Some how DTG with 15 years or so in the train sim market and now the game Train sim world after 7 years of development still does not have a fully functional steam locomotive simulation. SimRail steam loco was just released with the full version of the game. Its got every thing you want in steam sim and operates as one expects. Its even has a fireman you can communicate with. You can even fire the loco if you want. It has fuel it has water. Its traction behaves as one expects. Its consumes steam as one expects. It even has some extra touches like water sloshing out of the tender if you stop to fast. Its safety valve does not constantly go off because you can control the amount of steam generated and the Ai has a decent idea at how to fire it. How is that SimRail could get it so right on the fist try and DTG could not even get their simulation working after 3 paid dlc, and in the end just gave up. SimRail now joins Derail Valley as the best steam simulators out the there. We got Century of Steam coming some time in the next few years. There is a market out there for authentic steam engine simulation how has DTG dropped the ball so badly. When they had a 7 year lead on the current generation of Train Sims. Why does DTG continue to do the less then the bare minimum.
Because just by looking at the state of TSW and the patches that bring instead of remove bugs, SimRail is out of EarlyAccess. They thoroughly develop each function until it works and seem to have a well structured project management. It also looks as if they're playing the game themselves, not like DTG acting surprised when getting obvious bugs reported that you encounter one minute into the game (real bugs not glitches or feature requests). TSW is never out of EA. If something works, chances are good it won't after the next patch. Probably DTG are spending too much money on PR and too little on developers, with mostly spare time 3rd party devs. Remarkable temper for a guy with roots in Switzerland. But without getting sarcastic - both sims just have different target audiences. A global train sim in the scale of TSC is just not possible anymore - it's alive because the community can create everything themselves, having the same toolset and skills as the devs from the start. DTG even supported them by releasing small asset packs in the early days getting route building started. UKBuildings pack, MPClutter, etc. Probably the spirit of retired Paul Jackson. Almost all freeware routes have DTG DLC dependencies, so it was Win-Win for both company and community. The finest freeware routes are seeing the light of day just now, after many years of work. Hungarian devs managed to create locos and DMUs in TSC where you can freely walk inside using Shift WASD by clever Lua scripting, with way more functionality than most TSW locos. TSW Editor is difficult, many gave up or are stuck at track laying forever, and it just arrived way too late to make a change now, which might have been a conscious decision, we'll never know.
SimRail's EA exit wasnt exactly great. Hardly any communication from the devs not just post release but in general. MP is currently a mess with a meh timetable to be improved soon (I hope). Hopefully we wont have to wait for Lodz. SP scenarios are small in number, bugged or without AI. Proper manuals or guidance setting a train up arent a guaranteed. Gonna have to wait for some community members to compile the timetables again. Even then, the AI dispatcher is still pretty dumb. No passengers walking in front of trains but there is an abundance of cars thinking they are in trackmania. Kinda accurate for Polish driving to be fair. Some of the scenery makes Rivet look like master artists. The fact it took like 7 months to fix the pendo brakes, is just a cherry on the top. I would also expect the expert sim which only has electric trains to have neutral zones integrated. So far, I pretty much appreciate the in train announcements, as the Tunel Kraków section is pretty boring with the nearly constant 110 speed limit. As much as I like the game, if dtg does bare mininum, they are doing minimum + taking forever to release it.
SimRail was in EA and you paid for it once and it got updated for more then a year. its the companies first product. DTG 15 years development experience. TSW been out for 7 years with what 50dlc and 4 paid updates. Still no functional steam. Spirt of steam was released for TSW2 and got one update. That was a good 40 bucks I spent on SOS then the 30 bucks TSW2 for it to be abandoned 2 months later.
You can run steam trains in single player in SimRail. They are ever expanding the single player experience Multiplayer is one aspect of SimRail. Playing multiplayer in SimRail is not that different then single player in TSW. other then its a little more dynamic. You can chat to other people and can have a real person dispatching.
Well we can go enjoy steam on Simrail now so maybe dtg can bury it for good. Should make the steam content free though at least
SimRail is impressive in many ways. The multiplayer is brilliant - to summarise it for people who haven't seen or tried it, the AI drives the services and controls the signals unless a player steps in to do it instead. You can use the text or voice chat to talk to other people or even the AI in some circumstances, to the point where everything is quite seamless. Other than the timetable itself needing a bit more work, SimRail's multiplayer is what Train Sim World's timetable mode should have been. The graphics are also a bit weird in SimRail. The lighting is undoubtedly better than TSW, but like TSW the lack of antialiasing options means that the game doesn't look smooth at all. Many smaller scale developers are seemingly allergic to adding SSAA or MSAA to games, which hugely improve how the game looks. Train Simulator allows for multiple levels of FXAA and SSAA to be combined, giving it among the smoothest image quality of any PC game I have. The controls in SimRail are also a bit funky for someone who has only played TS and TSW, but you can remap the controls. The largest issue is the lack of an editor (deja vu). They've promised one and I do believe it will come out, but it is absolutely crucial that there are no restrictions based on the sale of third party content for SimRail. If they follow DTG in restricting third parties, it's over and TS will once again have no prospective replacement.
DTG rushes everything out the door. Like their business depends on it (maybe it does). The answer to all these multi page long threads is the same: dev time. If it takes more than a few months to make it you aren’t getting it from DTG. Honestly I’d rather they just spend time fixing the stuff we already have than pumping out more and more broken things but 4 years playing this game I know that’s not likely.
Most modern games use differed rendering. Which allows for more dynamic lights but the down side is yo cant use MSAA. which is why MSAA has disappeared from a lot of modern game options. It would seem The TAA used in Sim rail is very gentle and does not remove much aliasing or leave lots of shimmering and pixel crawl. I guess they are trying it avoid the down sides to TAA like ghosting or excessive blurring. You can force SSAA via your gpu drivers or set the in game resolution higher then your monitors resolution via DSR or VSR. TSW has TAA, but its uses Unreal engine defaults which suck you can improve them a lot with engine.ini settings.
SimRail coming out of early access has not been without growing pains, if some of the posts on the Steam forum and their own board are anything to go by. That said, I had a quick go on the new Krakow to Tunel section last night in SP and I quite liked the route extension. More curves, more hills rather than the generally flat nature of the existing route. Biggest bugbear for me is they have created this massive route, the Eastern European equivalent of SoCal in Run 8, plus some delightful trains to run on it - but you still can’t save a run in single player, or access the full timetable as you can in multiplayer. Unlike Zusi 3 where you can jump forward to the station where you left off, can’t do that in SimRail either. The one thing I will give SimRail is, while performance is occasionally a bit juddery, particularly around the big cities including Krakow, it does not affect the lovely traction sounds. Probably because, unlike TSW the audio isn’t tied to the physics in Simugraph which I’m beginning to suspect is the cause of the dreadful sound squelching we are getting currently in TSW. I like the 87 on the new WCMLoS route but it has become unbearable to drive with the sound distortion. In contrast, driving the EP07 and EN57 in SimRail yesterday evening was just a marvellous aural experience. As regards the steam in SimRail, not tried it yet. Maybe later on today. Have seen reports elsewhere that the sounds of the loco could be better, but again probably no worse than steam locos in TSW where above 40 MPH it just collapses into a wall of white sound. Again, no doubt a result of tying sound to complex physics cycles.
A thing that also comes to my mind is for all the talk about how "Simrail's ignoring the single player items!" I feel like a lot of the work that's been done here would be relatively easy to adapt into a single player mode when the time comes. They already the AI and a timetable worked out for the multiplayer side of things. I imagine it wouldn't be a whole ton of work to make a single player "timetable" type mode based around it.
The other plus about SimRail, is that it does seem relatively easy for them to extend on to the existing route mileage without the trauma that DTG seem to attach to doing a similar exercise in TSW. I dare say I will be adding the new Lodz route once it becomes available. Would be nice to see them get a diesel loco in there at some point too, along with some of those grim looking battleship grey double deck coaches used on local and suburban runs!
I’ve no interest in SimRail to be honest. Tried the beta, didn’t like it, and less than zero interest in multiplayer. Visually it’s not a patch on TSW5 and IMHO there is genuinely nothing wrong with TSW that a bit of robustness and consistency wouldn’t sort out (which likely comes down to time). The bare bones of the game is the best train simulator out there now by some margin. It has moved on immeasurably since even the TSW2 days, to deny that isn’t being realistic. Yours, One of TSW’s harshest (at times) critics. ps Like it or not, steam clearly didn’t sell well enough to justify the investment in developing it further. People often defend TSW’s problems by saying it’s a niche market and therefore development time and finance for higher quality isn’t feasible. I’ve never for one second agreed with that, but if TSW’s segment of the market is supposedly niche, then what the heck is SimRail? There is no way of knowing if a market exists for authentic steam…wait and see if SimRail release any more of it before making that judgment. pps There’s absolutely nothing to stop a third party (perhaps one of the TSC stalwarts) coming in and producing highly detailed steam for TSW. They haven’t done so, which again has to make you wonder exactly what market is available.
Very simple they take 8/6 months to bring an update.... I believe for a few months nobody plays the game and when a update goes live a lot of play again for a few weeks. So not a very good commercial production and people get bored.
Maybe leave other games for the steam content then. DTG have clearly said on multiple occasions it’s not a big seller. If the majority of the player base don’t want steam content than its not profitable.
Its more both sides... Amount of work...from reference and production and the amount of players that have interest in this type of trains.
I'll take a look at simrail when it comes with a full single player experience. I am not interested in multiplayer. It will be interesting to see how steam does. Personally I feel that DTG have been partially responsible for steam not being apparently worthwhile on TSW. It seems popular on TSC and potentially could look and feel lot more immersive on TSW if working properly. Whilst simrail looks okay it doesn't look as good as TSW or even that much better than TSC especially with the latters enhancement. Also from my point of view I would want to see some UK content which doesn't look that likely.
---》 !!!THIS!!! 《--- If DTG would put more effort in a solid structure, working persistent features and more bugfixes, TSW could really be THE best trainsim. Basicly tsw now, but without annoyance
This is the thing with steam, TSC does have a decent third party steam market. There are devs that do focus solely on steam. VictoryWorks has even said on the forums that he does well enough from his content to be able to keep a roof over his head. Spirit of Steam & Peak Forest are more of a case that poor quality products don’t sell well, rather than steam doesn’t sell well. Matt even said around the time Spirit of Steam released that it was TSW’s highest selling route, but that definitely was off the hype of steam traction coming to the sim and not the end quality of the route. The lack of physics improvements between SoS to PF didn’t help the latter’s sales at all. It’s a shame because PF is actually a really nice, scenic route overall, despite the odd start/end points. Third parties could develop steam for TSW but why would they want to when the core foundations for such content is in such a messy state? It’s really up to DTG to fix those core physics, give those third parties a good reason why they should move on from TSC and start making TSW content. VictoryWorks was in the early stages of actually making a steam era route & LBSCR Terrier to go with it but scrapped it when DTG came out saying no further development of steam was happening for the foreseeable future. It’s truly a shame things went the way they did with steam. If not for JT making BR content, TSW would be rather dire in content variety right now. Hopefully something changes in the future and steam makes a return, best to keep expectations low in the meantime though!
In the end it's a decision that's the result of weighing Pros vs Cons by DTG. Can't force BMW to make trucks or Mercedes to make motorcycles.
Honestly, TSC is an Eldorado for US enthusiasts covering so many different eras starting at Promontory Summit 1869 for starters. The amount of content available would take at least a decade to do in TSW with the currently active number of TSW developers. TSW is mainly focused on their biggest markets, which is UK and Germany/Austria. You get 40-page threads on Fife Circle even before release, and MBTA maybe 5 pages and forgotten. Most, not all, of the US content in TSC was done by 3rd parties, developers since MSTS days. Stuff like the BigBoy was even redone two times until perfect. Firstly, IHH made it, then DTG updated it (terribly, you had to patch the files to get smoke emitters working and it operated as simple as a one handle EMU ) and finally Mighty Master Smokebox made it a real simulation of that iconic loco.
If you don't develop steam and freight locos and routes on a consistent basis, you cannot call yourself a true train simulator. TSW has become simply a commuter rail simulator for DTG and 3rd parties ( with the notable exception of JT.). The latest reveal is another example, however well- constructed it may be. Reusing the same tired old traction just emphasizes the monotony.
However, Simrail's US freight offering is being headed by Searchlight Simulations, so its quality would be way higher that most releases currently seen on either TSW or TSC, which may swade users in that direction who are fed up by HIS's recycled content and overuse on DTM on TSC, and DTG's mostly abandonment of it on TSW. Its also set in Minnesota, a location not really featured in most other sims I can think of. Though the scenic factor of the CPKC River Sub is unknown to me, so those wanting a iconic sight probably wont get it.
You just gotta combine everything, TSC, Run8 and SimRail for a complete experience. Each one has something the others don't.
And its been 2 years since they started work on it. By the time they release it Simrail will be a dead product. Also it was supposed to be Canadian Pacific but they may have had licensing issues due to Canadian Pacific doesn't exist anymore since they started develpment and now it is CPKC. So any licensing may have gone out the window.
