", 11 location nonspecific - "mind the gap" etc) and take up 74MB. And that size could be greatly reduced if the files were split up and assembled during gameplay, as I presume is done on the actual trains - for example, they wouldn't need 72 "This is" files if the "This is a Circle Line train to..." part was a separate audio file.
Densha de GO! on the PS2 and PC had in-train announcements before every station on every route. And that game could run on a PS2 and a potato PC. If a PS2 era game could to it back then, then a modern game on modern systems wouldn't have problems with it either.
More likely they just haven't got round to doing it yet, spending more time on other things. We don't know what those things are of course
DTG certainly doesn't have any problems including voiced instructions and comments in tutorials, so why should station messages be a problem? Although I'm not a fan of passenger runs, hearing platform announcements as I drive freight trains or switching runs through stations would add a lot to the much touted "immersion" factor. In fact, I think I would appreciate an option to have all or selected types of instructions being vocal as well as (or perhaps rather than) visual.
Here's a couple of excerpts from a 2020 interview with Lee Crooks, who has been the voice of the CTA since they first went to recorded announcements in 1998. Full interview is at https://onmilwaukee.com/articles/lee-crooks-milwaukee-talks-cta-voice ******* So then what was involved? Do you have to say all of those things – station names, et cetera – individually, and then they program them in, or do you just say all the names of things, and it generates combinations of them, or am I giving the technology too much credit? No, no, you're actually pretty close. It's all computerized. I had these lists of things, and they had probably about 10 to 12 announcements per page. You would think, well, just list them all up, but they had specific code numbers that were involved with what was going into the computer. And it also had to do with what (train) line it was on. I had literally pages of this stuff, and, initially, we did just the trains. That took two and a half days of recording. And what we did was because we were establishing how we were going to do this, we didn't know exactly how it would all fit together, and some things are in sections. They've since changed how they do it, but the "transfer to green, purple, blue, brown and pink line trains at," or whatever it is, each of those things would be separate, so we had to make sure that all that matched up. We recorded every line at least three times, so they could have things that would kind of match up. So it wasn't just record this line, record this line. It was like, record this three times. Listen to it, see if that's right ... Do we need a couple of others? And then at the end of it because every train run has a number, I had to count from one to 999. Oh my god. And did you do those individually or did you have to do those multiple times, too? Because I had already recorded, "Welcome aboard red line run." And then I had to go, "1. 2. 3. 4, 37, 68." And so, we just did it, and we didn't record those because we knew sort of how it had to sound coming out of, you know, "Welcome to brown line."... We knew the inflection. How it had to be. So it took me an hour and a half. I literally sat in front of the mic, closed my eyes and went, "One. Two. Three." And the engineer, god bless him, he listened carefully and about every 50 to 100, we would stop and listen to lead-in line to make sure I hadn't drifted, and of course I had drifted because it's hard to keep that exact same energy. And so, we would listen, and he was like, "No. No. You're getting soft or your pitch is dropping," so we would fix it up. Was there anything after you do that initial batch of things that the CTA wanted you to re-say? Oh, sure, we had revisions. In fact, we have revisions about three or four times a year now still. So you did the initial two and a half days or whatever In '98. And in the intervening 22 years, how often do you go there to do more? Yeah. I'd say about three or four times a year. It's things like, let's say, if a train line is under construction, while they're doing it, "the so and so station will be closed from now until whatever. Please use this station instead. Bus service will be available." If there's, for instance, like the Chicago Marathon. They always have to re-route the buses. [snip] It's just like being a musician, always wishing you could do another take! Oh yeah. I did get another take because they just bought new trains, and the technology on the new trains is better than the train technology from before. The engineer told me that he had to squish it down to I don't know if it was eight-bit files or four-bit files, but they were this weird format called (dot)L3. Never heard of it. I found one program that will play them. Nothing I could find will encode those. But that's what they required. And so, there's a Mac program called VLC that would play them. So here's the problem. Yeah, they could have taken those and somehow converted them for the new trains, but why would you take something that sounds real low quality, when you could have high quality. So did you have to go back and redo everything? I just did that earlier this year. And how long did that take? Two and a half days again? No. Because I engineered it. It took me much longer because my agent and I, we set a flat rate for each section. There's four sections to this. We set a flat rate for each section, and then I just took my time, and I would record several takes of something and go, "Nope. No. Yeah, we'll take that one." So it took me literally months, but that was on me. That was just me being incredibly picky. And I'd work for an hour or two a day, kind of just getting it the way I wanted to hear it. When I did the other stuff, remember we said we recorded it several times, and then they would choose? (This time) I was the one choosing. And they only wanted one take. They didn't want to be provided with options. They wanted a finished product. And so, that's where my past engineering skills came in. And we had 623 files that we had to deliver, including all the, "Please stand clear of the doors." Well, actually, that's the 623 files, plus the 900 (individual numbers). Do you find yourself in other cities listening to the subway voices? Oh yeah. Last year I went to Boston, and somewhere on this phone is my recording of those announcements. The woman who is doing it, I was like, “I really like the way she's inflecting that.” It's a small group of people who do this, right? Worldwide. I mean, even if it's a different person in every city, how many subways are there? A couple hundred, tops? Probably. I'm also the voice of the Buffalo (Metro Rail). Just Chicago and Buffalo.
For me, the lack of announcements is one of the biggest immersion killers in the game. It's one of the main reasons why I rarely play Bakerloo, despite it being my favourite Underground line. It's just not the same without the on train announcer constantly repeating where the train is going etc. It's the same when I'm exploring stations. At Paddington station in real life, you can't go two minutes without hearing Anne's voice. In Watch Dogs Legion, a game that has absolutely nothing to do with trains, you can hear Anne's voice in the lobby of St Pancras station. There's only like three separate recordings, and they're all bizarrely from Paddington for trains heading for Cardiff etc, but it's still so much more effort than DTG have put in for a game that's entirely meant to immerse you in these locations. I refuse to listen to "oh it's too hard" as an argument, as if that was DTG’s attitude to the game nothing would get made. Even announcements recorded by staff would be a start.
I could actually do train announcing, plz do not laugh its actually true. I actually did it when my uncle worked for BR many years ago. I m actually a semi pro musician to on which I own my own recording studio, so things like this would be water of a ducks back for me.
Was on a journey from Brighton to Hastings last year, and the guard let a little girl who liked trains do some of the announcements. It was adorable, some people in the carriage clapped when she finished! Apart from being a nice story, my point is that any voice is better than none. I wonder if they could use a text to speech engine of some kind?
Good story and if you're up to apply that to German routes you would have Alisa Palmer Bremen Hauptbahnhof Bremen Oldenburg Hauptstrecke München Augsburg Schnellfahrstrecke Köln-Aachen version Heiko Grauel Rhein Ruhr Osten Wuppertal Hbf & also updated ones Inside trains Ingo Ruff Nahverkehr Dresden RE50 then repeated on Dostos 442 612 425 & S-Bahn Rhein Ruhr 423 Taurus DB MRCE Dispolok Baureihe 182 & 183 ÖBB Baureihe 4744-4748 1016-1216 ÖBB announcer Chris Lohner
