Train Sim World 2 - Roadmap Update 25/01/2022

But they've already made a sale... and the way of it is on the consumer, not the company.
If I buy a V6 in the hope that at the next service they'll fit a V12... That's my problem

 

Whichever order that means the updates can be tested and released most efficiently and quickly. I have many routes on the preservation crew update list, and have been holding off playing them until they get updated, some for as long as 8 months. So any would be good, i'd just like something released

 

If we try to solve the ordering issue, we are are solving the wrong thing. The real problem seems to be twofold:

1. Limitations to the release schedule. Lot's of paperwork and limited amount of slots.
2. The way development is organized with all kinds of specialists and a separate QA team.

It is hard to keep this all in balance. Into my opinion there is a better way, but it is up to DTG to organize their process. In present day software development, we work with multidisciplinary teams that are responsible for the whole product, including quality.Each team member may have one or two core skills, but they must at least have some knowledge on other topics. E.g. the track laying expert may do signalling and game play as well. Maybe not as good as the expert, but good enough to support an expert and give feedback from his own discipline. The team makes the product release ready and this includes testing. Part of their time each team should work on improving their way of working, eg. automate testing and so on.

A bit loose coupled from the teams their can be chapters or communities focussing on specific expertise, like game play, track laying and so. These teams drive innovations and make sure each individual employee can learn new stuff.

There should be a small QA team. But what it does is nothing more than accept the product from the devs to go live and sell it. From this perspective the community manager, helpdesk and release team are part of the QA team.

In this way you need far less management as well.

You also can make teams responsible for the preserved collection, that is each team gets a set of routes they should maintain and update where needed. This also means the teams are responsible to fix their bugs as well.

With this style of work a team can have ma maximum of 9 developers plus a product owner who sets priorities and a scrum master, who makes sure the team works together in an optimal way.

For the release schedule: automate it. Make releases small and less work and release every week. It may take some time to discuss with the partners, but consider TSW2 as a game platform and each DLC as a game.

I have a lot of experience with this way of working as a product owner. My team released about 20 changes every two weeks and we did 4-6 large projects in a year. We had a release schedule with four teams. It started on Monday and the process accepted only tested and approved stuff. On Tuesday the release dev ran an pre-release test and on Thursday the release would go live. By setting clear criteria (necessary, because it is a customer administration for 2 million customers, including a billing engine), this process runs extremely smooth. You do not get this for free. The devs worked two years to automate the process step-by-step with every month an improvement.

 

The analogy doesn't work because in the cases you are talking about the company only wishes to make a single sale to you in your lifetime. I think Dovetail's business model relies on you making multiple purchases with them over the course of many years. That relies on consumer confidence. But using your example if you buy a car and expect it to be a V12 and it is not you are likely to leave a bad review saying "don't expect this car to be a V12!" and other customers will take note

 

Pretty sure that's the case. The release slots thing comes up every once in a while when talking about preserved crew work, but the real bottleneck seems to be testing.

 

OK, Anyone looks up "DTG" on steam will see their business model. If they search "Dovetail Flywheel" they'll get another insight...
But back to "expectation", don't use it as a purchase strategy as it will almost always fail

 

Then it's a more serious "concern" than DTG are making out. That would mean no fixes tested for approx six months.

 

Unless the company has promised that 'old' products sold in the past, will be updated to the new technology standards, and has created a preservation crew to do that job. In such a case, when V12 comes the standard for new products, we as a consumer can expect the company to update our old V6 products up to the new V12 standard, for free, as they promised us.

 

you test very longtime

 

This makes me happy, because I've been wanting to dive into Peninsula but have been holding off until the (it seemed) imminent preservation pass came through.

And as always, insights from the people behind the scenes are most welcome. Thanks for taking the time to post.

 

I think it’s safe to assume that testing has become such a bottleneck because DTG is an independent publisher having based its income on a few hobbyist titles developed internally. They always prioritize new releases to keep the wheels of the publishing arm turning, and they don’t have several development studios to rely on for income, like many other publishers in the gaming industry. I’m afraid this business model will always be at odds with the very valuable concept of post-release support.

On one of the recent streams the topic of “how to keep new players coming back” was raised in the context of making the simulation more accessible to newcomers. On the other hand, if you want to keep experienced players coming back, invest more in post-release support of existing content. Maybe then I’d actually start buying TSW DLC at full price instead of 50% off.

 

It has been suggested both on roadmaps and especially roadmap streams what was the intended with the preservation crew updates. I believe that's where the information came from. Maybe people watched those before purchasing certain add-ons?

 

I'd just bypass the QA anyway, I mean there have been many instances where obvious glaring bugs/glitches/problems etc. have been missed by QA and been spotted by the community within hours of release.

Fix it > release to community > We report issues within hours
Repeat

 

Absolutely, especially when within steam there is an option to have an "opt-in beta", and a separate beta bug forum could be set up to report problems so as not to flood the main technical report forum with beta bugs.

 

I believe it was also stated on trainsimworld.com website when TSW2 was just released. I cannot find that version of the FAQ anmore, as the whole website seems to be overhauled and advertises Rush Hour, which is no longer being sold...

DTG Natster perhaps the website needs an update...

 

No, just no. Last time they released a poorly tested preservation update it caused a backlash bad enough to provoke an internal investigation. At least that’s what we were told.

Some of the routes awaiting preservation updates are playable in their current shape. Running the risk of them becoming unplayable is not worth it. They promised QA improvements, so let them show it.

 

Well, at least your are persistent.

 

That's probably what happened which is understandable. Why buy a defective product that has issues when you can buy the same product down the line when it's fixed up.

 

That can't happen because Sony and Microsoft do NOT permit public betas.

 

The problem with the "player vote" model for sequencing update releases, is that it doesn't take size into consideration. As Adam posted above, updates vary in size from tiny to huge, and they need somehow to be grouped into packages of roughly equal size.

 

The only reason it can't happen is because DTG insists on treating all platforms equally. However, if a Steam beta branch could find potential bugs before it needs through QA, it may speed up the process and thus indirectly help getting stuff released sooner, and that benefits console players as well, even if they don't have access to the beta themselves.

 

But at least a "player vote" model could help with determining the popularity of updates. It doesn't necessarily need to be the only thing being taken into account to determine a release schedule, but it may be useful when also combining it with update size and whatever :P

At least it prevents a situation that DLC remains unpopular because it receives no updates.

 

I agree I do not see "Player Vote" style working, as the files sizes of some the downloads vary. Doing it by region also is not necessarily a good idea either.

Possibly mixing some small ones in with the bigger ones might work and get things out the door quicker.

 

The only issue with that is that something popular to one may not be popular with another, either way which ever way is chosen people are going to be disappointed.

Added: they some routes are not as popular for me yes there are routes I have not played as much. But that is due to the fact that I am waiting for them to release raildriver support to the remaining loco's.

 

This "SIZE" is more about QA capacity to evaluate changes.
Player Vote is totaly off, I will never vote for addon that is not in my collection and popular routes will be on top with every small fix done and listed as candidate for QA and realease. More important is to allocate QA resources for Preservation Crew and don't let main devs to consume it! It's allways better to put out even very small fixes on regular basis than 6 months of nothing...

 

Having any kind of community feedback to determine the order updates come out has hopefully been abandoned now. The only people who know all the parameters covering what has been fixed, whIch updates have been done, the size of potential release updates and whether an update release fits in with the whole QA, packaging and release schedule is DTG themselves. They need to determine the best way of getting as many fixes and updates to the players based on all the above and how long a fix or update has been completed and waiting to get through the system. The players can only complicate this system with their input.

DTG just need to get on with it and release the updates in the best way they can manage and handle. It’s not going to be popular whatever happens so we may as well just see what comes out and the order will be what it is. It’s also up to DTG to set up some sort of strategy to ensure this doesn’t drag on indefinitely and doesn’t become such a nightmare ever again. We can’t help them do that either. I’m whacking the ball firmly into their half of the court on this matter.

 

That's not completely true, at least for Xbox. I know both PUBG and Overwatch, at least, have had separate Xbox apps for their public test realms. There's also Xbox Game Preview, which is where TSW originally launched on console- but i'm not sure if they can launch DLC through that channel.

It would probably be a lot of work on DTG's end, but maybe it would be worth it? I think they'd be worried about not being able to do the same on Playstation (and the ensuing blowback), but the architecture is so similar that i'd think an Xbox beta would be a help for PS too in the long run.

 

Have you ever thought about doing some Scandinavian DLC (Scandinavia is beautiful, specially Norway). And a soth American or Brazilian DCL like São Paulo Metro and south Brazilian train routes like Curitiba... Well It train WORLD simulator and there's nothing in south America

 

All things considered I am not in the slightest bit bothered about which order the updates arrive in, as long as they are indeed arriving. If I have to wait longer for my favourite routes to get updated as there are other more significant issues elsewhere to be resolved then so be it.

 

or like you said they could have expanded the route as well, but either way, I'm kinda surprise to hear that it would take this long. Hopefully they might surprise us, by extending it, or something else. I believe the current LIRR Route, that we got is the full route, but i am not sure.

 

i think Adam's should expand their QA Team, basically train more people. I wish i have the skill to help them, but unfortunately, i don't. I think the real reason why the hold up is because of how small their team is, the more people they have with the right skill, the quicker the community gets what they want, but I am guessing it's hard. Do you think, it's because they are not getting paid?

 

Quite the same here.
I dont have all routes, but i will be happy if things advance for all. So dont care about order as long as it dont take a year.

 

Perhaps when considering the order of releasing items we can go back to the original idea about the severity of bugs/importance of fixes determining the order of priority:

1. Can you play the game at all? Crashes etc
2. Does it stop functioning? Safety systems, signals etc
3. Does it look/sound bad?
4. Is it adding additional/improved functionality?

And as a tiebreaker only, which route is it and which country is it from? - balancing out the releases of similar priority fixes.

 

TrainSim-Adam
The order of release doesn't matter. Just start releasing the fixes rather than talking about them! No way to please everybody, but DTG might as well start pleasing someone.

 

The new Swiss route will include Lucerne. It can be standard gauge or narrow gauge route...

 

The new swiss route could be Luzern-Engelberg or Luzern-Lenzburg.

 

I did infact say 'if' there was a fix. Surely if you buy a DLC and there is a problem, bug that affects gameplay you would expect a 'fix' for it no? Or am I being self entitled?

If I am selling a product and it needs a 'fix' and I do not provide one making customers unhappy how do you think that would affect future sales? imo I would expect to lose customers and rightly so in my view.

Adam, it seems strange you haven't mentioned the fairest way of releasing the updates and that is in the order the routes were released. So the route waiting the longest gets the fix first. I'm sure no-one would object to that. Or as seems to me we are being fobbed off yet again and hoping to cause a division amongst the community.

DTG need to start releasing the fixes before their player base starts falling. And why they couldn't release all the loco's waiting for RD support in one go is baffling, especially after the last 6 months they have been telling us how easy it is to do. I wish DTG would realise that people waiting for these fixes just want to enjoy the game but many are deciding to not purchase any more DLC until the fixes are released which seems reasonable to me.

 

I don't expect anything from anyone other than companies I work for to pay me what they're contracted to... So I don't expect fixes, I tend to work with what I have and if I don't like it I don't buy further product. But I don't then spend the next six months complaining about what I haven't got that in reality I never had

The "fairest" would be to fix the longest standing bugs rather than in release date for routes. Some bugs have been caused by later updates, but in routes that have been out for longer

 

Thoroughly agree, DTG are already unpopular because these updates have been in limbo land for several months. They need to bite the bullet and accept they're going to get the flak because some vociferous punters don't get "their" updates as early as they wished.

I have some sympathy for DTG as the intent was to bring earlier DLC up to the standards of newer ones. Sadly, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

 

We get updates for released routes, thats all that matters to me to be honest. its ready when its ready. It makes sense when dlcs are upcoming to priorise them (harlem line / lirr preservation update) in this case.

 

There was said (long time ago) that things on the roadmap are listed in how they will release. Not sure if that is the same by 3rd parties but; the unknow Swiss route is above Horseshoe Curve, does that mean the Swiss route is that close already or is Horseshoe Curve just delayed that mch, or aren't they listed in how they'll release?

 

I get the feeling that HSC was sent back to SHG with lots and lots of red pencil.

 

I think and am thankful that between them (likely DTG) have pulled rank and said this is not going to fly with our community.

That said , it may be more financial risk to skyhook but likely longer term value teaching them new tricks and giving them the confidence to deliver more. Someone will always find fault but if it releases with less overall issues I'm all for it

 

Yes and i like the fact dtg is supporting 3rd party even closer. In the end i want skyhook to succeed, and would be pretty bad advertisement for this franchaise, if a 3rd party stopps making content.

 

Narrow Gauge route out of Lucerne is a Rack railway Riggenbach system the Brünig Bahn. That requires update to have working rack equipped locomotives in the game

 

A Rack railway would be nice. Its just requiring proper physic setup. Im not questioning if rivet would be capable of, i question if they would go into such detail as required, to make a real experience out of it.

So my guess is, the route is based on a 1435mm gauge.

 

Find that helpful since SBB CFF FFS selected locomotives can change German routes due to them being 1.435m tracks

 

Feels like its dragging on for nearly a year now. Yet every stream its "Oh its been done FOR MONTHS"

 

The preservation crew should prioritise updates in the order that the original routes were released in. Simples!

Also, don’t release anything else until Adam and his team have caught up…they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place atm

 

Let’s look at how things have changed for QA over the past few years.

Once upon a time QA was necessary for two products – Train Simulator and Fishing. Then DTG introduced Train Sim World (TSW) so now QA was needed for three products .Subsequently they added the generation 8 consoles to the party which required different hardware and also had more restrictive memory constraints so I’m treating them as additional products in their own right. Now QA was not only needed for five products but also all the existing PC DLC needed to go through QA as well. Perhaps DTG added one or two more staff or maybe they just farmed out the short term peak to third parties.

Train Sim World 2 (TSW2) then appeared and with it the issue of legacy TSW DLC. As part of the drive to persuade existing users to not only migrate to the new platform but also pay for the privilege DTG promised that all existing DLC would also be migrated at no extra cost to users. Enter the Preserved Crew and Adam. During this period whilst QA were still supporting five products they also needed to cope with revamped versions of existing TSW DLC but this was probably still manageable.

Meanwhile the TSW2 developers had increased their expertise and were now introducing new and improved features to new TSW2 DLC that weren’t present in migrated TSW DLC. The decision was made that Adam’s team would continue in being to retrofit these new and improved features as well as conduct a deep dive to rectify various issues that appeared during the initial migration as well long standing bugs. I suspect by now there had been some small permanent increase to QA staffing but since DTG is a business any increase will have been the bare minimum that could be financially justified. QA still only had five products but also had some additional reworked DLC from Adam’s team that needed to be tested for three products at a time.

Into the midst of all of this came the minor matter of a virus that caused major disruption to the UK at various times but particularly during the first lockdown. I suspect that QA was at best seriously disrupted initially if not suspended for a while. It’s a fair bet that DTG faced increased and probably continuing costs as a result. Naturally the priority was to increase income. How does DTG do that? Release more DLC of course! This DLC still needs to go through QA for three products and it’s pretty obvious that non income generating DLC from Adam’s team will be at the back of the queue,

To make matters more interesting generation 9 consoles make an appearance although in limited numbers due to disruption caused by that pesky virus. Naturally DTG is supporting these new consoles so now QA has to cover seven products as well as those outstanding DLC from Adam’s team. Third parties are now beginning to dip their toes into the water with some initial DLC which now needs to be tested for five products at a time. Third party DLC won’t make as much money for DTG as their own DLC but there’ll still be a percentage. QA now need to handle seven DTG products plus third party products for five products and of course there’s a growing list of DLC from Andy’s team that need to be tested for five products waiting for a spare (hollow laugh) slot.

I’m pretty certain that by now the strain on QA is now obvious to DTG but any extra permanent QA staff still need to be financially justified and then of course there’s the minor issue of finding said staff at the pay that DTG is prepared to offer.

Epic then come along and suggest adding TSW2 to their store and DTG agree. QA now need to handle eight DTG products plus third party products for six products plus there’s all the other TSW2 DLC needs to be tested for Epic and right slap at the bottom of the queue is a long list of DLC from Andy’s team that’s been further increased by Matt’s decision (obviously with the best of intentions) to update all outstanding DLC with a targeted set of improvements that need to be tested for six products waiting for the pretty well non-existent QA slots.

In the space of about three years QA have moved from coping with two DTG products to needing to handle eight DTG products plus third party products that need to be tested six times as well as about 17 DLC from Adam’s that also need to be tested six times. It’s hardly surprising that QA is now a major bottleneck.