So I go to create a scenario for the Class 31 on Crewe to Liverpool (could be any other route). Get the consist list up and guess what - not a single loco hauled passenger service amongst them, other than hauling a dead DMU which is hardly much of a challenge. For crying out loud... If you're not prepared to give us Scenario Planner 2.0 or a consist editor, in the name of all that is good can someone take a five minute timeout and add a couple of passenger consists to the list - single Class 31 and Load 5 or 6, double headed Load 10 or 12. Is it really too much to ask for?
Is scenario planner 2.0 still a thing? There hasn't been any news on that. I wonder what the difficulties are of adding a consist editor to the game
In my opinion (and its just what i assume), dtg doesnt want players give much own freedome in tsw 3 with scenario creations / consist creators. Tsc still needs a major selling point. Look at the very very few selectable sidings. They restricted it that much, you cant even build your own consists via shunt without spending 3 hours on a manual track section and let come train by train. Until 1 year ago you could take over a.i services which had active timetables. This got restricted, so now the only a.i trains which you can take over, are the oned reached its end destination. (Now the red warning sign appears "not able to control". Guess what: DTG must have noticed that players could make a small time table when you can just take over the a.i train and drive the route back. Also dtg could just have added 4 portals to each route, but .they didnt. There are a few path extension mods. DTG, for your execution in activly blocking tsw from its true potential i really should stop being a customer of you!! This is my honest point of view.
There’s something about consists using content from more than one home route that means they can’t be used in player scenarios. As far as I can tell the loco hauled trains in Diesel Legends are a special case. They technically don’t have a home route at all, appearing only in a DLC for a route. I think this means they can’t be in Scenario Planner because of the way it looks for consists. Adam explained it once in a live stream as I recall.
That's what threw me a bit as I definitely recall seeing Class 31 passenger consists while driving Legends on GWE. Come on DTG, how hard can it be to do a bit of drag and drop or tick a couple of boxes. If need be give them a notional route to run on as a layer.
Last time we tried adding formations that were cross plugin they caused major problems for scenario planner as it didn't have the ability to respect cross plugin dependencies - resulting in a crash every time. Things have moved on and we can now set that on the formation level so... i'll get someone to test it again and see whether it's good now, and if so, see what we can get added
Matt, How far off would you say adding timetabled stops is in scenario planner? It’s the one thing that’s putting me off using it. I think if we had that we could see its full potential?
why not give us complete freedom to use the rolling stock on any route in any consist? ie. free roam, quick drive like in TSC? or would that be a deviating from the console game concept that seems to have TSW in its grip?
The 31 runs passenger services on Diesel legends and WSR, I think it also runs a Railtour on ECW. So it can run with carriages. That it's not available with carriages on Content creator is a bit LOVE. Edit: I didn't see Matt's response before posting my comment.
We need a timetable editor, or at least the ability to create new timetables if the tools can allow. Why we are locked out of stuff so.much is frustrating as the community could have sorted NTP and TVL by now.
This was part of the idea for tsw3 trains but not tsw2/tsw2020 trains although that was due to technical reasons
I must admit I hadn't considered adding timed stops to each stop as a priority - interested to hear what others think. How much would you expect it to affect your experience and how would you anticipate adding those timings in? My concern is that it's easy for me to put a text field on each one that you can put the time in, but a) how many people would bother? and b) how do you know what they should be? I guess if you're copying a train entry from a real time table that's the most likely candidate? Added to my notes though. So "scenario planner" is a superset of TSC's "quick drive" - you can do more with Scenario Planner (defining bits of paths more easily, adding stop instructions etc) - it lacks in that you have to add all AI and you can't just benefit from AI placed by the quickdrive author, sure, i'm aware of that limitation and am thinking of solutions, but on the flipside, you can add any other trains you want and aren't *limited* by what one person put in either. The key bit you're missing though in TSW is the formation designer, which is also on my list of things I want to get added. As far as your list comment... "sigh" and "whatever". If you mean creating whole timetables - that's a mammoth task, takes weeks if not months of full time work, you're unlikely to to get an in-game editor for that because not only is the UI for it extremely complex, it also requires multiple hours-at-a-time sat number crunching just to re-simulate the timetable to a) test it and b) get all the start meta data so you can jump in anywhere. I *am* however keen to find some way to do it, I just have no idea what that looks like right now. Matt.
Why can't dtg add a scenario to each route in scenario designer where the player could swap out trains as they please. I.e a scenario on bml where one could swap a 377 for a 375 or 465 or all the 377s for 375s and where there is freight on the scenario swap a 66 with a 37 and so on? This would give us access to more paths, platforms, sidings etc...
I could see an unorthodox use for timed stops in making scenarios with quite tight timings as a challenge to see how closely the driver could get to time. Particularly fun with a twisty route that risks a derail on the way. Or with setting the scenario with different locos to see how hard the timing is in the class 40 say compared to the 377. As I said totally unorthodox but valid play potential there!
Thanks Matt, That is appreciated! For myself it’s the highest priority, having some sort of timetable to follow. I’m sure it’s a high priority for others too (hopefully they will confirm) It would certainly add to the realism of following a proper timetable. How would it be done? Well as I do now when I pay TSC and use the editor, use real world timetables, or Realtime Trains filling in the running times. If not some sort of text box as you said go show what time you should arrive/depart would be a fantastic addition to be honest. Again personal preference but if that was added then for me Scenario Planner would be as good as the TSC editor creating scenarios, I think it really is the most important thing that is missing. But thanks for replying Matt and listening to the feedback! Shaun.
One thing that came to my mind is that timed stops in scenario planner could help in creating timings for AI services in order to achieve a certain player experience. As an example, I once created a scenario on MSB where the player takes a stopping service from Aschaffenburg to Heigenbrücken and gets overtaken by an IC during the approach (or at latest during the stop). Now in order for this to work properly it is necessary that Laufach is departed at a specific time which is no problem for the creator of a scenario but if you want to share it on CC you'd need to put the timetable in the scenario instructions which is not ideal for obvious reasons. A more gamey approach would be that the earned 1,000AP for a timed stop are a bit more worth than the Max. 750 we're now having as well But specifically in further improvements regarding paths and AI services I see loads of potential in this!
I haven't delved into the TSW scenario planner yet. I have used the TSC scenario editor a lot and despite it throwing a hissy fit at times you can do quite a lot with it. In TSW I do feel some way to add timed stops on services, for example as seen in a working timetable, would greatly benefit the experience of scenario planner. And of course a consist editor. I would love to take the class 31 over NTP with a parcels train or imagine one has replaced a failed class 47 on a Liverpool to Newcastle servlce. A freeroam mode as in TSC would also be great. For example just setting up an 08 and some wagons in Teesyard so you could shunt around for a while or set some trains up at Victoria so you can just pick a trian and drive wherever you want, alls without the constriction of an actual service of scenario. I would love to see some kind of service mode planner or editor but it sounds like that may be a mammoth task.
I'd definitely have a use for this on single track lines, like WSR, IOW or Arosa. In the past while playing with scenario planner I needed to modify at least a couple of times start times of every AI services coming from the opposite side to get rid of dispatcher conflicts that caused red lights for both ways and making the scenario not being able to be finished. Setting a departure time at a given station (generally to extend the time the trains are stopped at double tracked stations) would probably fix the issue.
Might be getting the wrong end of the stick on this one but... For me this would be a case of "work out an AI timing and apply that as a minimum, then include the ability to extend the stop" It would affect the game play as the others have said, allowing overtakes or passes to be more flexible so that you can have clear running, then chasing yellows later on. If you could add them into stops as well as passenger stops (ie you can loop freight for a particular length of time) even better
Not sure I would want this. For me scenario planner is to chill out and drive any train on any route without worrying about timetables, speeding or anything else that dictates gameplay.
Then put that as an option... unlimited time on all stops, so you could take as much time as you like getting between them and as much time as you like at each stop... Would completely mess up the interactions though so not sure how the dispatcher would handle that, but maybe the latest iterations can manage that
Being able to edit a current timetable would be very useful as a starting point if that could be possible, basically adding one service at a time to see if it doesn't screw up other services. I would love to be able to add more services on NTP and TVL in timetable mode. If this was possible, don't know how if would affect PIS - could we tell it to go off map with stopping points i.e. a HST leaving Leeds for Kings X
Definitely go with this. One of my most used mods for MSTS was Activity Changer which allowed you to change the auto generated times to a round number. Open Rails, although I haven't used it much, has a timetable editor which allows precise times to be input. And technically, in the UK, even freight trains should adhere to their working timetable. There are a fair few sources to obtain old timetable data from - Disused Stations http://www.disused-stations.org.uk/ usually has a scan of them on the station pages, or Timetable World https://timetableworld.com - to assist in recreating authentic services.
Aside from the missing formations / formation designer - presumably you could already do this, this one is just about missing formations/designer. Because we don't pre-calculcate like TSC does, we'd currently need to run a timetable simulation to get those estimated times, which isn't feasibly (or currently possible) on the running game (it's a command line tool currently) - but - something to think about. Matt.
Timetable timings and why I think they are important. I made a scenario on GWE using BR stock from NTP and I wanted it to feature lots of AI and a bit of parallel running. It was incredibly difficult to do what I wanted for many reasons but mainly the lack of timing options. Firstly, I could only put in start times and secondly these times could only be inputted with timings in 5 minute intervals (I did this over 18 months ago on PS4 and before Creators Club). For the scenario to work as I had envisaged, I had to alter the times many times and I ended up with about 10 iterations of timing changes, and AI stopping patterns to try and shift trains by less than the five minute window, used a lot of paper and a spreadsheet on my computer, and after this I still had to manually time my wait before setting off and my one stop at Slough every time I played it to get my train to parallel run correctly with any of the services on the slow line as I wanted. This was on a route where there are plenty of stops to allow many service options but it was a bit of a nightmare. I pretty much gave up on using scenario planner for anything other than a quick drive without AI after that. Even that is hard enough with the daft paths that appear on many routes. I always seem to be swapped over to wrong way running for some reason, like the paths are taken from those diverted scenarios rather than proper timetable service paths. I would certainly like to use scenario planner but it really can’t do anything I want it to.
One of the problems currently with paths is that they're authored separately and with a different (much simpler) tool than the one used for services and scenarios - and we can't actually see the path at all until you get it in game. This is a key thing i'm asking to be changed, it should just use the same proven and easy to use tool and that would make the whole process much quicker (more paths!) and much more reliable (no stupid routing!). Will put my thinking cap on about start times and stopping times, appreciate the feedback folks. Matt.
Just adding my voice to the call for the ability to create timetabled stops with times in scenario planner. I don't use scenario planner at all at the moment because this is missing. Also (and even more valuable for me) the capability to run any train you own on any service in timetable mode would be a huge step forward. Some modders (such as 'ADTRAINSUK') have managed to do it - meaning we can, for example, run a Class 166 on a 323 schedule on Cross City, so it's clearly possible. If it could be made so that us mere mortals could manage it, that would be superb.
Matt, Thanks for the Response, here's hoping something can be brought to the table regarding timetable editing. No doubt it's hard work, some on here have done it for a living on the Railway also.
Briefly when I worked in Train Planning, then in the Control doing VSTP schedules as part of the job. sometimes even validated against the rest of the timetable! In truth that was an aspect of the job I really enjoyed as it required quite a bit of thought at times, then there were occasions trying to path a short notice tamper move out of West Ealing across to the Down Relief line then off towards Reading you just had to squeeze it between the existing 3 minute headways and hope there weren't too many "delay minutes" attributed to it! \you also learned about parts of the network not directly on the Western/Wales route. The biggest fun I had was coming in for a Saturday Day Turn on the West Country Desk and finding a VSTP request for a 07+45 St Phillips Marsh to Haymarket (Class 158 transfer) which the Night Turn had kindly left but the VSTP section didn't start until 0800!
