I play with the upper HUD turned on. I like seeing my distance to the next stop, my upcoming speed limits, and the location of the signals. I do keep the signal color turned off because I only want to know where it is, not what it says. The lower HUD stays off and I use the actual instruments in the cab. This creates a sort of artificial route knowledge, and in my opinion, a more realistic driving experience. A real driver would know all of these things because he would only drive a small amount of routes. It allows me to jump into any route and drive like I know what's coming up. Because in the real world, I would. There's just one thing missing. The grade. My suggestion is to have a third value up in the top right alongside the speed and signals. A small indicator showing the grade of the current track. Those who disagree could just turn it off
I agree this would be helpful. The alternative would be the ability to bring up the gradient profile for a quick look at the next few miles, without pausing the game - in the same way that you can with the timetable. I think I’d prefer that option as knowing the upcoming gradients - not just the current gradient - affects how I control the train.
Yes, that makes total sense. Anything to make the HUD more customisable will be an improvement. I dislike that even on the small setting the speedometer occupies 1/3 of my display so would like more scaling options. Even if at a minimum DTG renamed the current small to medium and added a smaller one under the small label. Never used to be so obnoxiously big. I understand the change was implicated to cater for console players but it was at the cost of PC players.
Good proposition! This would improve the realism and allow you to play without the lower display, based on the original locomotive gauges. At the moment, I play without hints, and I get information about ascents and descents from the map. But it's quite troublesome. Ideally, the HUD should be configurable. I play on 2 monitors. I would like to display only the HUD on the smaller monitor, and focus on driving on the larger one.
Don't forget that you can change the size of all elements of the HUD by adding to the bottom of the engine.ini file: [/Script/Engine.UserInterfaceSettings] ApplicationScale=0.700 (0.700 is an example - play around with this figure until you find the size which suits you) It makes the starting menus smaller as well but they're still fine to use.
Id like to see it go further and rather than a precise grade measurement on the HUD just a 7 position arrow, steep down hill, med DH, shallow DH, flat, shallow UH, med UD and steep UD. This would compensate for the lack of feeling youd get in a real life cab but not give an accurate measurement that you wouldnt know in real life
A fantastic idea! I would also like to see a small display of the upcoming grade profile, perhaps with an option that it only comes on when a grade of .3% or so is coming up.
I'm in favour of this, too. I'm especially intrigued by redrev1917's idea. Getting accurate numbers feels a bit like 'cheating' so to say, but sitting behind a virtual screen does have the disadvantage of not physically feeling the gradients.
I’d be okay with anything that gives an idea of what the track is doing. And yeah the lack of physical motion is always gonna be an Achilles heel for sim games (smooth braking in truck sim is an art form ) Percentage would probably be easiest for DTG to implement because it’s already there on a different section of the screen. I got this idea when I was playing cross city line. Tons of grades. Some of them have me powering into the station until almost the platform so I don’t lose momentum. It’s a good time
A more pronounced tilt in the cabin could also be introduced. You go up - you move away from the glass a bit. You're going from above - you're getting closer. Just like the inertia forces on the driver's head in a car.
Excellent idea.The HUD as it is now, is way too large. This has already been acknowledged by Matt quite some time ago (https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/smaller-hud.44290/) but nothing has changed in TSW3. There is too much clutter, interfering with the driver’s view.
Agreed, that would be superb. I have a copy of Ian Allan’s “Gradients of the British Main Line Railways” sitting next to my computer which I use in this way, but it doesn’t cover the entirety of all TSW routes, and some routes (including Cross City, which is actually an amalgamation of multiple different historical routes) are across several different charts, so there’s a certain amount of page turning required en route. Incidentally, I’d strongly recommend the above book - whether to use with TSW or otherwise - to anyone who doesn’t have it. It’s simply a collection of gradient profiles - nothing else - and is a different way of looking at and understanding the railways of the UK.
I agree I ready wish DTG would provide maps and gradient profiles as downloadable PDFs, it doesnt need to be fancy as I would be able to add comments onto it as I went along.
Just simulate a half-filled glass / bottle of water and keep it somewhere in every cab. Can act as a HUDless gradient detector ( by tilt in the surface ) & Force feedback system ( by sloshing ). Thoughts ?!
That's a pretty good idea!! Another option would be to adopt the color-coded accelerometer that appeared on HMA and then never again (maybe on some of TSG's locos?). I found it very helpful!
That’s a brilliant idea, actually, using a glass of water or maybe a cup of coffee. Only thing I don’t know is how resource-hungry it would be, especially if you want the force-feedback implemented.
Thanks for appreciation. Waiting for it to see the light of the day... Actually, the force-feedback system is implemented... This thing on the HUD denotes acceleration / retardation... And force is proportional to change in momentum ( Thanks, Mr. Newton ) Because the train won't change its mass ( drastically ) during a journey, they can assume the force to be directly proportional to this HUD element's value... Whatever variable holds this value already exists in the game's code. All they need to do is to tie it down to a ( dynamic ) graphical model.
Bring it on and this will be helpful for heavy Mountain routes if they arrive in game something like Bahnstrecke Salzburg Spittal Villach Tauernbahn & Drautalbahn ÖBB SBB Gotthardbahn. Because you will be dealing with steep uphill sections and steep downhill segments due to those routes actually crossing the Alps north to south
================================ In some routes (I apologize for not remembering which ones), this indicator appears in two colors, one designating increasing speed and the other decreasing. I seem to recall that at one time DTG promised to extend this system to all routes, but that has yet to happen and I very much wish it would.
I was referring to this: If you want this to actually look realistic, it's going to be resource hungry. Fluid dynamics are notoriously resource-heavy. It's a TSG thing. DTG doesn't seem to like/encourage it because colour-blind people are excluded from the benefits. TSG did say though that their own locos will continue to have it as far as I recall.
I can't help wondering how many color-blind people play any of DTG's train simulators and whether they actually care about this possibility.
Well, given that over 4% of the population are colour blind, I suppose the answer to the first question is ‘hundreds’. The proportion of those who want an indication of whether the train is accelerating or decelerating is probably similar to the rest of the population. Personally it doesn’t interest me because it’s not something a real Driver sees, but clearly there are some who like to have it.
Am I missing something? The HUD already has a gradient indicator. Or wait, you mean in the same format as ”next signal/speed limit”?
Force is actually mass times acceleration. Mass times change in momentum would be proportional to mass squared. Force is also the change in momentum with respect to time. So to change your momentum there needs to be a force acting on you over a duration of time.
No, we're talking about two different suggestions here: Detach the grade indicator from the speedometer. Many in this thread, including me, turn off the speedometer in order to focus on the actual instruments in the cab, but this also gets rid of the gradient indicator, which is useful to simulate the physical feedback in the actual train of going up- or downhill. Another idea to mitigate the same issue was to have something like a glass of water in the cab to give the same feedback of the current grade with the HUD turned off.
Of course, the driver/engineer would not see such an indicator, but he or she would almost certainly be both physically and visually aware of whether speed was increasing or decreasing. A possible solution could involve having this acceleration/deceleration indicator consist of a single arrowhead that changes position and direction (i.e. either an arrowhead pointing upward when speed is increasing or downward when speed is decreasing, with no arrowhead visible when speed is constant.
Maybe less visually appealing but I'd rather just have an acceleration value as a detachable HUD indication from the main HUD. Simugraph supports this (the ball is animated based on an acceleration value). So you would for example have an indication of a = 0.5 m/s^2 or 1.12 mph/s or 67 mph/min depending on unit, somewhere on the screen. Maybe as an option.
I see your point. Personally speaking, I'd also be fine with pdf maps of the routes giving information on the gradients. What annoys me is simply that I mostly have to do a few runs with the full HUD on for route learning before I can drive "properly".
Nothing personal mate, just my OCD; being an engineer IRL. The point I want to convey... What I meant was... * I edited that mistake in the OP. Thanks for pointing out ( Part of being an engineer is to make mistakes, so we get paid to fix them lol ) Cheers
No worries I always prefer equations because then there is less room for misunderstanding (but of course it might be a bit intimidating or cumbersome to readers that are not engineers like yourself). It might interest you to know that the acceleration/deceleration indicator in TSW is simply numerical time derivative of the "ground speed" taken from the axles (the axle class is what contains this information, of course it could just as well have been taken from "the body" but afaik that is not how Simugraph does it) this numerical derivative is then time averaged over short time duration to smooth out all the oscillations that are inherent in Simugraph (don't ask me why, I think it has to do with a mix of truncations and the asynchronous/parallel computing nature of the physics engine, but that's just speculation, I'm not an engineer - the software kind). The time averaging is a reason for why there is some lag in the "ball". So for this purpose no force or mass is involved. Of course, these are very important for the rest of the physics. Since the acceleration measurement does not care about forces it is important that the correct quantity is used. If "rail speed" (rotational speed of the wheels) is used you get very funny acceleration indications if the locomotive is slipping and if you use velocity, well then deceleration suddenly becomes acceleration and vice versa if the locomotive is reversing. Yes, I'm speaking from experience of messing that up...
Makes sense... TSW isn't the only software with problems like these. The golden rule about mathematical simulations is that 'The more realistic you make it, the more realistic it wants to be' And it's perfectly fine to 'calculate the parameters like velocity w.r.t. axels rather than the body'. My speculation is that some years down the line when you have a plethora of steam locomotives ( with a variety of driving characteristics ), you may end up in a situation where one loco. might experience wheelslip due to its load limits and others would work perfectly fine. And the components like the radius of driving wheels and so on would be relevant at that time. Can picture in my head, what that would look like XD Couldn't agree more on that...
So this is a rather timely thread, as just this past weekend I was showing the game to a friend who happens to be an engineer for the Canadian-Pacific that goes through town here. He actually gave me some crap when he saw the grade indicator on the screen. So, I asked what happens in the "real world" with grades, and what he said was this; "You really can't detect the minor to mid grade changes through a route, as there is too much rocking and vertical motion in the cab to get a good feel for it. Basically it comes down to experience, as in how many times you have made the particular trip. When I was very new, the grade would get the best of me very often. I would start to detect a speed drop, or an increase, depending, and then make an adjustment to compensate, only to realize I over-did it, or the grade simply changed again, and chased my tail constantly. This was taught to me very early in my training when riding second-seat. I would notice the engineer make adjustments to the throttle or even the brakes, and not feel why he made the change. I also clearly could tell we weren't losing or gaining speed when he made those changes. Pretty quickly I realized he was *anticipating* the change, and therefore he was able to keep the speed very constant throughout the route. It took me many trips to even get close to that level of control, and probably a good 5 years into the job to match what I saw those first days. So, it's all about knowing the route like the back of your hand, knowing when you need to add or remove throttle, and tossing brake control in there as well." So that was a cool thing to hear. Overall, he was genuinely impressed at the accuracy of simulation, and commented that it wasn't as "cheesy" as he expected it to be.
