Birminham Cross-city: Timetable Deep Dive | Pre-order | Release Day Update

A small error but I noticed you guys put West Midlands Railway coloured lamp posts (orange and grey) at Birmingham New Street, which is wrong as the station is managed by Network Rail. Any chance these could be repainted into the blue NR colours?

 

This definitely needs to go back in the factory for a rework...!

 

When TSW3 was being launched the devs mentioned that what was the Preservation Crew would work their magic on newer routes to resolve issues quickly, here’s hoping they are good at building bridge pillars, and if they can have the route polished in time for the first 50% sale discount that would be great.

 

Excellent, I would rather wait a while longer for a route if its had as many gremlins as you can identify at the time ironed out.

 

"let us know which train you will drive first", well obviously its gonna be the 323 haha. Seriously though, I like what I read and am glad now that I've invested in a few routes so that I get to enjoy the extra content.

 

And all this defects found my a couple of pictures.Imagine if we did an actual deep dive.

 

Guys, I think the scaling of Bouneville station is off..

NPCs are quite literally going to be bumping their heads given how low the CIS screens are here..

 

What is 'light baking?' I assume too much light?

 

Agree with various posters on here that as well as routes you should seriously investigate the possibility of loco DLC aswell

 

No light baking - when the outside world light goes through everything, basically. That’s why in the first version screenshots, everything looks incredibly bright.

 

West Coast main line: Euston to Glasgow

 

Speakng of which I noticed a strange phenomenon today on the Cathcart line, coming out of a tunnel and the sky is very briefly blue and clear before immediately turning back to Scottish weather lol

 

By default, light goes through everything so dark areas like tunnels will look like an outside scene due to light entering the walls. So the devs use light baking to 'force' the scene to be dark. Otherwise, you would just have a really lit up tunnel cuz of the outside light bleeding through

 

Interesting.

 

Couple of sound/physic queries:

Will there be a 2-3 second hissing sound and then movement physics.

Will there be the tick sound of air pressure whilst the train is stationary?

Will there be compressor sounds whilst stationary?

 

I’m skeptical about this route (I think DTG should have held off on creating BNS until they had the XC license) but those screenshots do look very good.

 

DTG had the XC license, but it has been canceled; and XC itself looks like it's not much longer for the world.

 

If we're finding this many faults with screenshots in previews, I dread to think what the actual route will be like.

 

I’m aware of the backstory; doesn’t change my opinion. Plus, I’m pretty sure that when the XC franchise expires it’ll just go into DFT since franchising is all but dead now (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here)- and the last few instances of franchises being taken into government hands have resulted in incredibly minimal changes to name and livery (if anything, at that). So Arriva XC may be dying, but I don’t expect much to change for the trains themselves.

 

Following on from this, it makes me wonder- when doing the extended SEHS, did DTG have to negotiate with SE Trains Ltd. at all after they took the SouthEastern franchise from Govia or was that not necessary?

 

I mean dtg had the southeastern license before the event, so it wouldn't have mattered im assuming. Besides, there were no new trains added or new liveries, so I don't think there would have been the need to renegotiate.

 

Probably not because SE Trains limited is owned by the DfT and DTG already has licencing agreements in place with DfT. This could also pave the way for future UK DLCs featuring Northern Rail and LNER who are also under DfT ownership.

 

Ahh, well that answers my question. Would be good to see a Northern route.

 

DTG’s QA / Beta Testers look like they’re knocking it out of the park yet again. Did they not get the memo about the ‘new era?’

How in God’s name do you build a 3D model of a bridge and place it into the route build without it having supports? I’m really struggling to square away in my head the sequence of events that could mean that were possible. Not only that, but then release an image of it as a pre-release teaser shot, and still no-one notice. I’d love an explanation as to how that’s happened, because on the face of it it almost looks like some DTG staff are deliberately torpedoing their work.

I was genuinely looking forward to this route, and had suggested myself a year or too back that DTG should increase the DLC pricing to allow themselves more Dev time. That didn’t mean ‘price goes up but nothing improves’. I really hope BCC isn’t the first of the ‘two steps back’ after the relative step forward of TSW3.

 

That’s good to hear. Are you able to shed any light on how it ever got into the route without them in the first place? What other omissions can we expect? Hopefully none!

 

Still it is worrying that something this vital gets missed literally within days of release. What else is lurking that hasn't been picked up by the testers or "snagging" team?

 

Accepting that, that doesn’t seem like ‘polish’. Unless it’s a LOD issue the fundamental structure of a bridge seems like a pretty glaring omission. It’s a bit like building a train with no wheels or a building with no roof is it not?

Either way it’s moot because it’s been fixed. It’s just interesting how it ended up like that in the first place, and hopefully it’s a stand-alone issue.

 

Posted by JD in another thread - bridge supports now added, as well as wet platform surface visuals enabled.

 

well, it was Alex, not JD.

But yes, that now looks way better. Thanks.

I hope now the PIS and shelter at Bourneville station can also be heightened a bit. Impossible for anyone to pass under that PIS ...

 

Check my screenshot, that 323 looks different, right?

 

That's just lens/camera distortion due to the angle the picture was taken at. The actual model of the 323 is fine/exactly the same as we've seen before.

 

Given the angle of the lamp post, I'd say it was a perspective or lens distortion effect, rather than any model change.

 

Agreed. That's gonna look ridiculous with passengers phasing through it.

Who is picking the screenshots for these previews? Surely they should notice something's not quite right.

 

Just need to get those station lamp posts sorted into the correct colour at BNS now (as mentioned ealier by londonmidland ) Although would this have an effect on all station lamp posts within the route? So if you change the BNS lamp posts to the correct NR ones, would these will also appear on ALL stations?

 

Are you going to mention the PIS screen issue at Bournville (not sure if other stations have the same issue) to your team before the preview. It is is out of scale and too low down.

 

i mean I guess that’s the oompa lumpa station

 

Now THAT looks like a route worth £30.

 

Exactly its a chocolate factory

 

Do your testers actually play the route before release? Because I refuse to believe they wouldn't have noticed this, among the other issues people have pointed out. And who is choosing these screenshots for the previews? They must know there are issues present.

This isn't the first time the community has had to point out glaring problems, and it likely won't be the last. So much for TSW3 being a fresh start, seems to be business as usual.

 

Surely that isn’t acceptable? I know there are some pedantics going on such as the colour of lamp posts, but this issue is pretty major, no?

 

It's not acceptable and if fnd DTG's approach quite arrogant actually

 

It's not like they are going to change for us. I will just apply the same attitude and say, well I won't bother with the product, it's really that simple.

 

I had hoped that with TSW3 was a fresh start but is the same. The same cycle. Fire and forget, next

 

I just regret now putting quite so much credit aside on Steam, instead of acquiring a few more bits and pieces for Run 8. DTG are never going to change and now want to charge more for the privilege. Well I guess there's always the ATS DLC I still have to pick up, Montana and very soon Texas.

 

It’s a bit disconcerting that with a significant percentage of the pre-release screenshots really quite significant errors are immediately obvious to anyone with the gift of sight. It’s hard not to wonder;

- Who is it testing this stuff? Are they actually doing it whilst awake? Don’t they ever just play the game?!
- The original route builders…how do they not see these problems? Who placed that bridge at BNS and thought ‘job well done’? Who placed the PIS screen / station roof and thought ‘spot on’?
- Who on Earth takes / picks the screenshots? Are they also awake? Why are they not only not seeing this stuff, but happy to put these out to the public as teasers?

The second you look at this stuff it’s immediately obvious what the problems are. Why is it that DTG staff repeatedly miss these really very obvious errors? There’s no way that these are just an isolated few issues, but sadly much more likely to be an indicator of another poorly put together DLC (and another poorly put together UK one at that), except this time the price has gone up!

As I said, one step forward two steps back.