I have noticed on many TSW2 routes and sadly aswell in TSW3 Schnellfahrtstrecke Kassel-Würzburg preview there are frequent stutters. They are pretty noticeable and they they are also represented in the FPS/ms overlay. Lukas has 60 FPS all the time but ever so often the numbers change to red for a split second and the game "freezes". (Refer to his first ICE drive Ingame time 07:43:40. I think this might be related to the game loading parts of the map in and off the memory, but it would be nice if this get's addressed in the next Q&A.
People should be aware of this before pre-ordering. DTG themselves have said TSW3 will run the same as TSW2 so if you get stutters now you will certainly get them in TSW3. It seems people have been bringing up the stutter problem for a very long time and I'm sure it would boost sales of DLC for DTG if they addressed it.
It's an issue I've found common in UE4 based games where you move quickly across the map necessitating the frequent loading in or new parts, like in transport games. The Bus does the same thing as it loads in the next part of the city of Berlin and is UE4 based as does TramSim.
You can alleviate it in TSW2 somewhat with changes to the engine.ini file but those changes may not work as well with TSW3. The stutters are still there just significantly reduced geloxo
Yes, stutters are a known problem with Unreal Engine. You should be able to alleviate it by increasing the shader cache size in Nvidia control panel, 3D settings (not sure about AMD users). I'm not noticing stutters most of the time since doing this.
yes open Nvidia control panel, 3D settings shader cache https://raiseyourskillz.com/zh-TW/should-i-use-shader-cache-and-what-size-pro-advice-2022/
I tried that a while back (set it to unlimited) and made no difference whatsoever. Machine specs: I9-9900K (OC'd to 4.3), RTX3080TI, SSD, 32GB
It's obviously down to other variables with people's setups, too. I've seen shader cache touted as a "solution" (let's say plaster over Unreal Engine's defect) for other games with the issue, and I can only say from experience it's done wonders for me.
Resizable bar seems to make it better. Not 100% but better. Although it requires a bit of fiddling to get it to work with tsw. Edit: a decent cpu is also required.
FIFY. Unreal's tile-loading system is to blame, and there is little DTG can do about it (other than move to a completely different engine)
So why hasn't this happened? If UE is to blame and it means you can't build train simulators with UE. Why are they still using UE? Why don't they build their own engine?
If they dropped UE and went with a new engine, half the forum would go nuts because there dlc don't port over to the new engine and the other half would go nuts about losing thier achievements.
I would not care since i have less an less joy in TSW in its current form anyway. Thats life, sometime you waste $200. I would be happy if DTG would start from scratch
Not sure about that. Okay if it was released the 6th of September that would indeed happen. But switching to a new engine would take lots of time and we would not be seeing TSW3 for a long time. If there was no new DLC released for a year and then TSW3 would arrive like a brand new game working on an engine that is made for especially for trains. It would be a bitter pill to swallow but if it would blew TSW2 away people people will accept it. For me all my TSW2 content is already considered obsolete as it was stated that no TSW2 content will be updated to TSW3
This is what I have against TSW3, timing. September is far too close for me. If DTG had come out and said we are looking to bring out TSW3 which will be a brand new build next year and in the mean time we are concentrating on TSW2 I would be on board with that. SO long as the changes will be worthwhile.
Bethesda have used their own engine for over a decade and adapt it to their needs. I even think starfield will be using it as well which I was surprised at. OK, it does have a few bugs in it but couldn't DTG choose an Engine tailored to being good for a trainsim and then adapt it to their needs? Wasn't there a public domain engine released last year that people were getting excited over? I think they released a Star Wars Demo to show what it could do.
Does anyone else read this thread in the manner that people honestly believe that UE4 was chosen with no market research or due diligence by DTG? My gut feeling is there was likely market research, pestle and swot analysis, sales demos and pitches when they were choosing it. Then there is “happy mctappy” on their coloured keyboard with superior knowledge of gaming engines, no analysis , potentially never coded anything more than a 4digit bike lock who knows better. I bet the DTG love reading posts from those that know better and rip the absolute pisch out of them whilst at work (and rightly so if they do). CHANTS SARCASTICALLY…….UE5 UE5 UE5 UE5 oh and if you see happy mctappys bike locked up, the codes 5555
There was bound to have been some evaluation; the question is how good was it? I believe DTG were already using it for their fishing sim, so that might be a major reason for choosing it. Familiarity is a powerful reason not to change.
I'm not sure exactly what was considered when they chose UE4, but I bet console compatibility was a strong factor.
On the stream showing the new German route this week, the framerate started off at a solid 62 fps but by the end of the route in the adverse weather was a solid 25 fps.
I was reading about this ue4 stuttering issue and there's loads of posts about this online with many suggesting shader compilation causes it too. They seem to point to shader compilation before play resolving this. I assume tsw is doing this whilst loading the map right rather than on the fly?
It is OK choosing whatever engine there is but it is another choosing the right engine for the right game. I'm not qualified to say either way but let's say UE4 was the right engine for a train sim couldn't it also be implied perhaps that DTG haven't got good enough coders to take advantage of UE4 given some of the state of DLC we have got or the game itself. And still assuming that UE4 is the right engine why is stuttering such a big problem? Stuttering can show itself on a wide range of PC's not just potatoes, does it occur on the consoles? As for UE5, I don't want DTG to go anywhere near that engine for a long, long time.
Yes, Unreal Engine stuttering occurs on console versions. It seems there are at least two causes of stutters in TSW: one would be UE4, and stuttering happens on many other UE4 games, and the other sounds like the way it offloads unneeded data from memory according to Matt. Now, I don't know if the latter is also a UE issue, but I'd have thought it's more of an optimisation issue... I wouldn't like to say for sure. I almost eliminated stutters on East Coastway by increasing shader cache size (UE4-related "fix"), but on something like Dresden I'm getting significant hitches/pauses, which must be when it's offloading these chunks of data (more complex and detailed route, so more data to offload). As Matt said they rewrote UE's volumetric cloud code to improve it for TSW, I would guess the engine is fairly tweakable, if you have the time, inclination and skill to do it. But if you're a development company choosing an off-the-shelf engine (because, to be fair, it's a lot cheaper and gets your studio off the ground quicker), you're probably more likely to rely on what it gives you out of the box, so to speak, because that's why you chose such an engine. Then you have the Asobos of the industry, who developed their own engine in-house, which takes a hell of a lot more skill, and definitely gets you closer to the hardware (it makes me laugh the number of people still trying to make out Asobo are somehow useless and should be fired from MSFS just because it has bugs (that they're constantly working to eliminate), even though the simulator wouldn't exist in the groundbreaking way it does if not for Asobo).
Not at all. I Ve played a lot of UE 4 games without any stuttering. TSW2 has stuttering because the engine is not made for this kind of game and because the devs (lol) just pick this engine and thought that the game will runs alone. The fault is not on UE but on DTG who made a wrong choice by choosing this engine and because they do not know how to use it for their game. That's it.
"Wrong choice" of engine seems to be many people's new mantra, but nothing is ever offered as to what the right one would have been. Isn't it possible that DTG did their due diligence and, imperfect as it is, UE was in fact the best choice for what they wanted to do? Doesn't mean the fault is UE's either; maybe there's no fault at all. Pretty sure you're right. Though I can't quote a source this much later, I know I read a while back that some or most of the big studios that use UE have customized it a little or a lot for their purposes.
As have DTG, according to what I've heard on the streams. In fact, it seems they've used elements of UE 5 to customize TSW 3. The die is cast. It's much too late in the day for a change to a different engine. A train simulator is a very specific piece of software, unlike any other. There probably isn't an engine out there that fits any better than the one they're using. I think it's pointless to have that conversation, really.
There are Unreal Engine games that don't have apparent stuttering – but the stuttering issues with UE4 and 5 are a well-known, documented fact, acknowledged by Epic Games themselves. The engine developers engaged in a Q&A about it, and said they are attempting to improve it with the next iteration, UE5.1.
It comes down to how you use it. It's not a bad choice of engine. But you need plans in place to mitigate the known stuttering issues. Precompiling shaders for your console versions tends to reduce performance problems significantly, since it eliminates the compilation stutter. But that works because it's a known hardware configuration. It would take about 30 minutes on the first run if you implemented it on PC, and would need to be done again after every major graphics driver or game patch.
There is no game engine suitable for a train simulator without significant modification to the code. Whichever one they chose would have had compromises with it. Maybe they did choose the wrong one but we have no idea what the other contenders would have given us.
This constant regurgitation of "UE4 bad" on the forums is pretty incredible. If so many of you are experts in game engines and feel you're equipped with all the knowledge and skills to do things better, then I'd love to see your work! It is laughable to say that the DTG team put on a blindfold and picked an engine at random. I'd wager hundreds and hundreds of hours (if not thousands) went in to that choice - everything from communicating with other studios to building test bed applications to trial various game engines. Even more absurd is the idea that DTG should be building their own engine because companies like EA do it. I don't think anyone making that suggestion has any real idea about just how massive of an undertaking that is. DTG did the pragmatic thing and built on the shoulders of others by selecting a well-supported game engine, as many other studios do. It is fair to hold criticisms, but I think the forums have really gone off the rails lately. This vision that the average keyboard jockey on the forums is somehow better equipped than the crew at DTG is to make architectural decisions for their own game is insane.
Yes, because you've likely played games that were good candidates for UE. Games that require the camera/user to cover large distances rapidly will always have some issue with this UE stuttering to at least some extent.
And even EA didn't build their own engine. Frostbite was built by DICE, which EA bought out. For an in-house engine (that handles lighting, shadows etc well) you would have to look to RAGE: and Rockstar spends the equivalent of a small nation's GDP to develop a single title.
I was the one that suggested to build their own engine. I suggested it on the answers in this topic that no engine was suitable for a train simulator. If that is true the only way to build a serious train simulator is to build their own engine. This all based on the notion that i've been playing more than a decade race games build on the EGO engine. An engine build by what was not an all too big game developer back in the days. If you are serious about the game you are building you need to invest. The EGO engine was a very good investment; Can't remember for how much money Codemasters was sold but it was a lot of money.
I didn't say it was good but the fact remains they used an engine and tailored it for themselves and look at how successful they were. What I was hinting at was couldn't DTG have got an engine that was somewhat decent and adapted it to being train game friendly? What is the most common engine for racing games, F1 and all that, wouldn't that be better for a train game? I'm no expert on engines by a long chalk but then DTG struggle with UE4.
my Game plays at 5 (yes 5fps) but mainly just above 12fps any below and the clock starts to slow down, I have all options set on High. I just got used to the FPS showing in Red, perhaps I am easily pleased but to me the game plays good no stuttering etc and good quality.
Heavy stuttering on the training center stream. The dev said it should not have to reload tiles but the one playing said the stutter is legit and not caused by the recording or stream. The dev did not seem to want to talk about the stuttering and switched topics to the gimmick eye adaption...i hoped he would confirm the fix is being worked on and a priority but sadly no... It still blows my mind this was not fixed for TSW3 (just like the save and sound issues, the scenario creator having no seasons...) Also, the lighting still looks...strange, just to bright instead of to dark. The ICE was so bright i could hardly look at it. But when he went inside the building it looked nice. Night lighting also looks ok, certainly better then TSW2 Also... when rain was set the FPS got really low. Performance definitely seems to be same or even worse then TSW2...which is really bad in my book.
Oh and if you pass other trains they still seem to go apesh*t and get all blurry randomly. Add this to the things still not fixed... At least DTG has teams to look at everything. But for some reasons we dont get stuff fixed even after years...
At least it was acknowledged firmly. But it is very weird to see that amount of stuttering in the training centre. Like Adam said it's a small map so it's really mind boggling what is going on. I guess it's probably the amount of trains present on the map? Performance is really the game killer in TSW3 from what I've seen so far. The training centre looks such a nice addition. I really love what they did with it but with this performance it's hard not to be not negative about it.
