Just kicked off a freight run in SEHS from Hoo to Dartford, a run I know very well living in the area and I'm seeing multiple locations on the new section where in real life there are major elevation differences between the track and adjacent scenery, but in game everything's "very level"... Northfleet - the Southern platform at Northfleet (Ebbsfleet side) is a suspended platform over a steep drop, with the freight lines coming up from the old cement quarry being a dozen or so meters below the level of the North Kent lines, rising up to meet the NKL just to the west of the station. In game the cement lines go full length behind the station IRL they are substantially lower than the back of the station, so much so that a whole footbridge complex is between the two Swanscombe - this station is in a deep cutting between the Gravesend - Dartford main road and the town of Swanscombe itself, so the only way to get out from the station is by some pretty hefty stairs In game the bridge is fairly squat, and the embankments have to be forced up to meet the top of the stairs In real life the embankments run pretty high the full length of the platform, especially at the western end reaching up to the high arched bridge Higham - Just East of the station is a chalk cliff which impeded the progress of the Gravesend - Medway canal, necessitating the construction of a canal tunnel, which got converted to house the railway we run along today. In game the "cliff" is more like a low rise, barely clearing the tunnel mouth IRL the cliff face towers over the tunnel mouth, running along to meet the station car park
The comparisons are not even close, especially the second comparison. You could easily confuse all four for being different stations.
I guess it depends what quality DEM (terrain) data they used for the route. UK DEM in my experience is not always that accurate and tends to suffer from averaging across the elevations. However for locations where there is a noticeable difference, a bit of hand sculpting or adjusting might not have gone amiss.
Funny you should say this. As a Dartfordian I was looking forward to coming out of the cutting after stone crossing and seeing the chalk cliff on the right where fulwich road is…. It’s a bit of a shallow slope which I can assure you, from slogging up and down it, it ain’t!
Yep, the whole area between Dartford and Northfleet is a mass of chalk pits and cuttings which aren't reflected in game And the area west of Greenhithe shows a lot of housing where a commercial complex (Crossways) is. More affected by the elevation issues which make a fairly interesting area look bland
There's a lot not right about this route I mean a lot! I learned the route, I know the route like the back of my hand from tsc, yet from a tsw point of view I've had to learn the route again. I found myself blasting past stations because the scenery and landmarks I'm accustomed to are not there. With the dem data I find it's not accurate at all, even the hd data isn't perfect. In the editor in tsc, if I start on level ground and set a gradient using the gradient data from network rail, by the time I reach the top of a gradient its well off, sometimes the tracks end up a few meters higher than the ground! I think in tsc developers go by real gradient data mostly whereas in tsw maybe they are following dem model? Anyway it is what it is. It's good enough.
Also Swanscombe station appears to have far more historic platform shelters than the modern ones on the TSW route. That bridge does stand out as being far to low. I suppose this is the problem knowing the route in real life. The differences are palpable, especially the height of the chalk cuttings.
Yeah, which says to me either that they're using incorrect data (or making it up) or that their route building tools are less advanced than what they had in TSC when it comes to ground levels and gradients!
When things like these occur, I do wonder, do the route builders not watch any cab ride or photos of the areas they are recreating? Of course one can't expect everything to be 100% accurate. But when the TSC iterations of these routes seem to do a much better job at recreating these details, I wonder what is going on during TSW route building. Do they just care less?
Fairly new here, my question is, do things like this ever get fixed by DTG? From my perspective, they would basically have to start over from scratch to correct the base map. From what little I've seen, DTG doesn't really go back and fix old problems. I'm guessing this is the state the route will remain in. As another example, I made a post that in TSW2 Spirit of Steam the "loaded conflats" don't show any cargo on them and appear as "unloaded or empty conflats" This still hasn't been addressed and I even sent a bug report into the bug tracker and have heard nothing other t han automated responses.
Something like this will not be fixed after release since as you said it would probably mean to redo the whole route
So they go and botch the hs1 section on sehs when this route released for tsw 2. Now the "extended" route has scenery inaccuracies in certain areas. I wonder if this was made by the same second party that botched the HS1 section on the TSW 2 SEHS route? When the tsc version looks better than the tsw2 version, then clearly something is wrong.
