Is it standard for TSW routes to have completely incorrect PIS boards? I'm used to playing German and U.K. routes and haven't been to real life so I haven't noticed this, but I recently started playing the Morristown Line (which I ride often IRL) and the PIS boards are completely made up. Not only are the screen size, shape and graphics wrong, but they are in places they aren't supposed to be. For example at Hoboken Terminal, the main departure board is blank, with screens placed on poles on each track that aren't there in real life. The real PIS screens are instead paper advertisements in the game. This is the same for all stations on the line. Do they do this for all routes? A little disappointed.
They take a lot of creative liberties with things like that. I regularly ride the Hudson and Harlem lines and, like you, there are several details that I've noticed are wrong/missing. Some things I just ignore because they can be petty and minor, but other more obvious things stick out. DTG's based out of the UK, so they have to rely on research trips, community input, photos, videos, etc., which leads to certain things getting overlooked. For better or worse, this means not every detail is going to be correct. The most important thing you can do as a player from the area is provide feedback and photos like you've done here. Now whether they actually do something is a whole other story... lol Nice photos, btw, it's nice to see another member from the northeast here.
I’ll be straightforward here. The local Beta team members provide DTG all the information needed , feedback and suggestions. It comes down to the amount of dev time required . This was the case with Morristown and at the end the best options were suggested. There are still open tickets for current PIS information boards like in broad street and Hoboken which the font of the letters don’t fit the screens.
Just frustrating because such a oversight would never be allowed to go unfixed on a UK or DE route. The community would rightfully be heard. I guess, for US routes we should just count ourselves lucky that we get PIS at all! /s
For some reason DTG have never implemented combined departure boards-- except, weirdly, in Austria. Even though our trusty modders have done them for all the German Hauptbahnhofen
And I’d assume for dev time, it’s much easier to reuse assets that already exist in game vs. having to create brand new ones for specific stations (which I’d also assume takes up more space/memory on the route as well)?
It's possible that this is mainly a technical choice. I think that such large PIS must be very heavy for a route that already struggles to maintain performance at stations. We hope to see them one day, though.
That makes sense, although I still wish we'd get a little more attention with the U.S. routes - especially now that Brandon is leaving, I'm worried about the future ones. Glad to see another north-easterner too! I've got tons of train & station photos from all over the northeast. I ride the NJ Transit NEC line every week but I haven't picked it up for TSW, I've heard it isn't great. Very excited for the New Haven Line, though. ^ Getting the beautiful flip displays at Secacus in game would've been great, I'm sure they'd be a pain to model and program though. ^ Hoping we gets Comet Vs, IVs and IIs at some point, too.
That may well be the case here. I remember Lukas talking about the reason for not adding era appropriate flip PIS boards on Stuttgart - Heilbronn. They actually commissioned a dev to build them for UE4, but they would've broken the game. Something similar might be the case with adding too many different variants of PIS Boards on one route at the same time. Especially when you think about the other big station a few miles over, New York Penn with its barrage of platforms and tracks. Makes you wonder how they'll handle Grand Central with details like PIS.
Well, that should not be an issue with German Hbf, since the departure boards are essentially just the platform boards stacked together, and the great modder foob has made all of them fully functional. This of course is for modern routes. The old-school mechanical PIS is another matter.
I believe almost all of the MetroNorth trains (and maybe LIRR) use the same PIS board for the small on platform ones. So I’m sure the train info will be a little heavy, but the sizing and format should all be exactly the same outside of Grand Central, which has its own slightly different graphic.
European routes aren’t immune to similar PIS shortcomings. I’ll list a few off the top of my head: Luzern-Sursee having completely inaccurate German PIS all over the route (funnily, I never saw any big complaints about this because everyone knew Rivet would never bother making an accurate PIS from scratch ). Both Niddertalbahn and Mittenwaldbahn only have static classic PIS board assets that don’t display any info. This one hurts the most: Linke Rheinstrecke not having any PIS. They had the model for a classic split-flap PIS already made, but couldn’t get it working in time and instead decided to remove all of the assets from the route before release. This looks incredibly wrong because the posts they were attached to are still there and now look completely out of place. From other routes like Niddertalbahn and Mittenwaldbahn, we know how cool the classic PIS assets look, even if they’re not working. I wish we could get them back one day. Stuttgart-Heilbronn having completely out-of-place modern German PIS screens even though it is set much farther in the past. Someone named a reason the split-flap PIS didn’t make it onto the route, but I’m not buying that. If the flap-changing animation is so resource-intensive, just display the train info statically and maybe play a little sound effect in place of the animation whenever it changes. This is exactly what the running boards onboard the Mittenwaldbahn passenger trains are already doing — they magically change between services, and nobody has ever complained about it.
