West Cornwall Local - 4th November - Plus Improvements

I really like what I see. The Intro had a 150 and a 101. Great that it subed in right from the start. The NTP/BR Freight pack layer really works for me. The 150 looks and sounds great to me.

 

HST still is core traction for the route, albeit in Castle Class form on Plymouth and Bristol workings!

 

And Cardiff... https://www.realtimetrains.co.uk/service/gb-nr:G60324/2021-11-04/detailed
Shows as limited to 110mph...

 

Well I took the plunge and bought it. Will report later when I go up on the main PC to play it. With the 10% discount and a bit of credit came in under £20.

 

I guess this didn’t happen to the 37/5. For some reason

 

Yes I caught a HST Castle from Exeter to Plymouth this summer - it's a fantastic journey and a must for any rail fan visiting the UK.

 

I’m liking it so far! Really extensive scenario’s you won’t be done in just a few minutes, haha. The only loco I’m missing is the class 52. Since you can drive it in Diesel legends from London to ‘Penzance’. For continuity sake I would’ve loved to be able to ‘continue on’ the journey.

not sure if it would be realistic. But other than that, would’ve loved it.

Yes I know I could use the ‘off the rails’ scenario planner. But still, would’ve loved to see it integrated into the time table.

 

From what I understand, they are limited to 110mph as they are short formed sets and don't have the brakeing force for 125mph.

 

Also, I'm not sure that the track at the western end is rated for more than 110. IIRC, the old route from Paddington had to slow down after Exeter.

 

You are right I've just double checked and I think there's nothing West of Bristol that's over 110mph. As a side not about the cl255 castle sets, I found this on another forum.

 

TrainSim-Matt highlighted the car registration plates on WCL in tonight’s stream. The plates represented routes like WSR, GWE and SPG. There was also LMC, which is what? Maybe a new route hint?

 

LMC Leeds ManChester.

 

Or Liverpool Manchester as a future route. The current Leeds-Manchester route in game is NTP.

 

The St Ives branch is a 20mph restriction for most of the route in the Up direction. I know there is quite a low restriction but this can't be right, can it?

 

If you look at the game files, NTP is named "TS2Prototype-WindowsNoEditor-LeedsManchester.pak"

 

I thought that was nice way to show routes available in the game.

 

The sounds of the 150 aren't brilliant in my opinion, for one the brake rub noise is missing, the engine revs drop when setting the reverser which doesn't happen on the real unit & it doesn't rev like the real thing when setting off, even in notch 7 the engine still doesn't rev fully but the revs seem to increase as you get faster which isn't realistic.

 

Sounds is one the most subjective aspects of TSW 2 in my opinion. I dont have alot of experience with 150s in real life and have not watched many youtube videos of them. So I dont have a model of what I think they should sound like. I am not aware of all the nuances that are unique to the real sound. I think the sounds are good in terms of how they play in the game. I am not hearing sound distortion and the levels of sound seem better balanced so I dont have to turn the volume down when I open up a window for example.
I also feel that real world sounds are comlex analoue sound waves, these then get sampled/Digitized and you start loosing the richness/naunce of the real world sounds. For this reason I never expect game sounds to really match the real world trains.

 

This isn't the issue with the sound
The issue is more to do with how the drive system of the train works and it not being like other trains, in that if you put other trains in step 1 you might get some drive, and the engine revs and note will rise as the train moves off
In these trains the engine is almost not connected to the drive until you get going, so to get them to move you shove the power to notch 5 (high revs) and the drive then winds up, but the engine note should almost stay static. So you have the drive sounds and running sounds running UP but the engine noise staying static until you get to a certain speed where the noises converge
At higher speed the engine works almost OK as it is, but it's that specific "high engine revs, no drive" that sets the sprinter classes apart, and if this is how it sounds on the first sprinter class, when (if) we get a 153,156,158 etc we can only hope it works better

 

Thought I would do a little comparison video to compare it with the AP150 for train sim.

 

Those AP sounds in TS are glorious! Really captures the essence of the 150!

 

If you are doing both comparisons, do the revving up from outside. I am just as much a critique about the sounds but would prefer an analysis so I can get a good reference.

 

The irony is that the Rivet version uses AP sounds too.

 

Which shows it's nothing to do with the raw sounds, but how they're applied, mixed and maybe how the physics are applied.

 

Ironicly rivet said in a post a while ago about the br204, that they wont fix the transmission, because they would need to rebuild the entire loco. But they will learn from it. Ouch..

 

Jasper said the same on the 150 release stream on Thursday, that fixing how the sounds work would mean fixing how the physics work, which would mean changing the loco in a fundamental way (messing up the timetable etc etc) so this would not be something they would look at doing

 

It begs to question as to why they didn’t simulate and test the physics correctly in the first place. They’ve only dug themselves into a bigger hole by only addressing these issues after they did the timetable.

Oh perhaps they knew the issues they had all along, but kept their heads in the sand.

 

Same could be true of a lot of things made in simulators

 

If changing the physics messes up the timetable, then that suggests that the timetable was constructed by auto-running AI trains. If they had simply copied the RL timetable it wouldn't be an issue (aside from dragster 150s arriving too early and waiting around)

 

Not sure how you work that out. If I was to make a timetable based on a 1.2 litre Fiat and then changed it to a 1.6 litre Ford the timetable would have to change timings, and then if I threw a sportscar in there it would change again.
This is down to how the dispatcher and signalling works (ie DTG issue)

If Rivet have created the physics of the 150 in a certain way (ie with certain acceleration and braking physics) then changing those physics so it got there quicker or slower would mean different timetable interactions, hence needing to change the timetable

 

If the timetable is based on the real world, then applying real world i.e. proper physics to the train should mean it can keep time. Besides, if the timetable needs to be changed, then so be it. We are not talking about hours difference, maybe a minute or two end to end at most. Besides we have the 101 layer which is presumably trying to keep to the Sprinter times so not exactly 100% accurate in that respect either.

 

I don't think it's as simple as that. Change the timetable and suddenly you have people with incorrect AP points, losing medals etc etc
I completely agree with you that it shouldn't be a hard thing to change physics and allow the timetable to resolve itself, but neither the trains, the dispatcher nor the remainder of the "game elements" seem set up to allow for it

 

I forgot about the awards side of things. All the more reason to get it right in the first place.

 

I'm quite enjoying this one. Even found a beach to sit on and listened to the sea rippling onto it.
Am I on the only one who likes a track-walk?

 

If it were standard policy to design timetables from the start based on the RL timetables, this issue would never arise. (There is actually a similar issue with the 313: you can't keep to time at the Eastbourne end, without cheating, because the robo-constructed timetable expects line speed where IRL the 313 is limited to a 75 Vmax).

 

Absolutely. If it were up to me (and I know it's not but who cares?) the HUD would only ever show line speed if it were lower than VMAX, but then I drive at the speed of the train rather than what the HUD shows anyway
It's the same for freight... I tend to drive at 60mph everywhere in the 66 even if the HUD says I can do 90

 

Agree totally. For me the GWE route is under used. It used to be the fastest and iconic route especially under BR rule but DTG thought to do a small section of it, such a pity.

No of course we all like to do it. (NURSE! NURSE! lol)

 

Yes I often think a "Walk Sim World" would be quite popular! When I had the Greek version of Assassin's Creed I did very little fighting but loved walking through the beautifully modelled ancient landscape.

 

I think this may be part of the timetable issue, and the reason why aside from BML and perhaps Cathcart routes don't use RL timetables as the basis: IF the timetable routine in TSW works like the one in TS, you are not working from arrival and departure times, but arrival plus a fixed "load passengers" time. So if one builds a timetable allowing for more transit time than an AI rocket train takes between stations, then it will both arrive and depart early, and the timetable thus goes to hell.

Kudos to Joe, who apparently in BML hand-tuned those station-stop times so the departures are correct

 

Yeah, that must have taken some time, but it does mean that the fundamental structure of the dispatcher is written in a cackhanded way if it's reliant on station dwell time tuning rather than ARR-DEP times being used generally. I guess the loading instruction MUST be part of the program to get the passenger load complete and associated AP points etc