Major Playstation Integration Fault With Tsw2020

Discussion in 'Troubleshooting' started by synthetic.angel, Aug 27, 2019.

  1. synthetic.angel

    synthetic.angel Well-Known Member

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    Okay - I think that what follows is a major issue (with an easy fix), but the Support Team tell me it is nothing to do with TSW2020, and it is outside of their control. My ticket was as follows:
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    Broken PS Button Function
    When the PS button is pressed on the DualShock (and the user enters the PS4 UI), any TSW2020 simulation that was running continues to run in the background, without the user being aware of this. When pressing the PS(4) button, the user will expect the application to freeze or be in a paused state, especially since there are no multi-player online dependencies. Fault causes poor player experience, disrupts user's other activities in the PS UI, and wastes energy. Upon re-pressing the PS button, the user should find themselves in the pause menu, and not in the simulation that has progressed without the user's attention. Patch urgently required.
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    I think this is serious, and urgent. It's a major PS4 integration failure. It is not for Sony to write the code into TSW2020 that polls the DualShock's PS4 button, and when detecting a press, puts the TSW2020 application into a pause state. (The PS4 will detect the press and take you out of the application and into the PS UI, but TSW2020 continues to run in the background, which could lead to trains hitting the buffers at Minehead....!).

    It would only take a few lines of code to fix this. Possibly just two. (Although that might be optimistic...).

    Does anyone else have this issue? Am I being too picky here?
     
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  2. InspectorTiger

    InspectorTiger Well-Known Member

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    Just for reference, pressing the Xbox button on the Xbox doesn't pause the game either. I don't think there is a universal standard about this; some games pause themselves when the console UI button is pressed, others don't.

    You may have more luck if you phrase this as a feature request: "please pause TSW when the PS button is pressed". Describing it as a 'serious and urgent' bug may be a slight overreaction.
     
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  3. synthetic.angel

    synthetic.angel Well-Known Member

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    Thanks for this (seriously - as I was genuinely looking for feedback). I actually quite like your suggestion, and it is perhaps, a more politically correct, less controversial way, of raising the issue. But, because I think (rightly or wrongly) that this is really quite a serious issue, if I put it in as a "Feature Request", it feels to me as if I am being incredibly sarcastic, because it is such an incredibly basic thing that needs to be done (in my opinion, granted).

    This is my opinion because, in over 20 years of owning Playstation titles (maybe 500 games?), I have never seen the PS Button not pausing the action in the application, when switching to the PS UI (or other application). Or, at least, I have not *noticed* any other title not implement this. But since TSW is a game almost exclusively about driver vigilance when in control of a train, it seems entirely perverse to me for the PS button to not pause the simulation. I can't imagine, in the Developer meeting on assigning DS4 buttons, that they consciously agreed to leave the PS button unassigned.so that the simulation continues to run, without the player's attention.

    Also, I raised this privately through the Support System, and the general response that I got was:

    "None of your reports includes images when one would be applicable and most of it appears to be feedback rather than an issue I can address in the form of support. As you've noted issues entirely outside of our control such as your PS4 and how it minimises games it's not clear what you are expecting as a response. You've made many references to things covered in our previous Studio Updates which are not a subject for support such as asking for CSX Heavy Haul to come to PS4. Also as your reporting known issues in the vast majority of cases, it's hard to tell if you have visited our forum previously so this is why I have asked you to visit it and Dovetail Live as answers to your questions which are not a subject for support can be found there. As we do not need a single ticket for each issue you wish to report and as such, I have merged them into 1."

    As an aside/explainer to the above: I submitted x24 individual tickets. I found out that if you raised two or three issues in one ticket, then if there was a plausible reason to shut down the ticket for one of the reasons (with a resolution) then the other issues would just be ignored. I now accept that even raising the CSX issue is regarded as a "faux pas" (although it really does bother me, and it won't stop bothering me until there is parity on cost between PS4 and PC). I also discovered that the LIRR Change At jamaica Issue and the MSB Out of Order had indeed been raised in the PS4 Forums (although not acknowledged by any moderator or administrator). The other x20 issues were all unknown bugs and issues - the vast majority. I think all of my x24 tickets, including the PS Button ticket were just closed down, on the basis that I had the temerity to ask about CSX Heavy Haul..... ;-O
     
  4. ARuscoe

    ARuscoe Well-Known Member

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    Being pedantic here... CSX Heavy Haul has never been available on PS4 so cannot be classed as "a bug or something broken", the same could be said about any platform specific content for any game, ever

    The rest? I agree. The support system isn't very supportive at times. For instance on TSx you have to send them your DxDiag report to reflect latest GPU drivers no matter what the issue, so why not make it a requirement of submitting the ticket in the first place that a valid DxDiag report is uploaded?
     
  5. InspectorTiger

    InspectorTiger Well-Known Member

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    I sympathise with your experience with the support staff, but it sounds as though your credibility with them has reached something of a low point, which is partly your own fault. If your genuine bug reports are drowned out by feature requests and things which are already well-known and much-discussed on the forums, they're not going to pay much attention to you. Anyone who's ever worked in tech support knows that there are certain people—crank is such an ugly word—who take up far more of the staff's time and energy than their problems really warrant.

    Now, I'm not saying that's you, of course. But it's pretty clear that they think so, which perhaps explains a certain lack of enthusiasm in the response you quote. I think a wise strategy for support tickets in future might be:

    1. Report genuine bugs only, that is, something which doesn't work as advertised.
    2. Search the forums first to see if it has been mentioned or reported already, and if so, don't bother.
    3. Include all the information they ask for, including screenshots, and try to avoid making value judgments in your bug report (like saying "this is something incredibly basic"). Just keep it brief and descriptive; say what you did, what you expected to happen, what actually happened, and what would resolve the issue for you. This is much more likely to get results.

    All that said, the way that DTG handles bug reports (and feature requests!) clearly leaves a lot to be desired, and they know that. A big improvement on the current system would be to have a list that everybody can look at, showing what has already been reported, including ideas and feature requests.

    Posting on the forum gets feedback from other users, but it doesn't create a ticket in DTG's internal system. Raising a ticket does do that, but it's also invisible to other people, so the same thing gets needlessly re-reported, creating lots of churn for the support people to deal with. What we need is a system that does both things: a public issue tracker, in fact.
     
  6. synthetic.angel

    synthetic.angel Well-Known Member

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    Thank you for your considered response - I think that there's a lot of great advice in there. I can now see where I have gone wrong, LOL...!

    And to be honest - the description of me, potentially, as a "crank" is probably fair enough. Just a bit too keen. And I have the wrong expectations, I guess. And, I do quite like trains now and then. Anyway. If it turns out that there was any merit in any of my observations, then no doubt someone will get in touch with me to let me know.

    Well, that's it for me.

    But finally, I just wanted to say that I think that your idea, to create a "public issue tracker" is a great idea...! And I hope that your idea gathers some support, in time, and that your idea is acted upon.

    See you around, G. ;-)
     
  7. danjoda755

    danjoda755 Member

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    I'm going to disagree on this one. Only the "start" button enables pause mode. You've no doubt noticed that even entering map mode does not pause the action. I'm wondering if your goal is to run another "window" simultaneously? I'd hazard a guess the PS 4 requires most of it's RAM to run TSW, in fact, I blame the many previous CE-34878 crashes on memory overflow. Many PS 4 titles seem to crash after installation, then settle down as patches are downloaded. Classic example was "Deus Ex", drove me nuts when I first installed it. Console and software updates finally settled it down. TSW 2020 now crashes infrequently, but FAR better than before.
    Anyway, I'd propose sticking to the start button for pause, PS button like pulling a hard direct brake on icy rails (saying good bye to my butt, lollll).
     
  8. synthetic.angel

    synthetic.angel Well-Known Member

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    I am not sure what you mean by the "start" button, on PS4, unless you mean the PS button. Anyway, it is apparently of little consequence that the PS button hasn't been assigned, as we can now see. It's probably something that I find surprising, but very few others are bothered about, and that's fair enough.

    New players will have to learn to use the "Options" button on the DualShock to pause the game, and then they can press the PS Button safely if they want to make a cup of tea or look at something else on their PS4, etc., mid-simulation. If a new player spends, say, nearly two hours on "To The Beach", and then just before the end presses the PS Button to take a phone call, and then finds that they have to re-do the scenario again because of a derailment at Minehead, then that will teach them for not having the foresight that the game has not implemented the PS Button, as would be normally expected. And that's fair enough, I suppose. It's all part of the learning/discovery and problem solving player experience aspect of the game which players are expected to endure...sorry... I meant "enjoy".

    Re CE-34878 errors - which, as I understand it, is a general PS4 system message to say that the application has crashed (for any reason)... well....my knowledge of PS4 is believed to be extremely limited, but my guess would be that if a player gets the CE-34878 error message frequently (every five minutes), in every game, then there is genuinely something physically wrong with their PS4, which would be extremely rare. If a player gets the CE-34878 message during a specific game that has a very large amount of things happening (some of the scenes in Fallout 4?), then it might be a crash due to memory-handling at a large scale at that moment, and if a switch-off-switch-on to clear the cache thingy-a-majig doesn't help, then maybe the developer didn't quite get that bit of the game right.

    But....

    ...if you get a CE-34878 message when really nothing very much is happening, and.... always at the same point in a game, and.... quite a lot of people get it..., say...., when you click on a very unusual dialog box with some strange text in it, say...., for example...., on the "Minehead Shunter Part 2" scenario when you try to take over the Class 09, and..... you haven't completed the (unknowable) scenario's scripted pre-requisites for that action to happen..., and.... you get a crash with a CE-34878 message...., then my guess would that this is absolutely nothing to do with memory overflow. (Sorry about that, I like long sentences). Very specific memory addressing, at the machine level, maybe, but it's not about volume.

    My guess is that, in that sort of situation, it would probably be something that could be fixed in about five minutes with a minor change to the scenario's script. Pure guess though. Anyway - it can sometimes be hard to make a decision to commit as much as five minutes of a programmer's time to fix a bug in a game, especially if, formally, that bug is not recognised as a "known known". If it's just an "unknown known" or a "known unknown", why would you bother looking into it?
     
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