Train Simulator 2021 – Birmingham Bound!

Looking forward to tomorrows release

 

Blimey, that is more stock than I expected it to come with! Hats off to DTG for covering pretty much all aspects of stock operation on the line, the only exception being the Bakerloo Line but then I wasn't expecting to see anything on that front anyway. Really looking forward to this.

Edit: Obviously it's to do with licenses, but the 350s should be in London NorthWestern livery running with Avanti West Coast, but I'm not too bothered about that.

 

Get it quick before the franchises change.

 

That's a lot of stock! Hopefully the AP sounds will become available for them soon after release.

 

I was hoping we would get all of the stock! I didn't know it would be all included though, thought it would just be if you own it. Great job DTG, there's one question I have. Will the Northampton branch be included, as that is where the majority of LM/LNR services went through/still do!

 

Excellent array of stock there.

 

What I want to know if I have to purchase this or a part of Train Simulator 2021 which will be release tomorrow. I am confused because I have seen many comments about this that you have to purchase and other hand you don't have to purchase this. I did look at DoveTail Games site and say nothing about purchase unless if you want to purchase separately.

Thank you,

John

 

This is always confusing people
The GAME TS2021 is released tomorrow and anyone who has any previous version of TSx will be upgraded to the core game engine, for free, tomorrow if they connect to steam (about 17:00 UK time)
The BUNDLE TS2021 is a different matter as that is the core game (TS2021) and a selection of bundled routes and assets, so if you already have TS2020 and want the WCMLs you can either purchase the bundle that it comes with (TS2021 deluxe which gives you all four routes) or you can buy it as a standalone DLC
Either way, you won't get it for free as part of the core game update to TS2021, which is a rebadge and redo of the workshop

 

Still no mention of Northampton and still no mention of pricing?

I would assume that it being a longer route than usual DTG might charge a bit more. I'll just wait until tomorrow afternoon

 

I'm unsure why this still perplexes so many users, since TS2012 it has been the same process annually - free core software changes and purchase the new TS20XX for the content. 9 years now and every year people still ask the same question.

 

There has been released prices on stream, albeit there has been some confusion

TS2021 Base - 24.99
TS2021 Deluxe - 39.99
TS2021 WCML South STANDALONE - 24.99
(Pound Sterling)

Also, someone told me Northampton loop isn't included after adding up all of the station numbers, but due to it saying 21 (FAST) it may mean that is the routing, so there is hope that it would just be called 21 (SLOW N'TON) or something of the like. A bit of ambiguity and contrast in things. I guess all will become clear at 6PM BST tomorrow!

 

I don't see any of the prices for Train Simulator 2021 which you mentioned three different with Base, Deluxe and WCML South STANDALONE on Steam as I just checked. Mine would be different from yours as yours is in Pound Sterling and mine is in Canadian Dollar.

Thank you,

John

 

The above prices were told to us tonight during Matt's Steam Workshop he said he was unsure what the currency conversions would be but the usual for your country I would guess as the price of £24.99 is a pretty standard DTG figure.

Regards
Rob

 

Not everyone will have been playing the game for that long though. While I can't speak for the above poster, after 10-15 years away from trainsimming (back in the days MSTS was king), certainly on a personal level this is my first experience of the yearly 'upgrade' system. Each year will see a number of users that won't have been through the process before.

 

I wonder if the Class 350 is the one from Thomson, licenced to DTG, or a complete rebuild? The cab looks really nice and the destination display unit seems to be functioning.

 

Forgive me if this is a dumb question but I'm a newbie. Will i be able to use my class 86,87,90 and 92 on this ??. Many thanks in advance

 

With scenario creator you can use anything anywhere. I'm sure there will be quick drives as well

 

Looks like the Class 450 model from PDL/SWML modified into a Class 350. Also noticed they've included the subclasses which is nice (maybe the passenger views will be different too?).

 

DTG announced yesterday the WCML South would be available as a Standalone route.
"Available as part of the Deluxe Edition for Train Simulator 2021 or to purchase separately this features the Class 390 Pendolino and BR Class 221 Super Voyager in Avanti West Coast livery for the first time in Train Simulator."

 

Alongside the Class 390 Pendolino you will also be able to jump in the cab and take control of 5 other trains, the BR Class 221 Super Voyager in Avanti West Coast livery, the BR Class 378 Captialstar in London Overground livery, BR Class 350 Desiro EMU in London Midland livery, BR Class 377 Electrostar EMU in Southern livery and the Powerhaul Class 66!

 

It looks like a rebuild as Thomson are all OTT about copyright and I have compared it with the new 450 which it isnt

 

I hope that you'll do an add-on which covers the remaining Stafford-Preston...then you will have the West Coast Mainline all the way Euston to Glasgow. Additionally a modern era York to Newcastle would mean (including the Just Trains add on) you would also have the East Coast Mainline running all the way from Kings X to Edinburgh.

 

JustTrains still sell their Newcastle York Modern route. It really shows it's age though.

 

Great if you like green light runs for hours with little to do...
Personally give me a good shunting scenario or a stopper. I've driven 13 hours one way in a day and its boring...

 

Has anyone managed to get onto the store page? I keep getting errors since Steam looks to be down here in the US, and I really wanna see the listing with screenshots!

 

I bought the Deluxe Edition - but no sign whatsoever of this route!

 

Yeah I got through to the listing for the game itself and the Deluxe Edition doesn't have ANYTHING about the route. Hopefully DTG will fix it before everyone starts reporting that they didn't get what they paid for. They have quite good customer service from my experience so they should be able to help you out.

 

Yeah restarted Steam and it started downloading

 

Well having read the threads about the WCML South and seen a bit of the stream, I'm shocked at how badly the route runs and the various other issues it has. But I will still be buying the deluxe edition because for someone like me who has none of the routes it represents a pretty decent saving.
Clinchfield, Fife Circle, Kiel-Lübeck & WCML South £24.99 each = £99.96
Deluxe Edition = £39.99
As far as I am concerned I'm buying the WCML South for the trains only (the 390 and Voyager) and then I will continue working towards getting the freeware version of the route. Such a shame, I had high hopes for it.

 

Experience high speed rail!...at 14fps. What a joke.

 

WCML South is a great route in my opinion although depending on your PC. The graphics settings might need turning down a tad to shift the lag on the denser areas of the map. But if someone made the Stafford to Preston section and included NWC in the map. I could do a full full run Euston to Holyhead with the Class 221 or the LNER HST as a "hired in" holiday train! I am really enjoying TS2021 and I am going to be getting a new PC next year so that more power should mean more enjoyment without the lag . I hear the AMD Ryzen gaming PC's are good for simulation games. I am currently using an ASUS G752VY for TS and the game runs mostly fine. Well if it can handle GTA V on high settings then TS2021 shouldn't be an issue.

 

If only it was that simple, but having a properly powerful gaming PC is no guarantee the game will run better. My PC can handle pretty much any modern game you can throw at it at max graphics, and yet TS still runs like it's on a 10 year old toaster. It's the only game that gives me consistent issues with lag (on certain routes) and crashes.

 

It's not just the route... The pendo is a frames eater and so is the 450 from PDL (amended to be the 350 here) so between a frame eating route and two frame eating consists CPUs don't stand much of a chance.

Modern ones... Modern multicore enabled ones. Which TSx (which still uses a decade old version of DirectX) isn't

 

The 350 was built by Waggonz according to the back page of the Manual

 

The problem is that TS2021 doesn't use all the resources available to it from my currently PC sadly . I still had to turn down the graphics settings to play the route and get decent frames. But yet GTA V that is more resource intense runs better. I don't get it to be honest mate.

 

Well Sam did say in yesterday's stream that he is thinking that, with this route, this game engine has reached its limit on what can be done. He experimented with setting and such and that made no difference on the 14 - 16 fps he was getting on his powerful setup.

 

It would take a long time to explain, but the basic of it is that TSx was written before processors started getting more energy efficient by having more slower cores rather than a few faster ones, so back then having a program that used one core and used a lot of it was fine, now games use mutliple cores and "spread the load"
This means that TSx is reliant on maybe one eighth or one sixteenth of your CPU to run, so when people are talking about FPS (how many times per second their screen refreshes) this isn't going to be based on how fast your graphics card runs, how much memory you have etc (once you get above certain base limits anyway) but how fast the CPU can get round what it needs to do so it can send the GPU off to render it on screen
This is why if you have TSx running on a multi screen PC and have task manager on one screen with TSx on the other you'll see maybe one CPU core lagging but the rest of the machine waiting for it to catch up
Add to that the fact that some consists are scripted really badly, even the CPU might be waiting for a loop to finish so NONE of the resources are being used waiting for that damn script to do what it needs to

 

Developed by...
Doesn't mean built from scratch

 

I can't believe the Team streaming last night, Sam was adamant it was tested???????? Really by who Stevie Wonder??? I asked about leadership on the TSW2 stream and again in denial about ensuring the products are tested before they are distributed to the community. Someone is responsible and accountable for the content that has been released even with TSW2 the road map of updates goes to show the neglect on producing quality products.

Deep down I honestly think that the powers that be at DTG could not give a damn about content hoping the community will take over and update the WCML South.

Surely It does not take the brains to ensure a product is tested, tested and tested again. The version on ATS is far superior that what DTG have put out. Come on DTG explain to the community what is going on.

 

In that case then. Its more to do with how the game is programmed than the hardware side of things. If I have this right and I went out and bought a £4000 gaming PC for FS2020 which is designed for mid to high end PC's anyway. I would still get the same lag from TS2021? Well in that case. My suggestion to DTG would be to write a new 64bit launcher exe main file from scratch and optimise that to utilise the hardware that is available to it. Not only would that make the game more stable. It would mean I could have the graphics set to full blast without excessive lag. I guess its no use in having a state of the art gaming PC if TS2021 is not going to use the hardware available to it? .

 

In fact possibly MORE lag because you'd be getting an ultra modern energy efficient multi-core processor, but each processor in and of itself would be WORSE than one you might have bought five years ago

In fact what they would need to do is move away from DX9 and go to a newer, faster better gaming engine which they would then be able to do more with and not have similar issues...
Except that's what TSW was supposed to do and unfortunately it doesn't work like that either. Changing engine means changing how things work and things break. Very easily
As a minor example they recently moved revisions of the UE engine from TSW to TSW2 and this caused some strange issues such as cars appearing where traffic lights should be... imagine that with TSx where there are thousands of assets and consists making up tens or hundreds of thousands of route miles.
And they wouldn't make any money from the work because lots of people already have them...

 

Sorry but that is complete tosh.. There are 100's of routes out there that are a 1000 times more intricately detailed than WCML South, yes it's a long route but that is irrelevant as it loads in on a per tile and L.O.D basis (Level of detail, where there are models within models ranging from not rendered in at all yet to a roughly textured cube you view in the distance to the full blown up-close detailed model)
So I'm sorry but Sam is using his years of YouTube experience to waffle (nothing against Sam, it's what they do it's what makes them interesting and the good wafflers are the ones who gain popularity and success on that platform) , and let's face it he's not allowed (or would be ill advised at least) to openly say "hey guys I know this is LOVE and the guys who ok'd it really need to give their heads a wobble"

But to state this route is too much for the creaking old game engine is a cop out, nothing more nothing less, and will only placate those that know very little to nothing about either computers, modelling, game engines, modding and generally long term experience of gaming on PC.

 

I have the freeware version of WCML South V5 and the one from DTG. I am somewhat disappointed that Northampton wasn't on the DTG version of the WCML South map and sadly its more laggy than the freeware version. I would have liked to have seen Northampton in the DTG version as it is present in the freeware version of the route and even the old MSTS version from Europeanbahn back in 2006/7 had it along with the "Cross City" extension from Redditch to Lichfield Trent Valley that included the Class 323.

I have to agree mate. Surely there must be a way for DTG to implement the DX11 compatibility for TS2021 if they made a new 64 bit launcher only and move away from the 32 bit stuff now? Most newer games like GTA V, Dungeons 3, World of Tanks etc use DX11 as a minimum for the games to run smoothly. I am not a coder but from what I have read about game developing is that game engines can and load most files without issues. Its more down to things like the scripts and coding to get them to work properly is the key to get things to work as they should do.

Not sure if you play Transport Fever 2 or OMSI 2. But I think something like the Lotus game that allows backwards compatibility for the current DLC content as well as the newer more detailed stuff that would be exclusive to the 64 bit DX11 build. DTG and third parties would have to update their older content to benefit from the new game engine and the rendering scripts that I think are part of the launcher coding and are in general hard coded. It would likely mean that the new launcher would be a larger file due to more coding fused into the file. A bit like the GTAVLauncher that is about 60mb if I remember correctly.

In my whole honest opinion. I think that the best that DTG can do is to ditch the outdated 32bit launcher and move fully over to the 64bit system. As then they can utilise the new technology. As for TSW and TSW2. As there is no scenario tools or ability to make new trains and scenarios from my understanding. That is the reason why I am keeping with the older TS2021 because like with MSTS. TS2021 has a lot of support from the community mods and other content creators like AP for example. As to my understanding. TSW/TSW2 are not moddable like TS2021 currently is.

 

Train sim uses a heavily modified version of various engines (which you can see some detail of when you load the game) and it's that divergence from the basics which causes them issues, both with TSx and TSW

And given that all content and assets are in the DLC rather than in the core game if they updated the core they would likely break thousands of assets and routes developed over a decade.
They would then need to be fixed, but nobody is going to pay them more to do that so the business case to do what you ask isn't there.

Some 3rd party devs (usually a few people working on very tight margins) do update their content over time but many just drop the older packs as time goes on, even to the point of orphaning their other packs (until they get discontinued too)

One thing I find intriguing is that all the games you mention are basically new, so don't have this backward compatibility issue whereas TSx is over a decade old... comparing apples with skyscrapers?

 

Maybe a good comparison would be a 19th Century building vs a modern skyscraper? No one is too surprised if the old one has a leaky roof.

 

Should of been for TSW, the WCML