As the routes develop and I’m sure we all put more hours in I was curious about what static or trackside scenery people would like to see in the game. There’s a couple of considerations from streams I’m mindful of, assets need to be built, licensing, and the dreaded gen 8 performance balancing act. I’m also where it’s train, not trackside scenery editor. The last few routes from DTG have shown significant improvement but there are some suggestions I’d like to make and encourage others to think about. To me personally they are equally as immersion breaking as missing sounds or achievements. Hamburg to lubeck, nearly all cars in car parks are black, Germany has silver and red too. Diggers, I would love rot see these animated , perhaps two to three movement cycles they cycle through. I believe every digger on every route is static. This makes the routes a bit soulless when you spot them. Cars, nice they move but can the weird scalextrix turn be developed. I know they’re low priority but does it generate a big performance hit turning from front wheels rather than car centre? Shop fronts, can these be improved, the terminal stations always feel too quiet. Suggestions could be busking dioramas, people with cases, people pushing trolleys, people with push chairs, food stalls. This would significantly improve dead stations like reading for example. Share car assets with Rivet, theirs look like they’ve been stolen from noddy in toy town , though kudos they used more than black. Welcome people’s suggestions….
I would honestly love to see proper OHLE equipment modeled, as well as all the equipment cabinets for signalling. Also I'd like to make an honorable mention: on the London - Brighton route, I believe I spotted a wheel grease device on the tracks somewhere!
St ives is one where I would like to see some life on the beaches. This could have been away donkey opportunity. luggage trollies would be good, I know rivet have them in st ives. For the older routes the old parcel trains people used to drive on platforms could be an idea too
I’d probably say get the basics right first - on the Brighton to London route, there are several areas of missing line side palisade fencing. This results in open areas of trees or properties and/or commercial buildings backing onto an open railway which just isn’t realistic at all for the UK. There are also missing fences on several platform edges. Particularly at Clapham Junction. The tunnels also need a lot of work. They haven’t even been modelled correctly, with various instances of ‘clipping’ which means you can see where two tunnels badly line up with each other. I agree with more realistic OHLE. It’s pretty much unavoidable to see and the same repetitive model used with no variation can be quite an immersion breaker.
Well of course there's a lot I'd like to see. All of the above plus more natural looking track work. Sometimes, the track looks a bit like my model railway layout with built in ballast that is cut perfectly straight and doesn't blend into the surrounding ground area. I'd also mention improved water textures and more natural looking roadways as they meet each other and the RR crossings. Can we have more variety in vehicular traffic? That's just a few that come to mind.
For me the biggest let down is always the German catenary. There are some broken assets where parts of the OHLE clip into each other and where the contact and messenger wires are not correctly attached to the arms holding them (thus, the messenger being too low and clipping into the pantho and contact wire). These broken assets are re-used and re-used on every route. It would take probably not even a couple of hours to fix them, while now it will take considerably more effort to go into every route and fix it. And it is something you constantly see I hope this can be fixed for the next route at least, but I highly doubt it Edit: Couple of examples for what I mean:
Basics first. i.e. The lineside fencing which seems to be omitted in large measure on some recent UK releases.
Just a few static characters scattered through the landscape to create the. Illusion of a living world. If you can put in tree stumps and cows, you can put in someone leaning on a fence watching the trains go by
Seems like the missing lineside fencing is like the missing whistle posts from the US routes. Should be there pretty much everywhere, yet missing from many releases.
