So right after release I made a few mods that heavily improve the platform departure boards on Hamburg - Lübeck. Amongst other things I added platform numbers, replaced the service numbers with line numbers and service types, and made some texts and station names better fit to reality. I also hope at least some of the things I had to mod here will get fixed in the next updates like the platform and line numbers. Here is the download for it: https://mods.trainsimcommunity.com/...burg-lubeck-pis-boards-enhancements-and-fixes And have some pictures about the things I changed:
How is it that major problems in the product seen two weeks prior to release don't get fixed, but the community does it in two days? Great work!
Make that two hours Yesterday I tested them and today I prepared them for publishing. The mods themselves were basically ready two hours after I got the route
Development cycle. Fixes summitted today will go to a branch that will go to testing in 2 weeks that will be tested for 2 weeks and scheduled for release 2 weeks after testing is finished - any fix will reset the cycle and start it over. 2 weeks are taken as an example, maybe 2 days or 2 month. The point is that the smallest change resets the cycle to the 0 point, so no small bugfix is possible and no change is done at all after going to testing except game breaking bugs are found. Even if testing finds something, and I am sure it finds. That means if the route is buggy but playable - do no expect any fixes anytime soon. If the route is totally broken - you can hope developers sneak some minor fixes to testing additionally to fixing major bugs.
Glazier raises a good point im sure allot of people on here are not going to be aware off. Assuming they use a rather standard flow, below shows a normal git flow to visually demonstrate what Glazier is describing.
They got the updated Destination Boards for free for all Plattforms like Console, if they want use your work. Think about it DTG.
This explains well the difference between development as a hobby, not giving any guarantees that it will work on a variety of systems and circumstances and professional development where you must commit to deliver something working. I normally build changes to my software in max two days of work. But you do not get any warranty that it works and you do not expect it. If DTG makes any mistake half of the community starts complaining. This makes them much more careful (well at least in theory) not to break anything that is more or less working. I still think DTG needs to build smaller changes, make testing and releasing much cheaper and easier. The LIRR and RT patches are far to big to release as a single package. I would never have done that. Problem is the preserved collection team is doing roughly 1-2 routes in a month, so they would need a release moment every two weeks, or better every week. They cannot get that yet. On my job we did maintenance and innovations for a customer administration system for severely regulated products, so we had to doa lot with privacy, government regulations, tax regulations, and so on. After two years of hard work, the release team managed to do releases on a daily basis, though we normally released once a week all changes that were ready for release. The daily process was reserved for emergencies. As a product owner I was very happy with that process ... The major advantage is that you can keep changes small, so less risk, less bugs in the changes, better testing and you could resolve issues much faster. I am aware DTG is very far from this process, in part due to their own way of thinking and work processes but also because of the dependencies of external parties like Microsoft and Steam.
I think us PC players are lucky to benefit from such fine mods, such as this one. I don't think I could play TSW vanilla, as to me the vanilla version looks and feels way too plain, as well as having to wait several months for fixes of which someone from the community could literally fix in a few days. I don't think DTG will ever officially support mods, but as long as they don't attempt to try and block it, that's fine with me.
In a semi-perfect world they would at least take the community-made fixes/improvements, test them and in case they're stable, try to implement them. Your cloud fix seems to be a very stable mod and moves the sky miles ahead. They should truly look into this. There might be a need for some written agreements with the modder, but I guess most people would be like "take it, take it, just make the game better"
Speaking of this, I wouldn't mind if they wanted to use my mod and officially make it available for all players to enjoy. As long as they credit me in some way, I'd happily offer it to them.
TSW could really be improved a lot if DTG worked together with community members to release good and functional mods as permanent and official improvements to the game where possible. Expanding on that, they might even decide to oficially release player made content (i.e. player makes a good livery, DTG handles the licensing and makes it available to everyone)