Dtg Needs To Stop Selling Tsw On Consoles (from A Console User)

The thread yesterday about Series S got me thinking. I know the Series S is effectively a toaster, but it seems not just be a Series S issue, but PS5 and Series X users report the issue too. The game, in it's current form simply doesn't work properly, either because it's too big and demanding for consoles, or because DTG can't be arsed to optimise it properly. Or both.

Quite frankly is it really fair, (or even ethical), to continue selling a product knowing full well it won't work properly? What about new players buying the product unknowing of all the issues?

 

I have an Xbox Series S and can totally understand what you mean, it's very frustrating, when I'm able to I am looking at upgrading to a PC. DTG really should getter better at optimisation.

 

I may have my doubts and disagreements with DTG, but no.


cutting console off completely would be economic suicide for DTG and is totally out of the question, there is a large majority of console users on TSW. cutting these platforms off would be shooting this game in the foot, and pouring salt into the wound.

A better option is actually optimising consoles better, and not just entirely abandoning it.

 

The problem isn't DTG alone, much fall back on the console users themselves.
Having every single route installed and no "knowhow to maintain the console" regarding powercycling is very common, and then to blame DTG for it, is not the right way to go.

Reduce your routes installed (preferred maximum 5-6 routes at the same time), and learn to powercycle your console is a great way to reduce problems.

So no, DTG shouldn't stop the selling on consoles, the users must be more aware of the limnitations on XBox series S...

 

They've already proven they can't do that

 

I think people have to realise not all consoles have the same issues. i’ve had little to no issues on my PS5, none of them game breaking. It’s not fair to lable all consoles as ‘unoptimisable’ in the same way it’s not fair to say that one console working means all should work. Don’t cut off customers from a game that works perfect for them.

 

I agree, my playstation was crashing and failing tons before i went and got it fixed. (i believe the issue was that worldwide issues there was with something), i’m not really that much of a tech person so i’m not sure. My PS5 works perfect now and the game worked 99% of the time. Except for the once in a blue moon crash when approaching Euston

 

Seems people don't agree, which is fine, I personally don't think it's fair to sell stuff that doesn't work...

 

alternatively, dtg could fix the game. microsoft flight simulator and GTA 5 both perform much better that tsw on my xbox which shouldn’t be happening when you consider the amount of storage they take up compared to a tsw route.

 

The game works perfectly fine for me on a normal PS5. I never experience blurry textures and the game only crashed once for me. Sometimes the fps drops to 20-30 when I’m approaching big stations like Euston and Birmingham and sometimes the game stutters but that doesn’t make the game unplayable. It seems like there are a lot more issues on Xbox compared to PS though.

 

I agree, pc gamers are sadly being held back by console capable releases, the routes could be so much more detailed and with far more traffic if they were just being built for pc. I have nothing against consoles just stating fact.
if DTG ever do build a new train sim on UE5 please don’t try and squeeze consoles in to increase income because it won’t work and graphics and content will suffer.

 

I like to dump on consoles and how many issues holding back TSW are because of them however DTG can't stop churning out TSW for console as consoles have the bigger market in terms of casual gamer. It is a massive revenue stream for them.

One thing to bear in mind is that a lot of the console issues are because "there are too many routes/dlc installed" and the majority of casual gamers off the street probably only have the base routes or one DLC they liked so bought and thus don't experience the issues.

Consoles are holding TSW back however I think the biggest drawback is 3rd party licensing, makes it very hard for anyone to get interested in making stuff for it and that is what is holding it back. Do you think TSC is doing as well as it is because it looks good? No, it's because it has a great & vast library of routes and rolling stock.

 

My PS5 works fine with everything installed.
Time to chill folks!
Way too many negative people on this forum.

 

You mean people who have alternate views to you?

 

Console development has certainly hindered the PC side of things even though DTG will say otherwise….”we build for a high spec PC and downscale for console blah blah” but unfortunately the serious money is selling on console nowadays - there’s just no getting away from that!

 

Don't disagree that console is good for money, but that didn't seem to be an issue in the tsc days

 

Without any context ie exactly how much dlc is installed etc this post is pointless. What does ‘everything installed’ mean? “Everything” could just be one dlc for you!

 

MSFS is not without its issues on PC either.

 

The arrival of 10th gen consoles can’t arrive soon enough. When they do, they will level the playing field between consoles and PC.

 

This is pretty much what I do. I just keep the routes I play very frequently. If I feel like playing a route I haven’t played in a very long time I’ll just reinstall it until I’m bored of it again. Also by doing this the game loads so much faster than when every single bit of content you have bought is installed at once. Maybe this will be less of an issue when the next consoles come around.

 

They're going to just give up 80% of their customers?

Although to be fair, consoles are probably on their way out if the new PC hybrids hit the market.
Then it'll just be "little PC" vs "big PC" and it won't need to be "optimized" at all as they'll both use PC hardware and software.

 

The game will never reach its full potential as long as they're making console versions, especially when they're still including the lesser consoles as part of that package. Just look at what mod makers have accomplished on PC. If you have a powerful enough rig it's essentially an entirely different game.

It's a shame. And they're essentially stuck with the console millstone around their necks due to the large audience they've built. All the concessions and cutbacks due to console limitations (which now are bleeding into the PC version as well from what I've heard recently), and they don't even have a fully functional and optimized game in the first place. I don't think they have the workforce or funding to do the job properly on both fronts like the big boys do, and the entire game suffers for it. Perhaps if things were different there, it wouldn't even be an issue.

If I had the choice to either play the game on console or not play at all, I'd sooner just not play at all. It's only just barely worth it on PC anyway.

Oh, but here's another new route consisting of a small section of the actual route, in a slightly different location of the UK, US, or Germany so let's all get excited. /s

 

My experience on PS5 is similar. Except for blurs on a few routes: Mildmay and Birmingham-Crewe (which has improved a lot since yesterday).

 

There's perforamance issues on PC too.

 

TSW is just not well optimised to run on anything short of a super dooper PCMR rig. or something with enough RAM to just brute force your way around the memory issues from what i hear. Consoles, PC, we all have issues and getting rid of one or the other isnt the way, neither is splitting the game into two different "editions" i think.

Perhaps the best way forward is to just start from scratch in that new unreal engine and avoid the mistakes that DTG themselves have sad they made in the beggining when they were greener

 

Not everyone can afford PC, this is why this game Is also on console

 

Or heard me out doesn’t test games just doesn’t do enough to fix problems on content

this is just stupid since if you are buying stuff for the game you shouldn’t have to limit the amount of your own downloaded paid content for the game to run well

 

There are way more intense and demanding games that run without issue on console. The issue isn't consoles. It's DTG's incompetence. This game is poorly optimized and DTG's lack of quality control is why this game is plagued with issues. DTG have buried their heads in the sand and have allowed issues to pile up without fixes which has led us to where we are now. That is not the fault of consoles. Why should players who pay full price have to limit what content they can use just so the game can run well?

Without consoles, DTG would lose a ton of money and this game would effectively be dead. This notion that Consoles are holding back PC is absurd

 

Economically that’s never going to happen, I’m a PC player and I strongly believe that consoles (especially the S) is holding the game back but the flip side of the coin is that without the console market there’d likely be no TSW at all. And despite its flaws and our nags about it, do any of really want that?

 

Yes...and no.
I think much of the issue is what is being tracked, including how many features and over what timeframe.
Yes a shooter with cool graphics can be run on a console. However, that doesn't really require much RAM. Just a good graphics card.
Once the buildings are loaded, it's just you running around pew pewing. Those bullets last for a second or two...then disappear.
Not much is tracked long term.
A "fully physicalized" game with every piece tracked over long distances (like TSW) is HEAVILY dependent on a LOT of memory and processing. The game has to know what a dozen trains are doing, plus all hundreds of "pieces" of each train on the map and how hundreds passengers, all the while loading in new textures constantly as you are shooting across the map at sometimes 100mph.

That load is just not happening in most games, no matter how pretty they may look. Consoles at their heart are simplified systems focusing on graphics, not RAM and longer term memory usage so this is the opposite of what kind of game consoles are designed to be used for.
It's honestly a miracle that it runs as well as it does given those limitations.

If TSW were designed like those "other games" it'd be more like ATS where the "world" is composed of pre-built few-piece locos, the AI version were super-simplified (and not playable), with no persistent passengers, no "world map" that tracks each train in detail in real time, and no speeds above about 25 mph.

If you want to test this, compare playing something like Frankfurt (lots of trains, lots of passengers, high speed trains, etc) with something like West Somerset (very slow speed limits, few passengers, few trains, plenty of time for scenery to load in)

Or even play any route once "fast" and once "slow" and you can see the difference.

TSW is a more demanding game that gets MORE demanding the more features and details you add to it with every "improvement."
Thinking that you'll get that much more stuff to run on older and older computers is silly.

 

I live in the vain hope that DTG will realise that "enough is enough" as far as new features are concerned with this current platform. It seems to me that it's already reached "peak feature" and can't really support any more compute-intensive features without breaking/degrading the console experience. I suspect somebody somewhere has decided that new features are a way of justifying a +1 on the version number each year, and all the associated marketing guff that goes with that - the sooner they realise that ALL WE WANT are interesting routes & rolling stock that Just Work, the better! They can still call it TSW 7 or 8 or SE or whatever as far as I'm concerned, just stop shoehorning more broken stuff in that the platform can't handle.

 

soooooo.. just randomly.. there is ETS2 coming to Playstation 5 and now BeamNG is coming to Playstation 5 (im sure also Xbox as well but who cares, i use PS) and while neither of them is out yet the fact that their developers are even trying means it is possible. i assume they also use the same game engine or at least a very similar one. so many other games that sure feel like theyre able to run.

It isnt the consoles hardware, its however Dovetail are porting the content into console format from the PC dev build. somewhere, someone is either LOVE it up due to not nowing how to do it right or by an obtuse process that churns gold into a fine [EDIT - Language]

 

For those who are interested, ETS and ATS use SCS’s in-house Prism3D engine.
BeamNG also uses its own in-house BeamNG engine, a heavily modified and enhanced version of the earlier Torque3D engine.

 

TIL.... thats cool, wikipedia here i come

 

Wouldn't it be better to create separate versions for PCs and home game consoles?

 

Prism3D shouldn't cause any issues on consoles, it's a well-performing engine that doesn't place too many demands on the hardware. With BeamNG, things are a bit different, we'll have to wait and see how well the port turns out.

Each vehicle consists of hundreds of physical nodes.
Every part is calculated in real time.
Collisions are soft-body simulations.
The physics engine performs over 2,000 calculations per frame for each vehicle.

 

... when DTG were smaller and making way more releases.

 

Hell payday 2’s diesel engine had the same problem for consoles they just couldn’t get it to optimise for console and it took 6 months per bit of content

they really need to invest in modifying the engine to be more efficient and optimised for consoles instead of using the default pc version and expecting that to work well

 

Yeah BeanNG is going to be interesting, I've got a very high end gaming rig and all seven fans kick into high gear when that things running. Prism3D on the other hand, well could run ATS/ETS2 on a potato or a close approximation...

The only "feature" I would like to see added is a logbook type of thing, loco number, distance etc... Sadly I doubt that will happen, last year I brought it up on here that we used to be able to see our loco/unit class mileages in older versions of TSW and one of the DTG team told me to submit it as a suggestion on the webform, then one of the devs did respond to say thanks but we aren't going to do that - pretty much can't be bothered reinstating a line of code that they probably deleted in error in the first place.

As for the features already, well guard mode is hit and miss for folks, mostly miss, random faults are frustratingly too common and the temporary speed restrictions are laughable.

They just need to sift through that spaghetti code and start fixing the bugs, that's all we need

 

Nah, twice the maintenance effort - only viable with a decent sized team of in-house devs, which DTG clearly don’t have (if they did, the testing backlog wouldn’t be an issue)

 

Dovetail cant maintain the one version of TSW, having two or three separate versions wouldnt make it any better. even money bet it just gets worse as now instead of them fumbling the one build, theyve got multiple builds to fumble and screw up.

how long did it take to get the SR 158 updates, years, litterally. ATS says there is an MAC update waiting on DTG to release it, Just Trains say there is an update to the class 86 waiting on DTG to release it. who know how many other bugs are fixed in patch that DTG just hasnt decided we are worthy of having yet..

 

The best thing for TSW would be to have DTG removed from it and have someone else take over, c'mon Pullup your the capitalist daddy here, use your big boy money and make fetch happen

 

DTG inexplicably sitting on third party updates that we know exist bothers me so much. Why should we as players be forced to use a perhaps broken or less complete product when the better version is just sat there? Then the third party ends up looking bad when they did nothing wrong...

 

It’s likely that the core has moved on since the patches from ATS and JT were issued to DTG. There’s no point in them testing those because the core is different, so those patches are “stale” and effectively dead. That being the case, JT and ATS (and everyone else) would have to rebuild their patches against the latest version of the core and re-issue… chances are that’s as big an ask of the 3Ps as it is of DTG - bit of a Catch-22 really … the obvious way out is to have an N-month freeze on releasing new content to allow patches to catch up, but that means no revenue for an already struggling company, and there’s doubtless pressure from the owners (Pullup) to keep the cash coming in: no revenue = no bonuses etc

TL;DR - we can probably forget about patches for anything other than the most recent DLCs. Of course, this cannot ever officially be confirmed because the forum would melt down and some bright spark would kick off a class action lawsuit and kill the company for good. Then we all lose.

 

You know what, that is a good idea and there is a real world example of this right now.

Cities Skylines 2, the original was outstanding and set the new standard for city builders, it's sequel was beyond a buggy mess, it had countless features from the original removed, some clearly intended to be put back via paid for DLC but it was clear that the developer had pushed it out far too soon for the sake of the annual accounts - it had killed Sim City, there was no real credible competition but they damn near killed off their franchise. A Several months ago, the developer "Colossal Order" was ousted with "Iceflake Studios" stepping in to take over. They immediately communicated with the players what their intentions were, they were going to fix the game before churning out DLC and you know what, they have! They still have a long way to go but they actually have made the game not just playable but a lot more enjoyable.

Now how one developer got ousted for another is a complicated matter and depends ultimately on who has the IP and how contracts are set up, that said maybe it is time to let someone else come in and look "under the hood" of TSW and see if it can be fixed.

 

Seems like a daft idea to me. Who would stump up the cash to buy out a broken product and spend months without a revenue stream while it’s being fixed? Who would take the job on? The win for the community is open-source, but that relies on a skilled team doing it for essentially nothing. Not going to happen.

 

The Medway valley line is the only route I play on ps5. Its optimized and plays fantastic. I played the southeastern route a few days ago and the stuttering is not nice. Trains stutter as they go by low fps at stations. And this goes for most routes I have. How anyone can be happy with the performance of this game on ps5 is beyond me. Its just not optimized. DTG need to look at medway and learn some lessons on how a route should play and also how it looks.

 

The optimist in me says that DTG will issue stricter performance and implementation guidelines for future route developments, since, as you say, it clearly IS possible to do a good job with the current platform.

 

I have always taken the super cynical view that its just because DTG genuinely just dont think we deserve them.

What legitimate reason is there to hold back updates for sometimes litteral years from players AFTER theyve been promised them or been told explicity that theyre coming.

this is the same group of people who promised the sound set fix for the Class 170, then hid it behind a paid DLC (the WMT/XC 170) then didnt end up releasing the update and hid it behind another paid DLC (ECW Remaster 171/377 pack)... so clearly they have no moral problems with the old bait and swith/deception path..

 

DTG will just expand the game until it runs like rubbish on Gen 10, just like with gen 9.