It's a damn shame about the auto generated timing, but not the end of the world. It's a very minor thing for me, in my head I'll just round it up or down to the nearest minute. I'm surprised so many people were unaware of the 385's infamously small view from the cab. I think people are being a bit dramatic, it's not like looking through a keyhole and it's not much worse than an Electrostar. I'm gonna assume these people also haven't touched Spirit of Steam because the view from the cab of steam locomotive is far worse than the 385.
It doesn't make much difference I guess, it is more irritating than anything. As long as the timings are attainable by a player of course. I still think it is an odd decision but shouldn't really take anything away from the quality of the route, if it lives up to its promise thus far.
It's a bit of a rubbish window. But unfortunately, you can't really knock it as it is realistic. I guess you should be looking at the signals and the instruments and not Edinburgh Castle
I do love how Rivet releases these videos about how they have developed the route they are working on. Gives quite a bit of insight into the process.
It's beginning to feel like Rivet are becoming in TSW who they were known to be in TSC, a developer creating unique, high quality routes with lots of novel features. Even though this route doesn't include any branches, the inclusion of new features more-or-less makes up for that. Now I'm only hoping the timetable turns out to be good, as that is the main thing that makes TSW so enjoyable.
What are everyone's thoughts on the announcements? From what I've learned from some YouTube comments and stuff, the announcements aren't a 1:1 to real life and that is too immersion breaking for them to purchase it. I'm assuming it's due to copyright or licensing. I still love the feature regardless cuz I've never been on the train in real life.
I'm very impressed with all the features and attention to detail from Rivet - which is really great to see and certainly sets a benchmark for future routes from DTG and other third-parties as well. However, as you say, I hope too the timetable matches the same level of enthusiasm - as I mentioned elsewhere, this will separate a good route with an excellent one, so fingers crossed.
I totally agree. Unless the announcements sound indistinguishable from Mel Gibson's William Wallace, it doesn't feel like a Scottish route to me. /s
Are you talking about the authentic annoucements that have been made public by Scotrail? If so that would be neat. I thought Rivet were going to use those in the first place.
I think Rivet were slightly mistaken - the ones made public by ScotRail are station announcements, not onboard train announcements. The ones they previewed in the video sound custom made to me. They aren’t the same as the real life ones. I might be able to ‘creatively’ come up with a few phrases by stitching the station announcements together.
As long as they sound close to the originals I'm happy. And besides, I'd rather have inaccurate announcements than none at all.
What i have written earlier the whole point is.... This is a simulation that can't present the 100% real world... So if the announcements are realistic or recreate the real world for me thats enough. Its impossible to create real 100% world...
We didn’t get Falkirk Grahamston, Camelon , Larbert,or stirling stations but looks like we got more services than just the Edinburgh and Glasgow. Probably some will be about 20 minute services
I've seen enough here to pre-order and get the discount. I've been driving a lot of the IOW services recently and forgot how much I liked that Rivet route.
I agree that, although it spoils the immersion, you can round up/down and try to ignore it. I think the issue with it for me is that it means that they definitely haven’t used a real timetable - if they had it would be 30s intervals. They’ve let the AI make up the timetable. It may possibly have real departures times at the point of origin, but even if it does, after that it’s completely fictional. This means the running times aren’t correct. This is the huge error DTG made with SoS and completely ruined the route with ridiculous scheduled running times. With an electric train the variations are likely to be less different to reality than with steam, but none the less it’s not going to be realistic, and it’s not going to feel realistic. The frustration is that it’s such a simple concept to get right. Look at timetable. Type in numbers. It takes time of course, but I doubt making the lifts work was a 5 minute job. DTG (Joe the Fish) managed to input a real timetable on London-Brighton which had far more trains than this route will, and whenever anybody talks about that route the first thing they comment on is the brilliant timetable. It’s really important for a lot of people.
I thought that was more to do with the fact that those timings were for more powerful locomotives than the Jubilees seen in TSW. In real life, Jubilees didn't really work Euston to Liverpool expresses, that was the domain of more powerful Stanier Pacifics and Royal Scots, so keeping to time in TSW is already quite difficult.
As long as the times are achieveable, I dont care if they are ai generated or human.. I'm not going to sit and compare the two and complain if they don't match up precisely. One thing I would like to see are the rapid loading times like on the BCC, that way if you're running late, you can hope to make up time
Looking good, but I'm thinking it may be a green signal route, I.e not much crossing your path etc. Maybe not much in the way of approach control needed on this route either? It's a weird one for me, I may not actually buy this immediately but we'll see how it pans out. I hope they make a few different cab views to give us some more viewing options.
I believe those options already exist and are called "zooming in" and "external camera view". Seriously where were all these people when Spirit of Steam came out, where the cab view is far worse than the 385? I just don't get all these people saying this view is the most deplorable thing in existence. You can see everything you need to and if you want to see more, you can just use one of the dozens of other camera views TSW3 already provides.
It is supposed to be a simulator, if that is what the drivers view is in real life, then surely it should be what is simulated.
Spirit Of Steam gave you a good head out view which is what the crew would be using when looking for signals etc. I think they may have added it subsequently, but am I right in thinking as originally released the Rivet 150/2 didn't actually offer a driver's droplight/head out view?
Not even steam drivers would have their heads out constantly, especially in adverse weather. And they still wouldn't be able to see around corners in the opposite direction. They'd have to rely on their fireman. But the 385's view is awful, apparently. If you showed a steam driver that view they'd have been more than happy.
I get it, but in real life you get the periphery views at the same time which gives more of a sense of speed and things to see. All I'm suggesting is another cab view, just like Mmmsim or 377 driver where the gauges are overlaid and we get to see the great scenery that the route builders have created. Of course we can still use the 3 key and position the camera in front of the cab.
I'll just use the 385 in passenger mode but for driving I'll be using the scenario creator and be driving proper trains, a class 47/7 with Scotrail rolling stock, not prototypical nowadays but hey ho, I don't care.
The core 'Standard Edition' cost me £17 and that came with several routes, so spending nearly 30 on a single DLC stings a bit given the current economic climate (although I did buy some cheap ones in the Winter sale). I think the other half might have something to say if that one popped up on the Bank Statement ... maybe next Christmas?
They essentially make a loss with the standard edition since it’s so cheap. The DLCs are the true money-makers, and they are quite expensive. But there are many sales on all platforms with steep discounts throughout the year. If you’re a new player and have many routes on your “to buy” list, chances are that at least one of these DLCs will be steeply discounted within a few weeks. Around two years ago, buying the deluxe edition of TSW2020 was a great way to cheaply get some of the well-received older add-ons. It personally kick-started my TSW journey, got six routes for like 20 bucks! But they unfortunately removed these editions from the storefronts soon after. I wish they brought them back. The game needs to be more accessible for new players, and putting some of the very old add-ons in a cheap bundle really wouldn’t hurt them massively financially.
There was the Festival of Rail event around this time last year which featured some big discounts. Let's hope 2023's iteration will happen soon as this will be a good opportunity for you to expand your collection
Sometimes you don't have to wait long for a decent sale. For example, BCC was released on 11/17 and was 25% discounted when I bought it on 12/22.
No. The timings on SoS are far, far faster than those for a Royal Scot or Stanier Pacific in real life. In fact, they’re not far off modern-day Pendolino timings. It’s completely ridiculous.
That’s one of the things I dislike the most about Cross-City (which is otherwise a good route on the whole). The rapid loading means it’s ridiculously easy to keep time. As you say, if you lose some time, you just get it back in the station stop, so there’s never any challenge to it. At least on other routes if you lose some time you have to use your own skill to make the time back. On Cross City it’s just handed back to you. On Cross City I ignore the loading time shown and wait at least 30 seconds at every station. That solves the problem, and I prefer it to having unrealistic 10 second stops, but it still isn’t a particularly satisfying solution.
The actual passenger timetables for 1958 are available on Timetable World and it's possible to look up the real timings, which are perfectly attainable with the Jubilee and nothing like the auto-generated timings. For instance, in the real life timetable, the 5:20 am departure from Crewe to Liverpool with a single stop at Edge Hill arrives into Lime St at 6:21 am, so allocated just over an hour. The 5:31 am Crewe departure in-game with the same stop is timetabled to arrive in Liverpool at 6:12 am (thereby allocated just 41 minutes) and is pretty much impossible. The situation typically gets worse with start-stop 'local' services as it's even harder to keep up with the timings. I can't emphasise enough how completely broken the auto-timetable is. Here's a bit of that timetable if you want to check it out for yourself: I really, really hope there's a significant fix package in the works for SoS as it's unfortunately a mess from a gameplay perspective which is a real shame. I'm not usually very negative about TSW (god knows I play enough of it) but this really needs to be looked at. The other consideration (and this is true for any route that uses auto-timing) is that it puts AI trains in the wrong place at any given time, as once they're dispatched from their origin station, they effectively run full-tilt all the way to the end instead of following the real world timings (which can often include longer stops at stations for various real-life reasons). I have a theory that with a busy enough timetable you'd actually need to start putting in intermediate timings accurately anyway as otherwise there would be a high risk of trains getting stuck in the wrong place because they've arrived too early and been given priority by the dispatcher where they shouldn't - of course all of the routes with the auto-timetable so far have been relatively quiet so we haven't yet run into those kinds of issues. I wonder if London to Brighton for instance would fall over if it was all auto-timed instead of planned properly by Joe.
But it comes in handy when you have impossible timings to meet, like on Cathcart Circle when you have 30 seconds to make it .6 mile to the next station and by no fault of your own end up running 2 minutes late because the timetable is impossible to keep too. There's no skill involved there, you are penalised because the timetable has been poorly created. That's another reason why I'd rather an AI generated one, at least it'll give you *semi* achieveable times.
Not sure what to make of this (and not sure where to comment it either), but the rc_preview branch on SteamDB, where finished patches usually show up a few days before being released, just had a change published for what looks to be every single DLC in the entire game. This could be some internal maintenance/housekeeping, but I’ve never seen a change like this before. So perhaps they’re testing an update that will affect every piece of content like the long-awaited Add-On Manager? https://steamdb.info/app/1944790/history/?changeid=17447430
Agreed - I did some comparisons based on that timetable and there’s a thread about it here: https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/spirit-of-steam-scheduled-running-times.55795/
I’m not aware of that on Cathcart but it sounds like a typo when inputting the schedule. Generally speaking the input schedules are much less likely to be unachievable because they’re tried and tested in the real world.
It's not impossible to keep time on Cathcard, you just have to begin closing the doors before the game tells you to. After pressing the door close button, it will take like 5 seconds for the doors to actually close, so you can press it when the Load Passengers circle is still only 3/4 full.
I think its between Shawlands and Pollockshaws that it's most common, but also between heading to Newton, via Mt Florida, you can't make it to the first station off the circle without being at least a minute late, unless you speed.
I am well aware. Its actually closer to 9 seconds on the 314. And yes, it is, especially, as I have said, some timings are impossible to make, i believe its between Shawlands and Pollickshaw that it gives you 30 seconds, which isn't achieveable
