I'm Struggling With The New Steam Ws Feature - Is It Just Me?

I'd like to start off by thanking the DTG development team for their work on the TS core. Whatever tweaks have been made, they definitely (in my own game install) seem to have made the game signficantly more stable. I'm so far not getting any random game crashes, either in scenario play or build mode. Clearly more hours of testing required to make full judgement, but certainly it looks very encouraging. So thank you DTG team for the effort gone into this, it's much appreciated.

Now onto something that is bugging me, & I'm not sure what's going on - whether it's me being an idiot, or whether others have also hit problems. I'm talking about the new Steam Work Shop (WS) upgrade.

A couple of days ago, Matt P did a stream demoing the new Workshop feature. As he proudly showed it off, there was a 'Go to Steam' button (fourth button along the right of the upper menu), to directly browse any selected scenario of interest in the Steam WS itself. Where is this button? I don't know whether just me, but in my game this button is entirely missing. Am I the only one? Am I doing something stupid? Or did this rather crucial function somehow miss the cut for final release.

I'd been really looking forward to the Steam WS upgrade - feeling such an update long overdue. And inital appearance is good - it's a nice clean layout design that looks promising. But again I'm struggling getting much of it to work. I subscribe to various WS scenarios & the 'Drive' button most of the time still remains greyed out, unable to run said scenario directly from the WS tab [just as historically has been the problem over the last few years]. And yes I have all the required DLC. I have a very large historic game collection.

One final note, I personally don't think Matt's demo (whilst well intended & meant to be helpful) was a fair representation of what the average (long-term) player will encounter. I believe he only had 8 or so routes (from TS2019, & 20 loaded in his TS install) plus the respective default locos from the last couple of years. As a TS player of the best part of a decade, I have more than 500 official DLC in my game. With many scores of routes, and hundreds of locos. With such a collection, the new in-game WS environment basically falls over. Loading at every stage takes an absolute age, and selection of specific DLC becomes a bit of nightmare. Again, anyone else finding the same? Or is it just me being a dunce!! Would love to see a follow-up demo with a 'proper' DLC collection installled.

And just to clarify I do have a fairly decent rig (i7-7700k, GTX1080 ti, 32 GB fast RAM, & Samsung Evo ITB SSD - this drive devoted entirely to TS). So I'd like think an upgrade not necessary to get the WS functioning as intended! lol

Would love to hear what others in similar boat are finding. But for now primarily the 'missing' menu button is really bugging me - what gives. Penny for your thoughts. Cheers.

 

Thak you Jamie for replying. I'm afraid that's not what I see (image below shows my view), the 'Go To Steam' button definitely missing - and I note the bottom buttons are jumbled as well. Yes I'm logged into Steam, and playing online. The in-game WS feature is happily seeing my owned DLC, but after that it seems to go a bit Pete Tong. Look forward to hearing any suggestions to remedy this. And yes, I have tried clearing the game cache. Cheers.

 

I was getting the same as you yesterday mike370 in fact I just fired the game up to screen grab my workshop page as being the same.
However it appears to have sorted itself out (maybe screenshot 2 is the reason I'll explain after)

Ok what I mean regarding screenshot 2 is the store button on the Main Menu page was greyed out yesterday and I was wondering why but today it's back, afaik I haven't done or changed any settings on or offline and Steam is always logged in (It has to be to run the game)

So I was initially posting to support your issue now I'm just confused..

 

Making me doubly confused! Cheers!! lol

Weird. Well I guess just wait and see. Either for it to magically resolve (as per your game), or for DTG to indicate what might be happening.

Ok, guess I should just off to check my 'Store' button!

EDIT - Reef, have just checked my Store button, and it's greyed out just like yours was. So clearly some common glitch going on here. Thanks for letting me know I'm not alone.

 

Try this Mike as I've just remembered doing it yesterday when trying to figure out if the Store was down (re- the greyed out button)

• In game on the Main Menu
• Click on the Dovetail Live button
• Once the new page opens, up in the top right(ish) should be a little store button, click it
• Once (hopefully) you've accessed the store this way go back to the Main Menu and see if the store button is now active and also two (one above the other) DLC advert windows to the right of that
• If yes to the above click the workshop tab to see if it's now fixed.

 

Thanks for trying my friend, I appreciate it. Though unfortunately no joy.

I think I'm just going to leave it for now. I've had enough for quite enough this afternoon Combine this glitch with the 'thrills' of the new WCML-S (suffice to say I'm not impressed!), & for now I need some time-out - with the two main advertised selling features of TS2021 truly glitched!

Looks like DTG_Jamie & Co will have to put their thinking caps on next week, & hopefully help me sort this out.

Have a good weekend!

 

Hi. When in that workshop screen in the game, hit shift + tab, does that bring steam overlay menu? If not, that might be the issue and you need to activate in steam.

 

Many thanks aeterna. That was the problem, switching on Steam overlay within STEAM settings fixed the problem. It's not a feature, I ever use in STEAM, so wouldn't have had a clue! Not quite sure why TS2021 Workshop tab would require this STEAM feature enabled for the game to work as it should. Nor am I impressed, that DTG don't seem to be aware this is the case. I would have expected to instantly be given the answer to the problem, just as you have done.

Anyway I'm very glad this is now sorted. Thanks again for your help - and who knows this thread might save others from the same grief.

One other thing I've learnt, regarding the 'Drive' button not showing after subscribing to a new WS scenario. It seems having subscribed, it's not automatically downloading the new WS item, so not available to play in game. I'm finding I'm having to quit the game, then restart the game, and that finally seems to trigger & force the download of any newly subscribed scenarios. Again, hardly ideal, but at least a workaround - which I hope may help some others currently baffled as the experience the same trouble.

I can't though seem to do anything about the speed of the Workshop search tab in TS2021. With a large collection of DLC installed in one's game - it seems to take an eternity for each in-game page to update. This includes switching from one drive (mode) tab to another. It really is painful. Looks like I will have to cull have my purchased DLC, which is again hardly ideal. I really wish DTG would take this into account with their game testing. It's no use testing the game with a vanilla install of just the lastest annual release with its very limited DLC (i.e. very small number installed DLC), it needs to be representative of what the average player is going to experience. I may be at the extreme end of players, with such a large collection of addons (though I personally know many other players, in the same position - those that have been playing the game for many years going right back to the early Railworks days) - but a large proportion of players are going to have a fairly extensive collection going back a few years. The game should be geared to run properly for such user installs.

 

There is a steam setting to not download anything when a game runs, too. Maybe this is active and the download starts after you quit.

 

I’m glad it’s been sorted. I like the new workshop features, especially the custom filters. You can filter the list to one dlc and check if the scenario list refresh rate changes. My simple logic says that querying an api with 1000 dlc shouldn’t take any long time but that might be under steam’s control. I recently refreshed my windows installation and when i installed ts, i installed only my us dlcs and some 3rd party content and refresh rate is quite fast, like half a second or less.

 

Thank you for the suggestion. You guys clearly know the Steam platform far better than me. I very rarely go behind the scenes and look at these settings. Yes, the box for 'allowing downloads during game play' was not checked - so perhaps that is the problem. Have just checked the box, and will give it a whirl tomorrow, as just too tired now. I'll let you know how I fair, but cheers it definitely sounds hopeful.

 

Yes this is a great addition. Found a bunch of scenarios I am interested in that I would never have come across via the deplorable Steam workshop interface.

 

I promised I'd give an update on whether this particular suggestion worked.

Thanks Hyperlord - your pointer worked a treat! Newly subscribed WS scenarios are now downloading & installing in my game immediately.

Once again guys, cheers for all your help. The main problems have been sorted & they were Steam problems rather than TS2021. I hope DTG will take note of your tips in case other players hit upon the same difficulties.

Does though look like I'm going to have to break-up my TS DLC collection into smaller units (i.e. perhaps UK, European, US, & ROW) to cope with the super slow loading of TS2021 menu pages/features. And scenario loading times. There's clearly some unknown threshold of game install size, where TS20xx really begins to struggle managing all the content. The bigger your overall collection grows, the more general in-game performance suffers. It would be really handy if there were an official tool to setup & switch between multiple asset/content libraries - thereby keeping DLC numbers smaller. I don't want to have to keep on uninstalling/reinstalling official Steam DLC to keep the game working properly. That's no true fix, particularly when WS & other freeware route creations are needing all manner of DLC dependencies.

 

Well, I'm confused as this Workshop utility is useless really. The search function doesn't work, and everything is just bundled together as per the screenshot above, I assume they are done in date order, so, those on the top are the most recent releases, but, there is no way of knowing from the description if it is a route or a scenario, and as there are nearly 25,000 items in Workshop currently according to the Steam page, if you expect people to scroll through page after page after page it's just not on. I thought this Workshop was going to allow us to see what are routes, what are scenarios and what are repaints, if everything is jumbled up how can we choose anything, and if I have the name of a route how can I search for it if it was created last year, I'm not wasting hours going through every page, it's a shambles quite frankly.

 

You can search all.. search for stuff that you have the DLC for, or a custom search where you can select which DLC you want to match.

You can select by date or by rating. You can also add things to a favourites list.

I'm not a heavy user of the Worskshop, but I'm finding things I didn't find under the old one.

 

I do think the ability to filter routes from scenarios would be good though... unless you can and I'm missing something.