A bus simulator based on Unreal engine released an editor a couple of days ago. This, alongside the unofficial editor, shows that an official editor is from a tecnical and from a licensing perspecive possible, so hopefully DTG could release one. I think this would be a good decision from a financial standpoint, since Simrail, a TSW competitor is offering one too.
You can't compare here. The editor that "The Bus" is using is a vanilla one with plugins for proprietary things. The TSW editor is a different thing. The whole engine has changed a lot on the source code side and so the editor too. That is where the problems begin.
Your absolutely spot on different sims use different techniques/ packages for example fernbus coach sim releasing tomorrow for Xbox series X/S and ps5 ported from pc but using the newer unreal 5 engine
Plus, licensing isn't a generic thing where one publisher's success in one area means anyone should automatically be able to get any license for anything.
Bed time storie "100 and 1 reasons why we cant release editor" continue There is couple of games which got completely changed source code, even more then TSW and they still publish their editor. Even TML Studios change some stuff in source code, its not basic vanilla. And Epic dont really care how many changes you do in their code as long as the editor is distributed by official way thru Epic Launcher or Github connected to their acc. So where is the problem which you are talking about ? SpeedTree ? World Machine ? or any other payware plugin ? You know when you will want to use the plugins (and it was stated many times before when DTG was talking about the editor) then you will need to buy licence for those plugins (they dont work without it) but editor is working fine without those plugins, they are not required to create route, loco into the game or even some basic stuff. I still think DTG dont publish editor because they want to have full control over the game and $$$. And then there is that console excuse "if consoles cant have it then nobody will"
If DTG want full control and don't want to release an editor, that's their choice and should be end of story. The amount of stick they get for not including documentation or a properly polished UI on their DLC, can you imagine the chaos they'd have to deal with if they released a dev tool which was built for internal use?! I imagine most people playing on console couldn't care less about having an editor on the platform and understand the obvious reasons why that would be - the Unreal editor itself being exclusively Mac/PC. Similarly, many console players won't care if there's a public editor at all - I'd guess most are more interested in playing the game than tinkering with settings and assets, and if professional companies are struggling to put out worthwhile content, I doubt I'd be interested in most of the LOVE that hobbyists would cobble together in their spare time. Sure there are some genuinely talented folk out there who could make some amazing content, but I'm sure they'd be welcomed by DTG or other developers to contribute to their routes or build up into third parties of their own, like TSG etc. More third parties would obviously benefit everybody, but having a mod system without any kind of quality control doesn't feel like a must-have to me - that's from the perspective of someone who plays on a console because they absolutely don't want to have to tinker with stuff and manage dependencies just to make it work properly.
Could this interest in having a bus editor just be a side effect of now having a barge in livery editor?What's nexts people wanting a tram editor or a hovercraft editor or a airplane editor.
