Avmz/Bvmz? the Avmz/Bvmz cars date from the 80s and there was no passenger information system yet, it was a poster like on the corail coaches
So the paper is the PIS. No reason they can’t make information systems with a paper texture in a window.
That’s where I was. I’ve now uninstalled RWEPro because the Weather pack is literally an absolute game changer. It’s revolutionised the game, and is far more than v1 ever was. It’s not just weather, it’s lighting, effects, reflections etc.
Make fabulous stuff, that's the slogan. I do think there have been some fabulous routes like London Commuter and South Eastern High Speed, those are the two I find myself going back to, but of course they are not without their flaws, but they are good enough that they can be played. Ultimately with this kind of hobby, it's impossible to please everyone. It's very personal. There are those that want freight, steam, passenger, other countries, different eras, more functionality. However consistency is key and its maybe down to how the game is built more than anything else. If an add-on is created, there should be an acceptable standard. Missing AI PIS, weird passenger behaviours, routes being too short, missing off branch lines, and bad sounds are not creating a consistent experience and ultimately undermine trust in the products. The average customer does not care which developper is making the add-on, they just want to enjoy the route/train because it should be of a certain standard. I do not think anyone is asking for perfection, and I understand the need to generate revenue from a business point of view. However with some routes I ask myself, who is really requesting some of these new routes? I.e. How many people were asking to drive in a straight line at high speeds through tunnel after tunnel on Kassel - Würzburg. Are there tons of people requesting a class 37 for SEHS? Maybe, I don't know - but looking through the forums it seems like there are many other bits of low hanging fruit that could be developped. Unlike some businesses there is a wealth of data on user insights that should be harnessed more to make fabulous stuff. I think the game has a lot of potential and I really don't want it to turn into the mess of TS Classic where you need all kinds of 3rd party addons to make the game realistic.
I worked for the railway for 36 years (freight). I am impressed with the realism of this game. Yes it’s not exactly the same as the real world and there are bugs but this is a great game. I have spent many hours playing and getting great value for the money I spent.
The Avmmz and Bpmmz coaches are 2010's overhauls of late-70s Avmz and Bvmz; I'm taking a wait and see attitude since, if DTG are redoing the livery, they could also be redoing the interiors and getting rid of the anachronistic PIS screens.
Whoa. What a thread. I have this weird little feeling we are mixing things up here though. This is not about a beautiful DLC or not. About a rehash of a loco model in another livery or what have you. If you want to buy the same thing in a different colour that’s fine. I’d do it. I did. If you like the beauty of the game that’s also fine. I know I do. If you enjoy TSW good for you. I still do on occasion. No this is about something else. This is about the way DTG conducts business. It’s beyond any logic. These are the facts: - DTG develops new and beautiful DLC - No test team diligently test their new product - DTG releases their new DLC - New DLC looks great! - New DLC is broken day one! - Consumers are the test team and fill the forums with all the problems they encounter. You can find those. Well… Right here! - DTG confirms they know and that they are looking into it. - DTG works on a fix - DTG present their fix as an ‘improvement’ and that they were working very very hard to make our experience better. - Some problems remain. - 16 months later some of these problems are still not fixed - DTG still say they have the team looking into it. - In the meantime five other DLC were dished out with the same problems. You can start reading again from the beginning. This is why I can’t recommend any game from DTG. This is why I don’t play TSW3 and won’t ever recommend it. Some people ask me about TSW2 I redirect them to these forums. Make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. If you want to keep giving them your money? Feel free to do just that. But you have to agree the thing you just read is a familiar routine by DTG.
You see, for me, I disagree with you on point 1. This game does not look great, not by a long stretch. A lot of it looks blummin’ awful frankly. In almost any screenshot I can only see numerous problems, like those 158 screens that surfaced yesterday. They look just so wrong, for so many reasons.
I still love the game and will continue to buy all content as it releases. I have not run into any game breaking bugs in my opinion and since I'm retired I like to spend my last days enjoying life. And since this is the only game I own why would I stop adding to it? I still play at least 4 hours a day and it's still fun in my opinion. There will never be a "perfect" simulator, all sims are constantly evolving and always releasing patchs for fixes. If you want perfection the get a job driving a train. Thats the only way you'll get it.
Just bought the Tharandter Rampe: Dresden - Chemnitz Route on sale last night. About £11 for a wonderful route with a DMU that is an absolute dream to drive. Waiting has rewarded me with a route that has all its fixes and updates already in place, with a 50% discount. This is the way to play the game, and by game I don’t mean TSW, I mean the game the DTG executives play with us. I have no doubt Matt and the developers would pour their soul into any route if they had the time allowed.
I get your point and you aren't necessarily wrong. But I only believe it's a good thing. I myself love this series but I still it still could be a lot better, and everyone and everything should always aim to improve. The biggest problem for me in this game is the performance, dreadful, and it just becomes worse for every update it seems like. That being said, a lot of the "critique" here on the forums aren't even valid. But I still prefer that to the people who feel the need to defend Dovetail and TSW like their life depends on it.
Definitely in the top three of German routes along with RSN and Dresden to Riesa. Sadly a standard not present in the Uber short BBO and definitely a concern for the upcoming Rhine route. The only niggle I have with DCZ is when the all stations cab car run comes around in Journey mode. 90 minutes of near silent travel, best consumed in 30 minute stages.
There is no way TSC looks better than TSW. I have TSC with RWEnhancer and the Weather thingy, and while it is a neat tool, it is not a magic wand. Configuring it to look right at a certain conditions will make it totally wrong in another (i.e. bright day vs rainy night). And even then it is obvious that the engine is old, and all the improvements are just a fancy reshade shaders. TSC it is not capable of similar light interaction that unreal engine is capable of, which makes the enviroment much more varied based on the light and weather condition. Also things like screen space reflections do not exist in TSC. You will never see dynamic cab reflection of the windshield in TSC, they need to be baked into the texture and static. But TSC has two main things going for it. The first is consistency. Because the fidelity cieling is lower than in TSW, it makes the scenes look more consistent, and low fidelity areas don't pop-up as much as they do in TSW. Having a high poly train model with complex texture layering next to a low poly house model with just a simple diffuse map, makes the house feel really out of place. In TSC you have the same low level assets, and crudly modeled areas, but because the overall fidelity is much lower, they do not feel so out of place. That the creators had more than a decade to figure out what works and what looks good helps also a lot. The second is antialiasing. As it is a traditionally rendered game it is not dependant on shader based antialliasing, but can use MSAA. Also, becasue it is older, you can really push supersampling without suffering much performance loss. As to realism..Depends on what you define as realism. For me realism is mainly physics... and there, no, just no. TSW is miles ahead of TSC.. maybe few heavily scripted addons, like the Canadian Pacific AC4400CW from Searchligh come close, but they still have to deal with the limitation of the engine. One of such limitation is that there is singular brake pipe pressure which is valid for the whole train. So if you have a 2km freight, the front and rear of the brake pipe will always be at the same pressure, and thus all brakes will be uniformly applied and release at instance through the whole train. The only way to avoid this is to totally bypass the engine braking system, by implementing your own, using your own vagons (like searchlight does). Some addon makers tried to work around this issue by making the drop in air pressure really, really slow. But this is a bandaid solution, which trades one set of problems for another. TSW does have lots of issues, and the snail pace DTG is fixing them, or more often, not fixing them, is really not acceptable. Game braking bugs,like AI spadding, rendering whole route unplayable, cannot take months to fix. And the TSW 2 'soon to come patch'.. oh boy..... But as someone who plays TSC since Railworks, it is not a bed full of roses either. It has its major issues and very sever limitation when it comes to physics, signalling, safety systems, dispatcher (which is 100% static)...etc....If you cannot stand the broken ATC and ACESS in Trenton, then do not play the majority of US content in TSC... it is even worse. And the DLC quality is even more over the place than in TSW, and it is never getting fixed.
I think that’s the nub of the issue though, we’re talking about different games. I’m talking about TSC through the eyes of a UK player of UK content with the full array of the best stuff the 3rd parties can offer. I’ll freely admit that if I were talking only about stock DTG stuff then I wouldn’t be saying the same thing. It would suck, because although their route building can actually be very good, the rolling stock is almost uniformly awful and half-arsed. Normally pretty good models but otherwise poor & rehashed sound, full of bugs, inconsistent, missing features, poor physics and so on. Sound familiar? The fundamental problem for TSW is DTG are essentially all there is. Everything that is done for TSW has to go through DTG, and DTG are the worst bit about TSC (route building excluded). The TSC in front of me is what it is because of 3rd parties. The new Sky & Weather pack from AP (the name really does it a disservice, it is an everything enhancement pack - lighting, reflections, glass quality, sky fidelity and so on) has rendered everything that came before it, including RWE, redundant. It now does many of the things you claim couldn’t be done. It also matters not to me how AP simulate the physics, I just want it to feel realistic. Their products in TSC do, and I’m not seeing trains flipping off the rail in step 3 braking or stuff derailing because the buffers have touched. To reiterate what I said, what I have sat on my machine in front of me right now is more realistic, more comprehensive, better looking , better sounding, more fun and more varied than the significant amount of content that I own for TSW. A lot of that I’ve not touched because it becomes dull as heck after 5-10hrs of playtime per DLC because it’s just so repetitive. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever even remotely dynamic about TSW, but if driving the same identical service over and over again with only the same train as yours for company is what floats your boat at £30 a go then fill your boots. We can agree to disagree, but you have to see this new AP pack in action (and the signalling too, that is also transformative) to believe it. TSW can look stunning but major problems with the environmental lighting spoil what should be something special. It is also not remotely consistent enough, so overall I still believe that modern & enhanced TSC content certainly looks as good, if not better.
TSC shines for steam (as in traction) and routes that don’t stand a cat in hell’s chance of appearing in TSW, like the ones from New Zealand, South Africa, outlying parts of Canada or even rural or remote UK. But agree TSC does have limits. I quite the lighting way better than TSW, but once you have experienced the full day timetable in TSW it is hard to accept the handful of scenarios most routes ship with which you then have to ferret around to find in Standard or Career. However at least TSC allows you one save slot per scenario unlike the severe limitations of TSW with one save for the whole game. And despite the above, have to say TSW has been my go to of late, in fact I have dived into Run 8 more recently than TSC, despite the horrible 2003 era MSTSesque graphics (avenue of trees etc.).
But even these are not done by DTG, but by 3rd parties. It's the same thing: 3rd parties are important for variety. That's why i am thankful we now have a few in TSW and hope that more will join.
A point I should have made! Even some of the UK classics like The Port Road, WCML North, Over Shap etc., were done by Keith Ross at arm's length. The amazing, albeit temperamental, Metropolitan Line done by Just Trains.
I think you have to time stamp the train sim evolution. I have to chuckle when I think back to MSTS, but, at the time, in the early noughties, it was the best thing since sliced bread for me. But Railworks and, later, TSC are a big improvement and the universality is an enormous generator of content. Anyone and everyone can create, and they have, both payware and freeware. But there are limitations. The engine has aged and, as you say, it is limited to scenarios. But it is often superb and has features, like the save game, which have not been incorporated into its successor. TSW was supposed to be a quantum leap, with a new engine, new physics, graphics and a new player role. And Heavy Haul ( SPG ) promised much. Some of that promise has been delivered, but not all. And 20+ years on, expectations are quite rightly much higher than back in the day. As a virtual monopoly, it's up to DTG alone to meet those expectations.
I still remember the dark days pre MSTS and why I started my infamous web site at the time. The best that could be had for the UK was entirely text based programmes like Simudrive or Train Driver 3 with its basic cab view, if you could get the Amiga Emulator running. At least the latter had rudimentary sound and a few of us pioneers had great fun with the game. Then there were the oddities like Steam Express or C(rap)ab View Driver which relied on condensed Railscene video for the view. So as much as we moan and grizzle now I am entirely happy with a world in which we have the likes of TSC and TSW, my now long closed web site more than achieved the goal of highlighting the plight of train simming vs other genres.
Good for you mate! Don't worry there are more than enough enthusiastic and fired up volunteers available to ever consider press ganging people to fill the ranks. Indeed... but hey don't blame DTG, the people who created the product and are responsible for it's performance and overall quality. We need a convenient scapegoat... How about Covid or maybe even that dastardly Putin chap?
