PC Ongoing 'citywide Power Cut' Issues Within Tsw

DTG. Simply. Don’t. Care.

But why should they? They can put out any old crap, no matter how broken or inaccurate, and as long as it says TSW on the download people are falling over themselves to buy it. They play it for 48hrs, come on here and complain about the game breaking bugs and inaccuracies then immediately start speculating on what’s the next thing to waste their money on. You can set your watch by the cycle. As far as TSW goes, what incentive do DTG have to change the MO? This issue with lighting is just one of the many long-standing, immersion breaking, problems with this game that will never get fixed. This is basic (very basic) stuff after all.

There was a very interesting update on TSC released by DTG just before Christmas which shows there’s a lot of life in the old dog yet (including switching to DX12 - just me seeing the irony?). I haven’t played it in a long time despite owning a small fortune of content for it because whilst graphically it can look very good the performance was often lacking. The TSC Dev team, small as it may be, clearly see that though and are taking steps to address it. Any PC players who are actually into real simulation would be far better off backing that horse IMHO. I completely uninstalled TSW the other day and plan to reinstall TSC…I for one am fed up of being taken for a mug.

 

The most embarrassing thing is, is that a vast majority of these commonly used assets are simply a port over from Train Sim Classic.

Now I don’t mind this, but at least have the decency to set the assets up properly. They’re currently in a half-arsed/incomplete setup. I’m pretty sure most, if not all the building assets can correctly illuminate at night?

Same with things like cranes and excavators. They animate in Train Sim Classic but in Train Sim World, they’re completely static and lifeless.

Many people are offering to help out to make Train Sim World a better game, including myself. But you make application process extremely difficult to even be considered, which you’re just shooting yourself in the foot with.

Basic things like a simple building illumination not working properly just isn’t acceptable for a game in 2022, rapidly entering 2023 now.

Come on DTG. Step up your game and get the basics right. You’ve had more than enough time to sort these issues out.

 

For me this proofes dtg has no line in their internal development process. I mean the work of proper setting up commonly used assets has to be done one time, then it should work whenever this building is used in a route.

Its like it was mentioned above, they simply not care because it has probably little impact on sales.

I like to pay a way more higher price for good quality.
But increacing price and rushing routes out in a unfinished state...., well nothing to say anymore.

In tsc it happend with one addon in 2019 which just was too much for me in bad quality, let me uninstall entire tsc after a 10k investment (incl third party), and never reinstalled it, also never will.

So what would have happened if we didnt get the screenshots of the missing pillars of birmingham newstreet? Probably they would have released it this way...

I mean i still enjoy tsw, but if they actually increase in price, dtg well ok, but deliver your part on your side!!!

 

Commonly used assets (like general looking buildings and vehicles) should also be shared across routes, like in TSC. But no, instead every route has their own copy of each asset, meaning if 20 routes use the same building, that building will be stored on your hard drive 20 times instead of just once.

Really makes me wonder what is going on inside DTG when things like this happen.

 

Another thing I've noticed on Birmingham Cross City is that a lot of street lights do not light up when it is dark. I don't know if this is because they are linked to a specific on/off time or whether they are just broken but this is the main road outside of Aston Station.

Completely unrealistic looking with zero light sources from any buildings...

 

And zero light emanating from the car headlights either whereas this sort of thing was totally commonplace in games 10 years ago. TSW is just a complete mess in so many different ways it’s hard to see how they rectify it.

 

I remember the night lighting in games like GTA San Andreas - and that was 17 years ago. And yes, yes, before anyone raises the usual chestnut of Rockstar being a multi $billion developer, well DTG aren't exactly doing this from a bedroom PC or charging shareware prices either. Two routes at the new price would have bought GTA V with change, on release. And if you can't manipulate the game engine to do decent lighting or employ graphic/3D/route artists who can bring a night scene to life - then maybe they are in the wrong business.

 

Tbh the first time I see cars casting shadows I thought it was a waste of resources, car lights would be another waste. I'd much rather see some light shafts in foggy conditions and some kind of glow around the city in the distance.

 

Why bother with anything then? Why not just do with a track and a train? No need for any of this scenery nonsense then.

DTG have brainwashed people with this whole ‘resources’ rubbish. Just how bad is the engine that this game runs on that stuff that has been a basic provision in virtually every other game for at least 15 years is seen as something game-breaking? Is it UE4 that is an absolute heap, SimuGraph or both? Something somewhere is very wrong if this comes down to resources. This isn’t even a Gen 8 thing, we all played GTA V on the PS4, we know know what is was capable of. The whole lighting engine in TSC is better than it is in TSW.

You do play other games right? TSW is the exception, not the rule.

 

I don't see how the odd look at traffic here and there warrants the cars having shadows or beaming headlights. They drive up and down the roads the wrong way, float, spawn right infront of you and dissappear just the same. When cars turn corners they look like they are powersliding, they don't add any emersion to the game.

Other scenery, trees, buildings, shadows, tracks, ballast all things that have major problems in one way or another are more important to me.

I'm not saying dtg should be left to get away with the state of things, I'm not defending them either. Just pointing out that my gpu rendering shadows or lights on traffic could better be used rendering shadows on the tracks properly or trees whatever.

I play a lot of other games, some look a 100 times better that tsw and some look a lot worse.

At the end of the day tsw is the mess we are stuck with! It's got so many problems it's past the point of no return.
I hope on the future dtg will drop tsw and start again and take some of the players suggestions onboard.

 

Glasgow's skyline is looking pretty decent to be honest.

 

Well, this is what Glasgow actually looks like at night…



For comparison, this is the PC version of GTA V which, remember, was originally released in 2013. The PC version came out in 2015, 2 years before TSW surfaced.



See the similarity between the image of Glasgow and the video? Still think TSW3 looks ok by comparison?

Crucially, however, GTA V originally came out on PS3. Wanna see what a 10 years old PS3 game looked like?



Are we still seriously pretending that TSW3 is anything other than a complete and utter joke when it comes to all things lighting?

If it can’t be seen from these examples what is wrong with TSW’s environmental lighting then I give up. The gaping chasm between the in-game Glasgow skyline and what it should look like is absolutely monumental. That image of Glasgow does not look good!

 

Not city night lighting, but still regarding lighting, going back to my previous point about light flares, I have come to the conclusion that something is set up very wrongly in recent routes.

This is Peninsula Corridor in TSW3.



And this is Cajon Pass in TSW3:


On Peninsula Corridor, a very old route from the TSW2020 days, the train headlights have proper flares (still not visible from distance though, but at least they are there) and so does the sun. On Cajon Pass (or any other newer route), the headlights and the sun are just hard edges, no real flare to them.

I assume everyone agrees which one looks better. So I wonder, what went wrong and where?

 

Whilst you can see building lighting, the overall night lighting still looks complete trash for a modern game.

Granted this is an older TSW 2 route but TSW 3 routes have had virtually no change to night lighting (apart from making the world darker at night.)

So the main issues are still here - lack of light sources and lack of global illumination from said light sources - such as city light pollution.

 

Granted you are entitled to your own opinion, but I disagree.
I've played games with better lighting, sure, but I also play games with FAR WORSE lighting.

To me, the game functions and I'm immersed.

 

It may be connected to the fact that with older routes, the flare around signal lights was a huge hazy blob (in fact, one can't tell a double from a single yellow until close), and so they may have reduced light-source flare across the board. I've noticed that Cajon Pass now has the opposite problem- signal lights aren't visible at all at much of a distance (whereas, I believe, FRA spec is 1/2 mile in clear weather).

 

Yes. A couple of us brought this up back in October, but it elicited no response from DTG.

 

What I find baffling is that even if the buildings have light sources they aren't actually lit up (such as no lights in windows). That photo of Birmingham in the OP is hilariously bad - Gran Turismo had better night lighting on the PS1...

 

That resumes perfectly what puzzles me for more than a year now: That questionable narrative of "TSW being an absolute resource hog, comparable to nothing. None, zilch, niente, nada ....."...... "No game whatsoever can stand beside this train sim for comparison " ......... yadayada. Even from such recognized specialists like Maik from TSG.
It puts a knot into my brain when I look at the recently purchased HORIZON - Forbidden West running with superb graphics, fantastic lighting / shadowing, awesome detailings, photorealistic fur, hair, flowers etc. waving in the winds. And all that running smoothly like a charm on, guess where, ...... my oh-so outdated PS4 Slim. And there was me thinking that the latest Assassin´s Creed graphics couldn´t be topped .........

Ah, I get it ...... TSW is a much cheaper game ........... oh wait?!

 

It's worth bearing a few things in mind.

Firstly, comparing to games in completely different genres on totally different platforms is like comparing apples with roadsigns. There will be nothing in common between them in terms of technology. "Just because game (a) did this, game (b) therefore..." is a flawed argument that is easy to make, but for anybody with game development experience will know just doesn't add up. Spend 10 years learning Russian, then take this test in Mandarin.

Secondly, the price of a game isn't just related to how "perceived good" a game is. It's related to whether or a not a business can make a meaningful profit. A game like TSW does not have the same size of audience that a game like GT or GTA does, so in order to build on an ongoing basis each release needs a P&L that shows they will earn more than they spend - if releases make a loss consistently, then either DTG has to decide whether to keep funding at a loss because it's an important long-term bet for them, or they call it a day and end new production.

Thirdly, a game like HORIZON will have a budget of around $100 million to create. That's the cost of doing business for AAA games these days. How much do you think goes into TSW on an annual basis? *HINT not $100m.

Believe me, I'm as keen to see improvements on an ongoing basis with TSW as (almost) anybody (okay, I don't know enough about trains to worry too much about things like sounds, etc). I've asked about background lighting on streams in the past, and will again; and I would love to be able to go back to SOS at some point this century, not to mention a dozen or more other things that should really be fixed pre-release.

But when I see folks saying stuff like "Oh GTA did this 10 years ago" this really isn't a basis for criticism - and it's fine for folks not to know the ins and outs of development, but I feel like it needs some clarification.

Personally, I think the single biggest decision that's hindered TSW becoming really solid and really good is releasing on console. You would not BELIEVE how much additional resource and time has to go into multi-platform releases - and that's not just the timeframe between setting a bug as fixed and releasing that fix, but just how much effort it can be to wrangle what are quite different tech bases.

That said, I'm sure the GamePass license fee has made it worthwhile from a business perspective, while also increasing the potential audience a bit as well.

 

I think it’s clear that DTG do not have the same budget as triple A games, however, how hard is it to get the basics right?

Around <75% of buildings assets in TSW don’t even have a simple white light around the window surrounds that illuminate. As seen in the screenshots above, this makes cities look like they’ve had a power cut. They aren’t even recognisable at night because of how dark the approaches are.

I don’t expect global illumination, lighting reflections or light pollution at this stage (all the fancy looking stuff), but for simple things like buildings having no lights at all, there simply is no excuse for that.

 

Sorry but we should not be making excuses for DTG at this point, or feeling sorry for them. They are not doing this as some charitable exercise to fulfil a very minor gaming niche, the business plan has been worked out and at the price they are charging now the money must be tumbling in. They are a professional software company and there is no excuse for putting out a game with such shonky night lighting.

 

I always appreciate an insight view. And granted, I am ignorant when it comes to game development.
Still, there we go again, the everlasting polemics about what can be compared and what not. It looks like TSW is the holy grail of complex software and demands hardware developed for rocket science. Is it really THAT unique?

Sorry, I don´t buy it anymore. And can you blame me when you look at DTG´s track record of SW delivery?
I´m no stranger to high tech development which, these days, always include complex software. And what I´ve seen from DTG is hasty, amateurish, rushed out SW and correspondent "fixes" which break more than they cure. That´s putting it mildly.

Put whatever software you want to compare with TSW (I´m convinced it is not that unique), my point was that the PS4 is still capable to deliver decent graphic performances. Horizon and GTA as two of many examples.

Now, I didn´t purchase TSW3 because my gut feeling tells me that the PS4 Slim would be overwhelmed with it. This board is full of bug reports.
But why doesn´t DTG tell the customer that it can´t be handled by GEN8 consoles? Why? And why is there no mention of the unfamous 64GByte DLC limit for PS5? Not a single line, nothing!

Why do we learn it AFTER having purchased the DLCs? Suckers like me (spending a small fortune) who should´ve accessed these forums BEFORE downloading and installing what must be the most bug-infested software I´ve ever seen? Why?

That´s questionable work ethics in my book. To say the least. And that was the whole point of my post. If you can´t make it work on the consoles (not that the PC version is short of bugs!), leave it alone and don´grab the cash without warning your customer.

 

Yup. To me, anyway, the standard for realistic graphics (esp lighting effects) remains Red Dead Redemption 2- which was released in 2018 for 8th-gen consoles, and the hottest GPU available for PCs was the GTX1080.

So don't tell me that hardware is limiting TSW's graphics*

There, however, I have to disagree. The operative number is not the marginal price per copy, but aggregate sales revenue. A company like Rockstar or EA sells tens of millions of copies - I believe GTA V has passed the 200 million mark - and it is that total which permits production budgets on a Hollywood blockbuster scale.

_____
* The Youtube video bills itself as being 4k, but that's pointless since the game itself is in 1080 and has (rather notoriously) not been updated

 

This. I mean sure, it's understandable if they can't reproduce the graphics quality of AAA games. But half of the graphics issues in TSW stem from the fact that the assets they use to build route are simply made wrong/incompletely and lack basic effects.

For example, the game supports lit up texture overlays, as seen on many buildings and things like lit up cab dials. Yet more than half of the buildings lack any form of lighting, making cities dark.

95% of light assets also miss any form of light flare/halo effects, even though most of the track signals use them to make them visible from far - so why not locomotive headlights, car headlights and station lights? Then we could actually notice these things at night further apart, not only a from few hundred meters when the dynamic lighting actually starts rendering.

And regarding the original point of city night lighting, where are the street lights? If the game engine can handle 10-20 light sources at once at a station, then surely it could handle at least a few working street lights scattered around the streets, yet they are always so empty and dark. A good example is the Harlem Line, where stations are lit up pretty well, and most city buildings have lit up windows, yet the streets running alongside the tracks are completely dark. Looks very bad.

 

Just to be clear, I'm not suggesting we ignore the rest. Just that it's not realistic to measure TSW against the majority of other games. If anything, the closest comparison would be against other Unreal 4 Engine games, which there are plenty of... although different games use the engine in different ways, it's at least a basic level of comparison.

Essentially, though, there's no requirement for a comparison on track record. Things said in the past, if they're not lived up to, result in the reputational damage you describe. I think I'm more fortunate/less naive in that I've not been particularly invested in the game until the last 18 months or so, and therefore not had to go through that cycle of feeling let down so much.

Also OldVern I hope I'm not being accused of making excuses for DTG - that's for them alone to do. All I'm interested in doing is giving some insight into the context of comparisons. I'm as keen to see improvements as the next person.

 

No worries. Perhaps a more realistic comparison then in MSTS/OR or DTG's own TSC both of which do night lighting better than TSW. Apart from the night lighting TSW has suffered from other weird lighting since its inception. In TSW2 broad daylight would see ground and scenery covered with a sticky black tar like effect. That improved slightly in TSW3 but at a price of, unless you install a mod, being subject to the overcooked adaptive lighting DTG forced on us.

 

I do not understand how the budget is the issue here. The textures and models are fine like how they are in Train Simulator, it is just the lighting. Unreal 4 is a generic engine used by hundreds of developers around the world, the documentation for setting up good lighting is there and easy to use. YouTuber Reubs has been developing a remake of The Simpsons Hit And Run by himself which features ray tracing, cel shading and VR support and he didn't need a Sony budget to do it - it's just about learning how Unreal works and coding it correctly, which DTG haven't done. There is no real reason why the lighting in TSW is so poor other than bad decision making. TS may not be as refined when it comes to the graphics (although very often looks as good as or even better than TSW) but very rarely do you get the shockingly washed out or bland lighting you get in TSW... Just look at the trailers for the Class 385 Rivet have released. A beautiful model, but the yellow on the front is closer to white and I seriously doubt it has anything to do with them.

 

so true how do we as the operator who is driving the train can see at night, when its pitch dark as well? Its very dangerous if this happen in the real world

 

I’ll be interested to hear a response from a TSW developer on this topic.

I cannot, for one second, believe that simple white boxes on already low res assets will cause any sort of performance issue. The only reason I can think of is that it was never done because of time.

Though it does beg the question as to why this was never made a priority. If it still isn’t, this needs to change urgently with this issue sorted out. With the assets being shared across multiple routes, I’m hoping it only requires a global fix as opposed to every single route needed to be done individually.

If it’s the latter, then they really have shot themselves in the foot by not sorting this out from the beginning. It also raises the question as to why multiple identical assets are still assigned to individual routes, which take up storage space.

 

I'm very leery of this excuse that some essential feature or scenery was omitted due to " running out of time ". It shouldn't happen with any product ( Oh, sorry, didn't have time to actually wrap the cereal inside the box ).

We know that adequate night lighting is possible in TSW because it's been done in earlier routes. So its absence in BCC or any route since SPG is inexcusable.

 

Having a quick drive on BBO while waiting for ME Legendary to re-download (long OT story) and doing a drive in the rain and seeing passengers put their umbrellas up, that really debunks any and all of the, "Oh, they're only a small company", "they're not Rockstar/Bioware", "They don't make much money off the product", etc. excuses and platitudes for not dealing with the lighting. They obviously have people who are more than capable of doing intricate weather related animations and such like, so there is absolutely no excuse for having towns and cities with less ambient lighting than we had in Saxon England.

 

Will 2023 be the year night lighting will finally improve in TSW? One can dream...

 

Sadly there is basically zero shared scenery assets across routes in TSW. At least none I know of. Even the most widely used assets, like the generic warehouse buildings or parked cars, are all separate copies for each route. So it would be the same case as the skybox updates or the platform climb up functionalities, where the assigned team would need to update this on a route to route basis.

I can only agree with you saying they have shot themselves in the foot with this approach. Similarly to the identical copies of the same locomotive on different routes. They are creating a bigger and bigger mess of outdated, mismatched batches of assets with every new route release.

At least they finally started detaching locomotives from routes with the Training Center approach, but even that is only in game logic. The original rolling stock of a route is still stored in the same .pak file as the route itself, not separate. So for example, the new german route with the N Wagens released recently. If another route released with N Wagens as well, it would again be another duplicated sets of N Wagens, similarly to the god knows how many sets of Dostos we have.

 

Right now it's a one-sided conversation. We want it, we discuss it, but DTG haven't talked about it.
Unless and until it becomes a dialog, nothing will happen.

 

What's frustrating is that DTG giveth, but then DTG taketh away. Riesa-Dresden had magnificent night lighting, but it's never been repeated. The BR 612 for the first time had decent headlights- but no subsequent loco. Heck, Sand Patch had tunnel reverb five years ago- but that has also disappeared.

 

Indeed, it's highly frustrating. If there is just one thing I wish could be sorted uniformly across TSW, it's night lighting - especially on older routes. As you said with Riesa-Dresden, it's a baffling decision this was never continued. Compare this with fellow Rush Hour route, London Commuter for example, the night lighting on the latter at times looks like broad daylight and really ruins the immersion - and thus makes playing night services a bit of a chore.

Talking of night lighting, on non-TSW 3 routes, does anyone else experience the strange lighting issue where you start a service at night, and it does actually look dark - then, after a random amount of time, the lighting/surrounding scenery then suddenly becomes bright to the point it almost looks like daylight? This, is my most frustrating issue with TSW currently, not a game-breaking issue obviously, just annoying.

 

Yeah, that tends to happen on some routes. I especially remember Boston Sprinter having this issue a lot on night runs, where it starts out nice and dark, then after a few minutes it's very bright.

 

I was sold on Riesa to Dresden when they showed the night lighting in the stream, and on the occasions when I do play it (before it crashes) I generally play at night in the built up areas, solely for the lighting.

 

I know the devs are on their well earned holiday and they aren’t obliged to reply but it would’ve been nice to have at least one developer or someone from DTG acknowledge this issue.

Sometimes it feels like you’re shouting into the void.

 

Well, I drove the service from New Street to Lichfield and back. Even though I was driving in pitch darkness, I was determined to finish the darned thing. Couldn't see a thing, driving on instruments alone very cautiously and was about 15 minutes late getting back to BNS. Still got a gold star, can you believe!!

So much for TSW's scoring validity.

PS. Have to admit the 323 is fun to drive, a step above the Electrostars, if you will.

PPS. If only they would fix the night lighting, and add another AI train or two. BNS was completely, I mean utterly devoid of trains and people at about 6pm!

PPPS. Has anybody from DTG ever set foot in Birmingham?

PPPPS. And whatever happened to " Rush Hour "? Died on the vine I guess. Remember those foot- high headlines from the Summer of 2021?

 

Scoring literally makes no sense in TSW - you can literally do everything correct but still only get a bronze. Such as on short depot runs. I believe the only logic to the scoring is based off how many points you get, regardless to how long the actual journey is. So if you only have a short journey, its pretty much impossible to get a gold medal.

Birmingham New Street being empty of trains is not surprising, given that we only have the Class 323 for that route. Regarding the passengers, they have always been hit and miss. Although I think it still looks and sounds far too quiet for a major interchange station.

With the lack of city lighting, there's just no excuse for this at all. We're still awaiting a response from someone from DTG as to why it is so poor, on this route in particular.

 

I genuinely believe the target scores are input manually by the developers for each service. There doesn’t seem to be a clear pattern or an automated system, which is why mishaps like unobtainable gold medals can sometimes happen.
I think it shouldn’t be too hard to develop a unified bronze/silver/gold medal points formula by looking at the driven distance and stops/objectives awarding points per service… although that’s probably an unnecessary effort as long as they can simply make sure the target scores are reasonable during playtesting.

 

No response from dtg = nothing in the pipeline.
If assets are continously being recycled then why dtg can't find the time to put a bit of lighting into them is anyone's guess.
It's not like they have to remodel the building for each route is it?
One problem I have noticed with Windows on buildings, especially sos is the strange shape at a distance. They almost look like triangles?

As for performance, I've been spending a bit of time on cp2077 lately and at 1440p with Raytracing ultra I'm seeing around 60fps lows! even in built up areas with a lot of shadows, reflections, lighting, pedestrians and traffic etc... whereas tsw even though I'm getting highs of 160fps I'm still seeing dips into the 20s around places like Victoria. This is with out Raytracing obviously and not much lighting effects, reflections etc...

Can this be blamed on the game engine itself or something else?
Are there any graphics intense games running on unreal? I'd like to see how these perform.

 

You'd think they'd manage to at least reply to ONE message instead of us being left in the dark?

Regarding the triangle windows from a distance, I think this is to do with the reduced level of detail assets have when you're a certain distance away from them.

Obviously the weaker your specs are/if you have a last gen console, the more pronounced this will be.

 

This is an LOD issue.

It's a DTG issue without a doubt. I know it isn't a perfect comparison but Reubs' Simpsons Hit And Run remake is running on Unreal 5 at a locked 60 with dynamic time of day, ray tracing, cel shading and more.

Hellblade is an Unreal 4-based game which is a graphical powerhouse. Life Is Strange ran on Unreal 3 and looked great as well, albeit with data streaming issues on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Lumen In The Land of Nanite was a beautiful PS5 tech demo running on Unreal 5, although I think that was limited to 30fps.

 

Assuming they playtest. One bugaboo of mine occurs in any of the many scenarios where one has to change cabs to reverse direction or something: gold is almost never possible, because they expect a human player to make a cab switch and setup in the instantaneous time it takes an AI- and since that's not possible, you start the second leg hopelessly behind schedule.

 

Does anyone know what happened to the wonderful lighting of BR 612 and G6? Driving them at night used to be a delight and now it's a pain because they don't light up at all. Is it because of the new TSW3 lighting?
I'm going to tag Maik Goltz because TSG is the creator of these trains and maybe he can tell us something about it.
BR 612 on Tharandter Rampe:


BR 612 on Bremen-Oldrnburg:

 

I know all to well about dtg's no go areas, and threads that they will not get involved in.

I can't seem to find a lod setting for buildings and stations, I thought maybe it was static meshes but it don't seem to make any difference. I play on PC only with everything cranked right up and still get bad lod on a lot of objects. I've managed to sort the trees and tracks but not much else.