What's The Plan, Dtg? (+poll)

Discussion in 'TSW General Discussion' started by Monder, Jun 15, 2020.

?
  1. Currently announded version (release date, price, "preserved collection")

    44 vote(s)
    29.7%
  2. Postponed 6 months, double the price, old content compatibility + fixes

    104 vote(s)
    70.3%
  1. Rudolf

    Rudolf Well-Known Member

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    Thank you for this clarification.

    For TS2020 I think the steam workshop works reasonably well, but there are a number of issues in the user interface and in the communications between TS2020 and steam.

    I really hope DTG comes up with a simple solution. You post gives me the feel you are looking for a perfect solution. I think the risks for copyright infringes are much higher with the livery editor than with the scenario planner. I do not see the need for a livery or scenario to work at all platforms. It would be nice, but probably it is OK if users can say if it is working or not at their platform.

    For me, the issues with using stuff shared by other users are mainly the sometimes tremendous amount of additional DLC you need and the lack of filtering options in steam workshop to find out what you may want to use and what not. I have seen absolutely wonderful scenarios in the workshop, but also large numbers that are not playable without serious modifications, which is not supported by the game at all.

    Maybe it is good to talk to some users on this topic and find out what the real problems are. And I recommend to use the community in a better way than is happening now, but you know that and you did already some good things that make me a bit more hopeful in this respect. There is Dutch proverb saying "Trust comes on foot and goes on horse".
     
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  2. Redbus

    Redbus Well-Known Member

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    Because there is no easy way to share liveries and scenarios on the consoles, why are PC users being penalised? The Steam Workshop works fine for that purpose, look how actively it's been used for TS1! I really don't get why DTG suddenly has it in for PC folks. ☹️ There seems to be no legitimate reason for this attitude.
     
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  3. Monder

    Monder Well-Known Member

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    On one hand, I get where they're coming from with this. If you have a product for one price, it does seem a bit unfair to get more/less based on your platform. On the other hand, every bit of content you can throw in would help, even if only for PC. We will probably be able to share anyway, the liveries and scenarios have to become files, but there could definitely be an easier way to do that. And as I have mentioned before, I think sharing of scenarios could be made very easy so that even consoles could join.
     
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  4. stujoy

    stujoy Well-Known Member

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    If the liveries and scenarios were being allowed to be shared and there was no way for console players to join in then the console players would be being penalised, as in not being allowed to use a feature. The current standing isn’t penalising anybody, because PC users are not missing out on anything. The steam workshop existing and PC users being able to share on TS are not legitimate arguments for them to have special treatment for TSW2. It is a legitimate policy to have an everybody or nobody approach to this matter. It’s not going to make everyone happy but it’s where we currently are. If they are looking at a way for everyone to share, then that is a good thing, if not then we’ve all still got something we didn’t have before, even if it isn’t perfect.
     
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  5. Monder

    Monder Well-Known Member

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    But creating without sharing is a bit like giving someone a camera without SD-cards.
     
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  6. stujoy

    stujoy Well-Known Member

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    Well not really, it’s more like having a camera with no instagram. You still get to keep your creations. Creation isn’t only there for sharing, you can do it for your own enjoyment, so it’s not a totally pointless feature. As I said, it’s not perfect.
     
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  7. DTG Protagonist

    DTG Protagonist Has left the building Staff Member

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    We don't have it in for PC folks, far from it. We simply want to ensure that all players, regardless of platform, get access to the same suite of features. Sharing is entirely possible - we have problems to overcome with it, and it requires a lot of work - but we know how desirable it is.
     
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  8. seatsea

    seatsea Active Member

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    I understand that argument, it's reasonable to want to make things fair for everyone.
    The thing is the platforms are fundamentally different, why hold back one because of the others? Plenty of games in the past had different ports for different consoles because each had different sets of hardware. You wouldn't expect your Megadrive copy of a game to look and play exactly like the arcade version...

    In my personal opinion, I'd try get the platforms as close to feature parity as possible, but once I'd reach some fundamental platform limitation on one, improve the other platforms regardless, because they have the capacity to do better.

    This goes both ways, in future with the new generations of consoles, they might truly outpace the average gamer PC, for a little while, in terms of storage speed with their very fast SSDs, it would seem silly not to make use of that because some PCs are slower.
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2020
  9. longo239

    longo239 Well-Known Member

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    It sounds like we're not going to have First Class and economy, so everyone automatically thinks they're getting an upgrade to First class, when in reality everyone is now travelling in economy.

    Just my opinion!
     
  10. HuggernautNL

    HuggernautNL Member

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    DTG Protagonist

    I just want to say thanks for your superb work so far. It's answers like this the community needs.

    I can be unhappy about it, but with this clarification I respect the decision nonetheless.
     
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  11. Dinosbacsi

    Dinosbacsi Well-Known Member

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    Sounds like communism!
     
  12. Plastic Pal

    Plastic Pal Well-Known Member

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    To be fair, I don't think this is really true.

    After all, DTG could have decided to optimise TSW2 for PlayStation 5. But if they had done that, then the vast majority of customers with consumer PCs would have been left far behind, or would have had to run TSW2 at much lower graphics settings compared to PS5, and then not have access to the full feature-set.... So future PS5 owners are being penalised because of the relatively poor performance of PCs.... ;-p

    You have to move the fleet forward at the speed of the slowest boat, and in this case that would be the PC, and future PS5 owners (like myself) are being held back by having to pander to all those people with common or sluggish garden PCs.... ;-)
     
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  13. Dinosbacsi

    Dinosbacsi Well-Known Member

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    Dude you're in the PC Discussion forum, stop fanboying over the PS5 and consoles please. Sure, I bet it will be a great console, but no matter how good a console is, PCs always have more potential, as there it's up for the consumer to get whichever spec they want or can afford, while with a console you're always stuck to what they made.

    Slow PCs never held back game development, as they were always simply left behind if games exceeded their power, forcing the user to upgrade after a while. Interestingly it's always console games that run locked to 30fps with lower resolution textures, isn't it? Anyway it doesn't matter, my goal is not to complain about consoles, and if you prefer them, good for you, but stop spreading nonsense.
     
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  14. Plastic Pal

    Plastic Pal Well-Known Member

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    It's not really nonsense. It makes perfect sense to hold back the development of games (and their features) to cater for most PCs, many of which will be incredibly slow compared to the vastly higher-powered consoles that specialise in delivering the best high quality graphics. I play TSW on both PS4 and PC. I run TS1 on PC. And although I can afford to replace my PC mainboard, CPU, GPU, RAM and SSD every year, and beef up the cooling system.... I don't particularly want to... because it would cost thousands of dollars/pounds/euros.... every year.

    More importantly... even though I can afford to keep my PC upgraded to a bleeding edge state of the art PC (but still woefully below the power of the PS5), I want TSW2 to be dumbed down to cater for the poor performance delivered by the average PC.... because you get more sales for TSW2 in that wider market of very poorly performing PCs (compared to far superior consoles). You get a better and more sustainable TSW2 that way, even if it doesn't take advantage of the sheer power and "the best architecture ever for UE5" that PS5 has to offer, by slugging along at the back with the PC technology.

    So I am quite happy for the average slow PC to be the benchmark. The point that I am making is that DTG doesn't suddenly "have it in" for the PC folks.... the PC folks (including myself) are being treated with kid-gloves, and are being welcomed to take part.... by not optimising for PS5, so that the PC folks aren't left behind... even though the lack of PC performance is dragging everyone else down.
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2020
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  15. Plastic Pal

    Plastic Pal Well-Known Member

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    PS: Although I do not personally find the term "fanboy" offensive - after all, this is a Forum that is likely to be populated by railway enthusiasts...... I do find it to be a little presumptuous of you to assign me with a gender of your choosing. It's really not very woke, is it...?

    Also - I am not particularly keen on this tendency for rampant platformism. We all benefit from living in a multi-platformal society - and I like to celebrate the diversity. It doesn't matter to me whether you are a fan of Manic Miner, or Sonic the Hedgehog, or Mario and his brothers, or the guys from Halo or Wolfenstein 3D..... They have all made a wonderful contribution to our culture.

    So - I welcome DTG's approach to ensuring that TSW and TSW2 will be a balanced cross-platform title, with principles of platform diversity and feature equality placed firmly at the forefront. ;-)
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2020
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  16. Trooper117

    Trooper117 Active Member

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    And I thought it was political correctness that had gone mad... :D
     
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  17. londonmidland

    londonmidland Well-Known Member

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    I don’t want to go off topic but generally gaming PC’s will always be more powerful than consoles.

    By the time a new console is released, it’s hardware is pretty much already outdated. Also, you can’t upgrade it and keep it up-to-date with the latest hardware like you can with PC’s.

    That’s how it has been and always will be.
     
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  18. seatsea

    seatsea Active Member

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    I don't want to continue toe off topic to much but I want to mediate a little. PS5 technically will have a very fast SSD, and a way of accessing storage which will rather outpace the performance of most consumer PCs at least in the near term, allowing for loading content off of storage practically real-time, without having to first load it in ram. This however is an unusual situation and PCs are bound to catch up.
     
  19. Plastic Pal

    Plastic Pal Well-Known Member

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    True, true. I can't fault that as a belief.

    I am thinking of upgrading my PC. I have only got an i7 Extreme 5960X with 4.5Ghz octo-core processor, with a custom dual water-cooling loop. It gets quite hot in there! It's not helped by my pair of 12Gb Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan Xs SLI GPUs. The X99S mainboard is getting a bit long in the tooth now.... so it is probably time to swap it all out. Hopefully the new MB will take my old 64Gb of Patriot Viper Xtreme 2800Mhz DDR4.... if not, then I willl only be able to salvage the 1Tb EVO 850 SSD... ;-(

    My budget for a new PC this month is only £9000. Hopefully it will be enough to get a better PC than my current sludge-bucket (described above).

    I am sick of playing bat and ball on my PC at only 3,567,212,114.6 frames per second, even though my visual cortex can only really handle about 27 FPS... I want to play bat and ball with at least 7,500,000,000 FPS, because my friend's PC can currently manage 7.000,000,000 FPS, and I can't have my PC being slower. No. I couldn't bear it.
     
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  20. stujoy

    stujoy Well-Known Member

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    I wouldn’t want to have to build a massively powerful refrigerant cooled super computer specifically to run TSW because that was what it was developed for. I would rather have the developers make TSW so that it ran on a range of PCs from the modestly powerful right up to the stupidly powerful, and for the console versions to be comparable to it. Now, as we’re into analogies with communism, who has the best pushbike? I got mine second hand for £100, it squeaks a bit but it’s fine.
     
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  21. Plastic Pal

    Plastic Pal Well-Known Member

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    The PC will catch up with the PS5 after a few years. The CEO of Epic is openly begging software houses to triangle their UE game development using the PS5... and for the graphics tech (ultra-fast SSD to GPU streaming) to be adopted by PC manaufacurers. They will catch up eventually. Probably.

    The PS5 tech, incidentally, is ideally suited to applications where you have to stream large numbers of game/level/map tiles in quick succession..... and would be perfectly suited to Train Sim World... and for high speed rail lines, for example.

    But for now, we will just have to accept that there are large numbers of PC players with decrepit hardware... and those guys do buy DLC... so they must be catered for. Let's keep it slow for now. PC slow.

    But to get back on topic - I would be happy to wait a year for TSW2, and for it to launch on PS5, as a next-gen train simulator.
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2020
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  22. Dinosbacsi

    Dinosbacsi Well-Known Member

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    Typical console response, lol. Sorry to break it to you, but there is a clear difference between 30FPS and 60FPS and even higher. Not only in visuals but in input response time as well. Of course if you're stuck to consoles with 30FPS all the time, then maybe you've never experienced it, so that explains it.

    Anyway I'm done arguing over consoles and PCs as this is off topic and I will clearly not get you to change your opinion. There is nothing wrong with you prefering consoles, but consoles will always be the "weaker but cheaper" alternative to gaming. It's a fact, not an opinion.

    Edit: PS5 might be cool with this new SSD streaming technology, I will give you that. But it's nothing that PCs couldn't adopt as well or simply surpass already with simply more RAM. And look forward when in a few years Sony will release the PS5 Pro because turns out the PS5 is not powerful enough (just like it happens every time a console is released).
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2020
  23. Plastic Pal

    Plastic Pal Well-Known Member

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    I don't. I have both, and I like both. So we're good, either way. Although..... I am still not sure why you are still making wild assumptions about people's experiences.....

    More RAM would make absolutely no difference - the PS5 skips the CPU addressing RAM and then push to GPU.... and instead just grabs the data from the SSD and chucks it straight at the GPU.
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2020
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  24. Monder

    Monder Well-Known Member

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    What if sharing was made in two phases? Something simple to begin with, something sophisticated to create later? I have before mentioned a possible solution - when you make a scenario, it creates something like a text you could share. Let's make an example. You create two trains on Sand Patch going from one side to another. It could generate something like this:

    SPG // 001-US0001-1-084500-CU-B-go.to-RO-A // 002-US0004-2-091530-RO-B-go.to-CU-F // 003-US0010-2-stat-CU-D

    (SPG - the code of the route, I used "//" before every newly added train, Matt said there could be a lot of them in one scenario, you'd continue with another "//" and then three numbers for the train code, USxxxx would be a consist code (nation + number = specific train from the catalogue, for German trains it would then be GExxxx, etc.), next number is a direction, in which the train is set, six numbers for the time of start ("stat" is a stationary train - US0010 could be a bunch of freight cars), then command (go.to) and station code-track (CU - Cumberland, letters for tracks)) - there would probably have to be other things in it, but this is a simplification to make the point

    When you build a scenario, the game would write such a thing on its own and give it to you at the end. You could then take this code, put it on the forums, someone else copies it to their game and the Scenario Planner builds the scenario based on these instructions. There could also be "commands" like "couple to" (e.g. "go.to-CU-D-couple-003-go.to-CU-G-uncouple-003") and more stops for passenger trains represented by another station codes in between. I am not a code master, but I think the game could handle this simple system. If you copy the code incorrectly, you either make a faulty scenario or get an error message. That would be the player's fault. It is not perfect, but still better than nothing.
     
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  25. Redbus

    Redbus Well-Known Member

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    Every time a new console generation comes out, certain folks sound the death knell of the gaming PC. Don't want to beat a dead horse, but yer PS5 and Xbox Series wotsit are like all new console releases, pretty much obsolete before they're even out. They are about equivalent to a powerful PC on medium settings, but without the benefits of decent fps. That's just the way it is with hardware that's locked down with yesterday's tech. PCs are on the bleeding edge but evolve in a much more linear fashion, t'is the nature of things. Mind you if I didn't need my PC for it's exclusive titles (flight sims, truck sims, iRacing, Transport Fever etc.) I would probably be tempted to grab a console in a heartbeat, they're much more cost effective. My GTX 2080 Ti alone would pay for 3 of them lol. (Full disclosure - I have owned a both a PS4 and XB1X in the past). ;)
     
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  26. Plastic Pal

    Plastic Pal Well-Known Member

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    There's no death knell. There are no bells tolling. I have been a PC-building enthusiast for thirty years. I have seen/heard every discussion about fps.... And the majority of people that engage in that debate do not actually know what 30fps, 60fps, 105 fps means, in terms of gameplay.... or indeed... probability distributions (which is the only real useful purpose behind the fps metric....).

    In the past I have witnessed a raging fps argument between two people about what GPU could deliver what frame-rate.... and they were arguing the toss over 95 fps vs 105 fps and how 105 fps made so much difference to their gameplay... Turned out they had 50Hz and 60Hz monitors....... and 30Hz cables..... LOL.... people always forget about the cables.,.... it does make me laugh... ;-D

    (I wonder if Dinosbacsi will now go and check their cables...;-) )

    120Hz and 144 Hz monitors (even at 4k) are coming down in price.... but very very few people have exotic monitors (because they put the cash towards the GPU)... and even those that do....LOL... they don't use the right cables... so it's all completely wasted, including all of the hot air...... ;-O

    The key point in this discussion is this - many games have nearly fallen over because they have launched with way too high a spec (Crysis 3.... for example.........?)............so they had no viable market. And this is important. The XBox and PS4 players of TSW bring in cash so that TSW can be developed into the train simulator that everyone wants....quicker. That's it.

    The PC players of TSW and the console players of TSW are on the same side. They should be treated equally.


    As an aside... or rather... getting back on topic.... I think there is a third way for the OP's question. I assume that DTG mean the "Preserved Collection" to include the routes..... How about a short delay to TSW2 release.... but......

    .........all of the rolling stock comes across from old DLCs, and are made available to run on all future TSW2 routes, and made available under the Scenario Planner and Livery Editor (for those that bought them under TSW)?
     
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  27. Dinosbacsi

    Dinosbacsi Well-Known Member

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    Don't worry, I have a proper setup, and I know for a fact that the difference between 30 and 60fps is visible. Between 90 and 100, as you mentioned, probably not. But 30 and 60 is a big difference, because believe it or not, your eye can see more than 27fps. Sure, around 23fps will already look acceptable for the human eye, but that's pretty much the lowest limit. 60 (and more) will offer a much smoother experience (just go watch a 60fps movie if you don't believe me).

    And as I said, it's not just about the screen refresh rate. Even if you were to be locked to 30fps because of your monitor, your game would still be more responsive. Now it's not that noticable/important on a train sim, but for a racing game or a shooter for example, it can make a huge difference.
     
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  28. Plastic Pal

    Plastic Pal Well-Known Member

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    I fully agree with all of this. If you are playing a train simulator, and you need to respond to something in a tenth of a second, then you are playing the game wrong.... LOL... ;-D

    Any number above 60 fps is really just a measure of certainty of getting a stable 60fps. I am not that sensitive to frame-rate, unless it is a racing game (I do not play many shooters... at least... not seriously....). In a racing game I can just about cope with a locked 30 fps (not in traffic), but prefer 45fps as a minimum.... locked at 45 fps would be perfectly fine for me.... about 2x23fps.... it's not a coincidence...... - this would translate as "60fps" peak with a reasonable deviation. But if you are racing online, then the bottlenecks will always be the efficiency of the netcode, and the lag/latency/ping.... and not a client-side GPU struggling to output above 60fps...(not a problem for me anyway, as my PC pushes out 120 fps on the most intense racing games... , not that I can benefit from anything above 60fps....).
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2020
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