One of the biggest problems with Glossop lines right now in my opinion, is the complete lack of clutter. The track side is so incredibly barren it makes the route look terrible where it otherwise could look nice. There are some parts of the route that have clutter, and it looks really nice (I can’t understand why there’s so much inconsistency but it’s frustrating to say the least). Now, it doesn’t have to be loads of stuff piled along the trackside, just a few rail sections, gravel bags, old brick structures here and there and cable trunking where appropriate, and it completely transforms the route. I can’t imagine such small things would have massive hits on performance. Whilst this isn’t the only route that’s like it (MML was particularly bad), it stands out more on this route because in real life, there is so much old infrastructure lying around. This is the woodhead line, it is covered in scars of past life, but none of that is shown in the game. It’s almost as if clutter is just completely ignored of the brief or just isn’t included to begin with. Either way, i think it needs looking into because it really makes the route feel unpolished and unfinished.
Exactly, that was my point yesterday that I posted the Glossop Route was too clean, there is not enough rust, rubbish, broken rails, litter etc
I think they could make a perfect route and still find people to complain about it. They have clutter!!!
In a small number of places. Most of the trackside is completely barren, and I won’t even mention lineside fencing…
Agreed. That is one thing I highlighted in my Glossop review here We definitely need to try and move away from this ‘picture perfect’ look and try and make things look more grimy and disused, as per real life. Particularly with embankments, as well as sidings and little used lines - these are almost always laid with pristine continuous welded rail, with zero vegetation in TSW. Whereas in real life, they still have old jointed track, along with rusty rails, severe overgrown vegetation growing through them, rubbish etc. More attention to detail needs to be given in these areas to make TSW feel less ‘plastic’ looking and perfect feeling.
Absolutely agree that more clutter is needed on most routes! Still a shame that there is not an editor to add your own.
Fencing, easily found.... and loads of clutter!!!! I found plenty of logs lying on the ground, tree stumps, litter, bins and everything else. Fencing too.
That's why I love the eastern Hagen route. The views over the valley, the grafitti and overgrown tracks, and great variety of trackside objects make it my go-to route. The other side of Hagen is great too, with the winding tracks and varied industies along the valley.
I just watched it. Well one from a station. I can't find the video you speak of. But I saw the line and I am happy with that. There IS clutter!!! Some of the stations look a little unkempt (compared to the actual game) but honestly if you want to go and edit it yourself and make it look EXACTLY as you see in a video or real life..... go for it. I'm sure drivers are keeping count on the weeds at Ashburys....... I admire attention to detail but DTG have done quite well. The route is gorgeous. As I said if you want to spend 100 hours on adding tiny weeds and a few bumps in pavement, go for it. I won't stop you. People are doing mods on routes so maybe that is your thing.
As I said, yes there is clutter as you’ve shown. But there are dozens of places that DON’T have it and DON’T have fencing. I’m not asking for hundreds of hours to put every blade of grass in (seriously don’t need to be that pathetic about it). Anyone that’s seen the above video and then played the route will clearly see the complete lack of clutter overall. If you can’t then I don’t know what to say.
If you even read Londonmidlands post, you would know exactly what he is talking about when it comes to clutter. He never said there's zero clutter
As I posted in the Glossop thread somewhere, TSW routes are just too clean and plastic looking, it's more of a "Model Railway Simulator"
Manchester Piccadilly is so empty, feels extremely dystopian, for one of the most busiest stations in Britain, same with Birmingham and about almost every large station we have in TSW, only stations that don’t feel that way are Victoria and Brighton and Croydon
I drove a service from Hadfield to Manchester Piccadilly and there was a EMT HST and around three class 323 sets there so it didn't feel that empty, not like New Street. Although some variety would have been nicer to see but they do seem to have made a bit more effort with it.
Absolutely agree with this. Even a few simple looping animations of people wandering up and down streets would really elevate the immersion.
The coolest thing that could ever happen to this game would probably be massive amount of car and foot traffic in the appropriate areas (Harlem line, near Harlem etc etc) But this would most definitely drop fps to like 5 and cook everyone’s hardware lol Someday hopefully
Definitely agree that TSW as a whole is far too sterile, from how clean & tidy everything is right upto how unpopulated the world is. I do have to hand it to DTG though, they have done a lot better than I expected with Piccadilly, I was thinking we would get to see just the one train in P1/2 & then the odd EMT service up on 13/14. Just the 323’s utilising various platforms alone has helped a lot with this. The 323 itself isn’t as clean as we usually see trains, which is great. Services also seem to have actual passengers on them for once, something we also seem to getting less and less of. I still begrudge getting these major termini when DTG don’t have the stock to play with, there is never any escaping that & we always seem to get one, which gets abandoned and we never see it used again outside of a couple which have been reused - however this still doesn’t work backwards & the original route is left devoid of life.
I still think the whole diorama hooks idea has been woefully underutilised. Trackside works, trainspotters, people just going about their daily business, routes should be bustling with these randomised encounters.
Absolutely true, the only station with any life to it is Victoria, I would say Paddington, but Paddington has loads of services but looks deserted at times, when it comes to passengers
I don't think the timetable on GWE is complete though, even without the Heathrow services. There are times when Paddington is devoid of trains in the day time, something I am sure is not the case in real life. I think in time we will slowly get new routes and trains which can make these busy stations busier. Cross City hasn't been out for much more than six months yet.
Supporting this. My favorite routes are busy. Either because the foliage is super dense, or there are many other things to look at. People sitting at a diner, a dog nearby, stray animals, daily standup outside the offices and factories, trash bins out on the road. While it isn't too important for fast routes, it is so for slower ones to marvel, and of course photographing.
For fast routes the stations that they call at have to be busy, for example at Paddington there should be loads of passengers at the concourses, luggage assistance, dispatchers, guards, and obviously passengers as its a major station
Yeahh dioramas definitely need to be pushed a little more. It was amazing when they announced them and It gave routes a real chance to be brought to life. As said previously, workers by the trackside, staff in yards, spotters on bridges or in fields, farmers perhaps. Just the list is endless! Would really help to brighten up routes and add some more life no matter what the route is as some depots and yards have a lot of detail modelled scenically but are ghost towns which loses some immersion. I'd love to drive a loco into a yard and just see some cleaners or engineers around a static model or something to that effect!
Will they though? Say we get a Pendolino and 350 for argument sake, can you see DTG backfilling Bakerloo & BCC with 390's and 350's, Cathcart Route with 390's, Manchester Picc with 390's - all with real life time services? I'm skeptical TBH
Well they have put the MML HST onto SEHS so it isn't without precedent. Maybe it depends who compiles the timetable. I actually do think they would put a 350 or Pendolino onto BCC, whether they would with Bakerloo I know not. I am just speculating, I might be wrong but they obviously see the feedback on here, they do often take in on board although not all the time.
A thing I would love to see, along with generally just people out of stations, is some tractors in fields with appropriate equipment (ploughs etc) for the time of year and then a combiner during the harvest.
But why? Open world games have much bigger maps, much more detail and lots more traffic. You can take a car and drive from one side of the map to the other side of the map even interacting with the environment without one stutter. In TSW you are on rails which already restricts how much you can interact with the map. You can't punch or shoot an NPC, you can't damage a tree or building with a vehicle. A train game does not require so much interaction with the environment as those open world games so there is definitely lots of power in your hardware left to make the rather small TSW maps look like those huge open world maps.
That's simple, and i have told it more than twice in other discussions about it on the forums here. The actual visible area, when you play a TSW route at its standard settings, is bigger than most big open world games at all. Before you say "the AAA open world games are better and bigger and can do this and that and TSW not" you have to get into the tech and get the idea how these games are made, what tricks they use to feel that big and what not else they do fake it to make it big. Most biggest open world games have real map sizes of about 16km edge length at max. That is nothing compared to TSW. And you move way faster in a train simulator than on a GTA map or whatever other game. Please don't compare with the MSFS. That game works totally different and has way different requirements to the world generation than a train sim. And it has its own limitations. And games like GTA can be way better optimised because there is only one specific world map that never changes. In TSW you have lots of different worlds (Routes) to deal with and different amounts of trains. Trains eat up a lot of performance and memory. Adding more clutter means, steal the performance and memory space for it on other places (maybe on the trains itself). If you want that, you could have than, but i think DTG will not do it. If you put in amounts of assets over a specific limitation of what is possible to play the game on every machine, you have to steal the missing performance somewhere else on the same map/game.
The total modelled area, sure. But definitely not the visible area that's actually being rendered at any one time. And you can easily reach 120+ mph speeds in GTA and similar games...
We’re halfway through 2023 and you’re seriously suggesting that a bit of clutter will bring the game to it’s knees. If that’s the case something is very wrong somewhere. We were fed this line about ‘performance’ as a reason to why MML looked so bare and poor. When the rest of the patch, but more importantly the PC mod, finally releases you’ll see what a load of old hooky that excuse was. When you talk about ‘memory space’ you’re talking about older consoles right, as TSW doesn’t even get close on PC. That’s as close to proof as we can need that Gen 8 consoles are hampering the game on other platforms.
Yep, they only need to be static assets it can randomly load into a selection of fields every time you start the run. Plus, if you set the hooks for spawning them far enough away from the playable area, then they only need to be low poly low res objects to cut back on the overheads.
As long dtg trys to win the race with a fiat panda this years "big" summer release is the 700 on sehs. Gen8 just cant keep up with much more.
Clutter isn't needed. What they should really do, is stop having pristine clean trains - especially when you are taking over mid-route. You wouldn't believe the amount of rubbish I find when I am cleaning them.
I can probably imagine a fair bit of it. I've seen some of the stuff other passengers leave behind, when they're not going all the way to the end of the line like me.
I asked why it would drop to 5 fps. Not why you want the traffic. I want the traffic as wel and was explaining that traffic would be very simple in this game as there is no shooting and punching involved. Thank you for the explanation (once again). Again I'm not a developer so I'm allowed to say stupid things So let me try to make you go full facepalm In my view the game is just build wrong. I remember when I first picked up the game I was surprised I could walk around. But the lack of detail doesn't make a stroll very inviting. Later I learned you have to have every train on that route to be a fully equipped train because when you have the ability to walk you have the ability to engage with every train on that route. I think the exploring part was a stupid idea. Don't walk the rails is a part of everyones education I guess but this game invites you to do so. I've even seen it been done on the livestreams. If from the start that idea would have been scrapped the other trains should not have to take up so much memory. We could have way better scenery and would even have memory left for clutter. Ok now you may facepalm
No, that would not change anything. The other trains still need to be there as they have to run their schedules anyways and for that they are needed in memory. Every train sim is doing that this way as there is no other way. You can't move things around without a representation in some sort of data that is processed. I am not talking about the visuals of trains. This would explode the game with only 10 trains running on the route. But the logical part of a train does have is footprint in memory and all the other bits too. Every megabyte counts therefor. Clutter, even if you can't image it, needs a lot of position data on the map tiles and, regarding on ho much different clutter you put there, the overhead data of the assets itself. Loading then in and out creates new stutters additional. I really don't want to fight here for the developers. No. I just want to take out the illusions from some people. If the devs could fill the routes with tons of clutter, they would do it, believe me. It's simply not a good idea yet. May change some day when the UE4 tech gets better and TSW has adopted the new tech. But what cant't be changed is the amount of memory on consoles. That is a manifested size and as a developer you have to deal with that or don't do the game idea.
Why would the train traffic need to be as memory intensive as the train the player is using? You can strip most of the details in the interior of those trains I suppose?
As i said, i don't talk about the visuals. I talk about the logical train (invisible logical data like positions of each axle on the tracks etc. pp.).
But if you stripped out the interior details of the ai trains wouldn't they then be a different model to the train your driving and then in turn use even more memory? Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.
Depends on how this would be done. But that is not needed at all. It already uses techniques to reduce the amount of used memory and render performance. There is nothing much more you could do yet. It's well optimised already. And the people who now would come with UE5 and its Nanite tech. This new fancy stuff needs even more memory to store the mesh data. All Nanite is good for is save development time and have consistent render performance, but not memory.
So there we have it. Consoles, specifically Gen 8 consoles, are certainly holding the game back on PC and highly likely to be doing the same to Gen 9. Gen 8 consoles are ancient. Dump them.
But since we've lost Sam we don't know the exact numbers now on 9th and 8th gen so it could still be a large number of players? I know there was equal split betwen Xbox, PS and PC last time Sam shared with us and 9th gen was very low but would be interesting to see if its changed?
