PC The Future Of Train Sim World

Hello everyone, this is my first thread on the forum and I would like to express my thoughts on the community's recent concerns about the future of TSW. First of all, I apologise if my english is poor; I am from Spain and english is not my strong suit.The concern is evident, especially for players like me who have invested a lot of money in the game and are afraid that Dovetail will make a new TSW in which the content is not transferred to Unreal Engine 5. Most likely, if they do transfer content, it will be the most popular routes and those with the most detail. I wish they could transfer all the content, but financially it would be unfeasible due to the time it would take. I don't like the idea of a so-called ‘reset’ at all, and neither do other people. With Unreal Engine 5, we would gain things like longer routes and better physics, and hopefully they could implement ray tracing and FSR/DLSS.

The two most likely scenarios would be these: a reset from scratch or the migration of some routes.

My proposals for route migration would be these and improvements to them:

-WCML South: London-Milton Keynes (I would extend it to Birmingham)
-Dresden-Leipzig
-Cologne-Aachen
-London Victoria-Brighton
-Southeastern High Speed (it sounds unrealistic, but it would be great to have the entire route that the company operates in real life)
-Frankfurt S-Bahn
-WCML Over Shap
-Frankfurt-Fulda (underground sections of the S-Bahn in Frankfurt and Offenbach)
-Riviera Line
-Hauptstrecke Rhein-Ruhr (to Düsseldorf in the south and to Dortmund in the east)
-London Overground Goblin Line
-LIRR (It also sounds unlikely, but the whole network would be incredible)
-Midland Main Line (Southbound to St.Pancras)
-Kassel-Wurzburg (Northbound to Hannover)
-Cajon Pass
-Sand Patch Grade
-Great Western Express (Extend it to Bristol-Oxford)

These are my suggestions. Hopefully, a miracle will happen and we will have a new TSW with Unreal Engine 5 where all the content is transferred, or at least half of it. I don't want to sound negative, but Dovetail has been squeezing every last penny out of us with unfinished routes and trains. Let's not forget that even though TSW is the company's most popular product, it's still a niche simulator. Dovetail isn't interested in, nor should it be interested in, clinging to a strategy of monetisation at all costs because, no matter how big fans we are of the game, people get fed up and stop buying new DLC. They could follow the strategy of SCS Software with Euro Truck 2, where they have a fairly large base of loyal players and it's a very popular game, much more popular than TSW and TSC combined. If Dovetail wants to take its future TSW games to the next level, it must look after the loyal community it has built up over time and stop seeing us as walking credit cards. TSW6 is unplayable, with many performance issues, and a game that is sold annually for around €40-50 it is becoming less and less worthwhile. It is better to lose money now by taking care of, updating, and maintaining the game than to go bankrupt in the future because your player base has left the game due to how unplayable it is and the problems it has, solely because of your policy of squeezing our money out of us at any cost. It seems that Dovetail wants to go down this path with no future. TSW is not EA FC, it is not Call of Duty, we are not so foolish as to buy the same product in worse condition. We are few in comparison to Euro Truck 2, Cities: Skylines 1, or popular triple-A games. Dovetail must take care of its product and its community. We are the ones who give the game a future. Who else is going to buy incomplete routes and packs at such high prices?

Well, that's my opinion and my suggestions. I'm no expert in video game development, let alone Unreal Engine 5. I would be thrilled to see a new TSW with this engine and for them to get the most out of it. Knowing the long history of games with poor performance on this graphics engine, I believe Metro Rivals will shape the future of Dovetail Games and TSW.

 

The future of train simulation will happen as soon as DTG wakes up.
I don't know if they still want to wait 5 or 10 years before moving to UE 5 (which was released in early 2022, although it has since undergone numerous updates).
It's a bit like the BR 420 affair, which became a "Waiting for Godot"-style story.

 

tl:dr most of the OP but, 1. Don’t we already have a similar thread(s) discussing this and 2. Those very same threads have already speculated where DTG might take TSW in light of their UE5 experiment with Metro Rivals.

Ultimately if a UE5 TSW or whatever the new game is called comes about, by no means certain existing TSW content could be ported over. If it is feasible then I suspect DTG already have a fairly good idea of the routes they want to bring across and it might not necessarily be anyone’s first choice. For starters, recent releases to the latest standards (ha!) are more likely to easily transfer across than the more ancient content.

 

This is the thing I think; that UE5 is still being actively developed. My guess would be that DTG's experience with even small point updates to UE4 causing huge hassles (and remember that their own UE4 is also very heavily customized), means that they'd rather hold off until UE5 development has at least slowed down if not stopped.

 

I wouldn't pin my hopes on a Unreal Engine 5 miracle.

 

Personally, I respect anyone who can speak and write in a second language as well as that and they make a lot of sensible points.

My efforts to write that in Spanish would be abysmal.

 

I was talking about the paragraphs themselves, they're too long. Whether he was talking in Spanish or not, it's still hard to read.

 

Fair enough.

I just think that when someone is making their first post on a new forum in their second language, maybe cut them some slack?

Lord knows we could do with growing this community a bit from the same twenty people that post every day.

Each to their own though.

 

I don't usually read unnecessarily long posts, but I did read yours. Lack of paragraphs aside, the English is surprisingly good. Did you use some " help " by any chance. Hard to tell these days.

Anyway, you make some good points. What I would say is what I've said elsewhere: Is there any reason to think that DTG will make a better job in UE5 than they're currently making in UE4 with all the core issues we're dealing with? I can at least play the game right now, warts and all.

As someone said, UE5 will not miraculously solve the problems we have now. Best deal with those core issues first before moving the entire game and its bugs to another engine.

 

First of all, I don't understand why people are worrying about the future of TSW. There is nothing you can do about it, whatever DTG decides to do. You will still be able to play all the content you paid for, so nothing will be lost. Porting over DLC, when this is even possible, will costs a lot of time and effort to do, maybe a remake of routes is even faster. This can even mean they will ask money for the same routes, but why would someone want that?

You also don't want to port the s hit from one game over to another. If we get a new game in the future, I hope they will bring new content instead of the same routes again.

We can talk a lot about this, I don't think it will change anything, the only thing we can do is wait and see.

 

I have it on good authority the flagship UK route for TSUE5W will be Cardiff City Network, but in order to run properly, regrettably the Coryton and Penarth branches will be removed and the City Line will be cut out.

 

Good one OldVern!
I cannot see the value of porting existing DLC to a UE5 version of TSW. A huge effort by DTG using resources for which there is little or no revenue. I am one of many who switch between TSC and TSW depending on the route/rolling stock I wish to use. If route hopping was a major issue maybe, but timetable issues concerning stock/eras limit that. I would be happy with a new UE5 version limited to new DLC (not ported versions of existing DLC), without the current core bugs and especially if it included fully functional steam physics - and such things as fencing on US diesels ... and of course for OldVern multiple Save Game slots.

 

Fair.

Why do we think the current DTG crew would be any more likely to make a bug free game on a new engine though?

A lot of the bugs are nothing to do with programming ability or what the engine allows and everything to do with rushing and carelessness and I don't see why that would magically change.

 

Just to add to my previous post - the one big drawback to a new version on UE5 without backward compatibility is the loss of layers and the effect on timetables - we would need a massive pool of common rolling stock (one for each global region/era). What a wonderful marketing ploy, why did no-one think of it before?

 

Yes, it's 500 or so quid for a lot if people and for some much, much more!!

Plus the inevitable price increase.

Would be a great chance for them to totally spilt locos from routes though and have them as entirely separate entities and purchases, which would work much better for me.

 

They will release so much dlc that eventually they will vanish up their own exhaust pipe.

 

Careful Vern, you've been around here long enough to know that leaks of that magnitude are liable to get you banned!

 

I don’t think there are actually any DTG personnel on the forums any more to influence bringing down a ban hammer!

 

Tsw has born in UE4 and should end on it

 

Voilà.

 

At least if TSW does die I won't have to keep explaining myself every time I say something on this damn forum because I guess I can't formulate sentences anyone other than myself can actually understand.
Literacy was always my worst subject...

 

right now DTG see no unreal engine change for the foreseeable future for tsw i heard on October roadmap video. which is fine. unreal 6 is in the works and preview release is in 2 to 3 years from news article. there something about unreal 6 using multithreading usage or something were as unreal 5 is single threading usage. we shell see what happens down the road.

 

Given that DTG in 2018-22 had to seriously adapt the UE4 engine to make it more or less suitable for TSW 1 and 2, I reason a change to a higher, even more complicated version, will not be made without a very valid reason.

More eyecandy while the 'programming teams' already have enough problems making UE4 work with all the scripted features added to the core over the iterations of TSW 202x?

The crux of any serious simulation game isn't in the modeling or texturing, it is in the scripting to bring those objects to life.

 

I don't think moving to UE5 will solve TSW's current problems. If DTG go into it with the same attitude, then the problems will most likely be largely the same as the current UE4 version.

I can easily see a situation where route lengths are even shorter in a potential UE5 version, and Cardiff was bad enough.

 

However, there are fewer and fewer answers to the problems.

 

The yellow card is better than the red card (sin bin)!

 

Hi, in my case it's not just about existing bugs and whether those are going to be fixed, it's about getting some clarification to recent patch notes.

In the October 28 patch notes it listed multiple audio fixes for the class 170 and seeing as that patch also had a new timetable and in board announcements added for fife, I'd assumed the audio fixes were the long awaited ones for Fife circle.

That doesn't seem to be the case though as there hasn't been any changes at all and yet even asking for some clarification on those patch notes is met repeatedly with complete silence or one of the community team just moves the thread to the troubleshooting forum where it also gets ignored.

I'd have hoped that even a simple answer, even if it was something along the lines of "yeah, it's still broken but might be in the next patch" or " no, you Muppet it was for a different 170, not the Fife one " (or a worse name, I can take it!) could have been given, rather than being completely ignored.

 

I think we are all well within our rights to be very sceptical that having a couple of extra 'staff members' on the forum who purport to be feeding back to the rest of the team is going to make the slightest bit of difference.

There is literally a dedicated bug reports feature that allows us to go into as much detail as we want with screens and vids if desired and yet next to nothing that gets flagged ever gets fixed, so why would this be any different?

Sure, if in a couple of months we all suddenly realise that things have changed for the better, then great and I will certainly give credit where it is due and be very happy to admit that my lack of confidence that anything will improve was unfounded.

But for now, I think everyone who has a bit of experience with the game, is just assuming this is nothing more than a PR exercise.

The proof will be in the pudding at the end of the day.

 

No worries, thanks for the reply and apologies to yourself or anyone in the community team who might be getting fed up with my posts about it (I deleted my post above from yesterday as it was a bit snarky and frustration getting the better of me)

Well, the best way to describe the sound of the Fife 170 is "like driving a maglev" there are some very faint running sounds when you have the engine on full power, apart from that - silence!

Ps, if you have the mod powers feel free to change my username to Muppet!

 

October and November are rather unusual months for holidays.
And soon the Christmas holidays will begin.
Hmm...

 

At the end of September, TSW6 was released, once again promising new features.

However, these features have not been functioning properly since the beginning, like so many other features that came with other TSW versions.

Since then, we have received new DLCs, some of which should not have been released at all because they are still full of bugs. Next week, the next DLC will be released, presumably without quality control again.

But the DTG team is just taking a two-month holiday?

They should get their act together and fix all the bugs in TSW6 instead of going on holiday.

Above all, what employer gives you two months' paid holiday a year?

 

DTG has done this before with TSC (and TSW) - It changed nothing & eventually the community team was again whittled down before old names left & new ones came in with that energy that barely lasts 3 months.

The comms are still terrible, we’re just getting the illusion of them being better. I don’t see how having another handful of people saying “I’ve fed this back” is going to change anything when the issue is within the development of the game itself.

The idea of developer communication is that we as a community have tangible conversations with people who have answers. Having people just telling us “no news on that” & “I haven’t heard anything back” is just pointless.

In the cold light of day all I’m seeing is more content being pushed out while the devs & publisher are just seemingly ignoring all the big issues - let alone being able to actually deliver what they say they will in terms of updates.

 

Just going to pick up on this because it’s particularly laughable.

You can’t claim a communication win over other game devs because you’re sharing articles weekly, the majority of articles you release (if not all) are purely advertising even more content to sell us.

I don’t think anyone will dispute that in terms of letting us know what you’re going to try & sell us in the next month, your communication is top notch.

 

Please don't exaggerate, Jan.

Do you really think DTG is the best developer out there?
And do you listen to yourself when you write?

What you announce every week are either YouTube streams or new DLC announcements.
To me, that's not developer communication, it's just another way to get money out of people's pockets.

But in some feedback threads on the core routes of TSW6, you haven't even written anything to say that you're looking into it.

Other developers sometimes post every week about what they're working on and even show pictures.
And these developers communicate properly with their community, not just because they want to sell something again.

 

I took "team" as referring to the people running the project, rather than the PR side of things.

In fact my inner cynic begins to wonder if much of "Dovetail Games" is even full time and that includes the TSW project management and development side of things. Or has it now become a part time job alongside doing something else as full time?

 

I more than anyone understand the frustration with some of the things going on in TSW recently, and understand as a player some of the annoyances.

But, being the devils advocate I could see why DTG forum staff wouldn't want to interact to much on the forum if they are met with hostile and non constructive comments. The members of staff who replied to this thread could of not replied at all, and when they do all they get is frosty and hostile reception.

I'm not disagreeing that there are some issues that need addressing in the game, but I don't think the way in which some forum members are addressing staff members who are engaging in this thread in such a hostile way is particularly helpful, or polite for that matter.

My own rule is, I wouldn't say anything to forum staff, that I wouldn't be willing to say to any face to face customer facing retail workers. You don't have to agree, and you are all free to air your grievances (I do at the best of times), but just be polite when you do so, there are better ways to conduct conversations or airing frustrations to staff then just biting their heads odd and being hostile.

 

When even OldVvern starts getting snarky, we really are going down the tubes....this kind of exchange rarely ends well

 

Not snarky, just posing the question? What do all those staff do all day sat around in the expensive office block at Chatham but we still end up with botched DLC and no meaningful core fixes? The impression I got when the EP responded to the save game slot issue around the time of TSW6 was they have very limited developer/coder capacity so wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is being outsourced or bought in on a very tight budget. I’ve postulated that before and no one from DTG has been eager to come on and refute the claim.

And the very same people are more than eager to pop up on streams trying to sell us more product, while strangely silent when justified and mostly constructive criticism is posted on this forum. Not for one minute saying Matt should be jumping in every thread or getting embroiled in a back and forth. But surely to god they can read the room and see the general state of discontent around the game at present.

 

I think they're aware of the state of their DLC. But they're burying their heads in the sand.
We need to wake them up with our wallets. What a shame.

 

Modeling, texturing, creating can be outsourced/delegated/brought in (bought) from 3rd party developers, graphic artists.

Programming, that is scripting to bring the locomotive/train/asset/route/scenario to life is a whole different matter.
Here, far more experience with the particular game engine and knowledge of railway practice is needed to realistically break down/simplify and adapt a prototype feature to the game. Simugraph has already shown its limitations, i.e. not being able to simulate steam locomotive operation.

Programmers, coders, scripters are I think also more 'mobile' when it comes to taking or leaving projects, parttime or even full time jobs, and rent out their skills to the highest bidder?

 

I certainly think at some point the skill set which was bringing us the great BR Blue Classic stuff was either let go or walked away. Otherwise I’m sure by now we would have seen the oft requested Class 50, 55, 56 or even Sulzer Type 2.

 

Atleast there could be a "known bug list" and a roadmap for fixing this stuff. This roadmap could be something like the new stuff roadmap. The known bug list can also prevent a lot of double bug reports and forum posts for the same bugs. This can DTG save some time and it will also give us players some insights on what DTG is working.

In the end, it's not going well right now, to many bugs, it takes to long before bugs are solved and people are becoming frustrated.

 

the future of TSW is obvious: routes getting shorter and shorter and patches breaking things that were working before (cough cough, station announcements on ALP-45DP)