NZTS Workshops has been working on a total overhaul of their Midland Line: Aickens - Springfield Route and it looks absolutely lovely. I do not own the route but I really like the look of these screenshots from the upcoming update. I certainly am going to want the route more than ever now, not often do you see a developer going back and updating almost their entire route to look better. I am very impressed! Some higher quality screenshots from their facebook post.
Here is another post they made earlier in February. After taking a look at some of their products on the Steam store, I have come to the conclusion that NZTS Workshops are certainly an underrated developer for Steam store Train Simulator content. Their stuff all looks amazing, they receive amazing reviews on Steam but I just don't often see that many people talking about them. I always love to see areas outside of Europe and North America getting some love too, it's always a breath of fresh air seeing countries like this getting some attention and then being done well. They aren't perfect, no developer is but they are certainly very good!
Once the route is playable not only on cutting edge hardware, they'll surely not gonna be underrated.
I have looked at the route but it is too slow - in terms of train speed - for me. The Maximum Line Speed for PASSENGER Services is 45mph and FREIGHT/GOODS Services are limited to 30mph Do the scenarios run in 3 parts - Diesel - Electric - Diesel? There is no information in the Manual
Alas, the texture and model updates cannot fix the frames as well as I'd have liked - the issue is about 80% related to how TSC renders terrain (In short mountains = bad for FPS) - we're experimenting with a few techniques there but I dont have high hopes for massive improvements, though I do expect to get some.
The scenarios are set up to run as one service only rather than as multi-stage scenarios. The low speeds are largely due to the nature of the terrain, 1:50, 1:33 etc gradients and tight corners hugging cliff faces dont lend themselves to high speed!
So a scenario would take you to where the electrics start - then another over the top and a third from where the diesels start?
We've had mountains for ages. Feather River Canyon, Canadian Mountain Passes, Stevens Pass... no issues there. Sure it's not vegetation (3D, shadow casting) and too much of it in distant scenery that could be replaced by simpler 2D objects?
Most of the distant scenery is non shadow casting, view facing flora or simple quad trees. I have spent considerable time narrowing down the root cause, and its definitely largely terrain related and has a lot to do with the large valleys present for all of the route. Terrain renders at its full 8m mesh resolution, as far as the eye can see it, and does full detail terrain shadows for this distance as well. That means back when the terrain was imported, we made a critical mistake - we used high-resolution (>10m) data for all the terrain, including distant stuff, which is now generating needlessly complex shadows on terrain 30km from the player up the back of various valleys etc the line briefly crosses. Performance of the route is much improved if one deletes all the terrain tiles so its flat as a pancake, which is a clear sign the terrain itself is causing us issue. We're working on an option to load in lower resolution terrain for more distant hills/valleys/mountains, but its not easy as we don't want any sharp changes etc.
They could be done this way, but aren't. Each of the included scenarios is a stand-alone trip on one of the three portions of the route - which I elected to do to make things a bit more interesting. Trains weren't timetabled directly through anyway though, they'd get brought to either end of the tunnel then broken down/built up to the max weight for the electrics up the 1:33 incline and taken through. The electrics ran many more up/down trips a day than there were trains either side of the tunnel.
Thank you for the insight - that explains while I'm still experiencing stutters even on the lowest Scenery settings. Good luck in updating - the route deserves it! I've purchased all content you've released but really wish I could enjoy it in full bloom . I will try to play it without DynamicLighting and see what difference it makes (as it uses way more simple shadows) I'm also experiencing less loading stutters when packing all of the assets into a single 8 GB .ap file.
Be Careful turning Dynamic Lighting off, I think that makes the signal lights vanish (not just on the Midland Line, but on many other routes too!) We had no say in how the route was distributed, I was surprised to learn it was not in an AP file when it first released! Hopefully the update isn't too far away from being able to go to Dovetail, but this terrain issue is taking quite a bit of resolving as we don't want to simplify the wrong tile!
Not been on it recently so can't say about the patch. I do know it was rather prone to crashing. However biggest issue for me was that. despite my love of the superior steam experience in TSC compared to TSW, I just couldn't get to grips with the really complex loco including the need to manage lubrication. So that and the persistent crashing essentially made me put it to one side - despite the superb scenery.
Doesn't crash for me. They solved the terrain issues and performance has massively improved, it ran at 60 FPS even on my old i7-870+GTX1050.
On Steam the update for the route was released on 28 June 2023 at 09:02:45 UTC (info taken from SteamDB - the earlier patch for the route was on 19 January 2023 – 10:01:32 UTC, so before the route update). I hadn't had the route before the patch, but just got it in the last 2 hours of the winter sale now, along with a couple of other NZTS add-ons for it. I did only 4 of signalling tutorials and one of passenger scenarios until I spadded. It plays so far quite nice on a docked Steam Deck (with connected monitor's resolution set to 1600x900). It didn't crash while I was driving, but I needed to restart TSC between switching scenarios (to load another one). The performance is quite good as for playing it on Steam Deck.
I must give it another try then. If I can fathom that steam loco. Or I may borrow a Kiha diesel unit from one of the Japanese routes!
I bought it during the Christmas sales. FPS isn't a problem, it's the pauses that are. It's a real festival, some can last +-5'' in some places! Of all the roads I own, this is the only one I have a problem with! Very disappointed. If anyone has a solution, I'd love to hear it. Richard.
Are you playing from a harddisk or SSD? This, and Taurus Mountains are some of the most asset-heavy routes in TSC. (10GB) On my old PC (i7/GTX1050/HDD) I gained a massive loading improvement boost by packing the assets into an .ap file. Go to RailWorks\Assets\NZTSWS\MidlandNZ folder using 7zip. In there, select all contents and click on "Add", select .zip format and compression "0 - Store". Rename the resulting 10 GB file to MidlandNZAssets.ap and delete the previous files (or back them up if you wish, but remove them from the folder.) Do the same for the route files RailWorks\Content\Routes\b7ad4b52-9cf7-48d2-9aba-69f37bb420c6 Again select all contents and zip them using zero compression. Then rename that file MainContent.ap and delete the old files.
I presume you mean you are driving along and the game Freezes for up to 5 mins? Or do you mean you wait at some places for up to 5 mins because you are early or another train is coming?
Thank you very much! I'm playing from HD. I can't find the compression "0 - Store" option. My 7zip is french... Richard.
