PC Will We Ever Get The Promised Fixes?

You mean in your experience as it seems there are plenty on here, including myself with the opposite experience.

SEHS runs for me better than it did in TSW2, plus you get an extended run on HS2, there is no way I would want to go back to the TSW2 version.

Maybe caveat your responses with "in my limited experience"!

 

Sigh.. reading. I know it's difficult, but stay with me here. I... Have... TSW3. I'll repeat that even slower for you. I........ Have......... TSW3.

 

The re-release of TSW under the TSW3 name might have been the stupidest idea they have done so far, in my opinion. Split your playerbase in two, anger them and barely get anything out of it. Seeing TSW3 player numbers (and the fact that the bundle pricing makes the base game basically free), the profit from the TSW3 paywall must have been really minimal, but they did put themselves in a situation where they now have two versions to maintain (if we actually believe there really are TSW2 fixes exsisting and it's not just a lie) until they completely drop TSW2, which means more work.

Who is responsible for such bad decisions at DTG?

 

I don't think this was the plan. It may look like a bad decision today, but I'm sure someone somewhere thought this was a great idea, worth beaucoup bucks.

 

I don't believe that beyond the fixes (if they ever come), TSW2 will be maintained and nor would I expect it to be. I'll be happy with the fix(es) we were told would come, so long as they don't break something else in the process.

 

It may not have been the plan, but it could have been predicted by a third-grader with a Ouija board.

 

I bought Dresden -Riesa Route two hours ago.
And I spent an hour on the first tutorial, because it broken.
I feel like "DIY". Why don't DTG fix it?

 

Good question and in some cases Red light bug still happens happened to me on Bremen Oldenburg fast delivery scenario

 

This situation reminds me of some advice I was given by a work colleague many years ago. He said that he wasn't the best looking man but never had a shortage of female acquaintances during his time at university. His philosophy being "Aim low, avoid disappointment!"

Adopting this attitude with most things DTG related may help with your mental health. If you expect anything that comes out Chatham Docks to be garbage, when it's not then you will feel happier!

 

Lets be honest, this was planned. DTG screwed up tsw2 to the point its unfixable. They then said they would pause dlc and focus on fixing bugs. This was a muse, a lie. Instead tws3 came out, worts and all. Tsw3 was a few years in the making prior to all this. We all know how long it usually takes to make a game . DTG make false promises, whilst pushing out bugged, broken content.

Don't get me wrong, i love tsw, and tsw3. What i don't like is DTGs attitude towards the game and players. I've no doubt the dtg fan club will be on me like flies to, well you know what.

 

$ git tag -a v3.0 -m "Train Sim World 3"
$ git push --tags

 

Um, what?

 

It takes literally seconds to make TSW3 from TSW2: you just choose to call it that.
TSW3 is the same code as TSW2 (at least it was, at some point in time).

 

How do you know this? Have you ever developed a game? It does not take seconds. You think it takes seconds to upgrade sounds? Upgrade physics, textures, lighting etc. Game dev ain't easy. And no, I'm not defending dtg

 

The point I am trying to make is that TSW3 started from TSW2 code. They added the lights, the clouds, dynamic weather, etc. But, because they started off with the original TSW2 code, they inherited all the issues that TSW2 code contained. For example, the buffers/derailment issues, the red lights issues.
Had they written TSW3 from scratch, they would have needed a lot more than a couple of months.

 

TSW3 does not feature any new lighting. TSW3 exclusive routes do. Other than thedynamically changing weather and snow kickoff, TSW3 did not add any core features to TSW, as the volumetric clouds and new lighting is all route specific.

And the previous comment is true. TSW3 is not a "new" game, it is just a patch sold under a new name. Most of the game code is entirely the same, it did not take years to develop.

My guess would be that the dev team said "let's take a brake to fix some long standing issues" to which the money people at the company answered "sure, but let's sell it as new".

 

TSW3 is, to all intents and purposes, the same game as TSW2. It runs on the same version of the engine (4.26) and there is nothing in it that couldn’t have been released as a simple update to TSW2.

My understanding is that DTG simply turned on Volumetric Skies and Eye Adaption which were existing features within Unreal 4.26. Literally a tick box. However, in utilising eye adaption all the fudged lighting values that existed in TSW2 to make it look the way it did no longer worked so new, more realistic, lumin values had to be devised and used for lights in TSW3 routes. TSW2 content had a botch job done on it to make it look ok within TSW3, but it is not the same as the native TSW3 content. I believe they also did some optimisation on the skies as they proved to be a bit of a performance hog, particularly on lower-end PC’s and consoles.

That is why I (and many others, clearly) took exception to it and for me particularly, the outright fudge that they had ‘torn up the lighting and started again’ really bothered me. The ‘new lighting’ is why I bought it yet it turned out to simply be different brightness levels. For the vast majority of the time it still looks blinkin awful, the only saving grace being the new skies.

ps The above is my understanding. If I’m wrong please explain why…

 

Just to be clear, eye adaptation was already working in TSW and TSW2. It was less noticeable, as the the light values were set up incorrectly, but it was there.

But the point is, eye adaptation is not a new feature in TSW3 either, simply TOD4 now makes it actually noticeable due to the more true to life (though still not perfect) light and brightness values.

 

You’re right, it was there indeed so scratch that from the list of features. They just set it up ‘correctly’, and I use that word in it’s loosest sense because it’s far from correctly implemented.

 

Sometimes, it feels like their approach to fixing things is haphazard. Maybe the developer looks at the code like Ben Affleck was looking at the Armadillo controls, after crashing on the asteroid. "I have no idea what I'm doing. This button: I don't know what that does."

Look at the fix for the permanent red light issues. If they knew what they were doing, they would come and say: "This is what was fixed, and this is what wasn't fixed". Instead, they use vague wording: "some improvements", and then ask for feedback, because of course their QA department cannot verify the mile long list of red light issues that have been raised across many routes.
And despite the list of issues still happening, as seen in the feedback thread, they claimed that 80% of the issues were fixed! DTG JD are you sure about your math? Or is this the "moving the goal posts and claiming victory" kind of strategy?

 

Was TSW open sourced when I wasn't looking? That's the only explanation I can think of for the number of people who seem to have access to the full code base of both TSW2 and 3.

 

My opinion above is based on what has been said by DTG over the last 5 years, previous engine changes and my own (admittedly limited) knowledge gained through making mods for the last 3 versions of the game, and then finally from watching videos on UE4 on YouTube, particularly on the ‘new’ features.

As I said, if I’m wrong (and I’m happy to admit it if I am), then rather than get your DTG pom-poms out tell me why I’m wrong.

 

I look forward to all these new train simulators they will be developing!

 

Based on your experiences, please make some sense of these findings:
1. I can play TSW3 on my PC at 4K with Ultra settings and 200% rendering. I have 100+ FPS solid, as long as I play on an older route. Just now, I was playing RRO at 120+ FPS, smooth as butter.
2. When I try a new route, for example BRO, it runs ~60 fps with frequent drops into 40s: it feels like the train has hit something, then keeps going. I guess this is what some people call "stuttering". If I reduce the screen rendering percentage, the FPS will increase, but the stuttering will keep happening.
3. Not all routes are alike, but the "stuttering" seems to be happening more on the new routes than the old ones.

Is there any magic trick that I could do to remove some of the TSW3 features from a route like Bremen? Turn off the clouds, maybe? I want to play it, but I can't. The frequent drops in FPS give me nausea.

 

No, that's not stuttering. That's just low framerate.

 

There are many things that affect performance.

For straters, try changing the sky quality setting, as that seems to be a big FPS killer. Changing the Sky Quality to a lower preset will keep the volumetric clouds, but less detailed, so better performance.

But regardless of graphics settings, the route building techniques used can also affect performance.
Some rolling stock could be badly optimized, like the Clinchfield box cars that are big FPS killers - even Matt acknowledget this, said they will look into it, but they never got fixed.
Scenery can also be messed up. At one point is was found that something with the scenery layers/tiles causes them sometimes to ALWAYS render at full LOD, regardless of distance. This way tried out on several routes, if you set the game to use basically 0 render distance (meaning no scenery should render at all), quite big chuncks of scenery still spawned on the route. This might have been fixed since, I don't know, but I remember it was an issue in TSW2.

 

If you know anything about coding/game development, it's not hard to tell.

You can try to defend it in any way, but TSW3 is not a new software. It's not more than a core update re-released under a new name. TSW2 was already questionable, but at least TSW2 meant an UE version change, which made it somewhat acceptable.

 

It's more just that a lot of people are intimately familiar with UE4 development given its ubiquity nowadays and how freely available its documentation is, and as a result many know how to spot the telltale signs of particular issues emerging from the engine and how a developer is utilising it.

 

Yeah there was a engine version changes between TSW (4.16) and TSW 2 (4.23) but then there was engine change between TSW 2 (4.23) and TSW 2 Rush Hour (4.26) and it was free And then upgrade from 4.26 to 4.26 is payware (TSW 3)

 

I've uploaded a video that shows what I'm talking about.
The average FPS for the whole game is quite high, but these temporary drops are annoying to the point I cannot play.


The recorded gameplay was 4k @ Ultra, except for Sky Quality which is set to Low.

 

That is a bit abrupt and I agree - it is disturbing-- but I haven't seen such drops and I am running all settings on Ultra. (Specs I9-12900, 32G DDR4 Ram and GeoForce RTX 3090 TI) . On my lower spec Laptop - I have seen frame rate drops when loading - but nothing like what your video shows.

 

I think it is stutter.
I use RTX-3050, i5-12400, 1920*1080. It is OK on RDR2, medium level settings.
But small stutter is everywhere in TSW3, even low level settings.
I have 5 routes.
Large stutter in Cajon yard, Dresden-Riesa city area.
Small stutter per minute in Kassel-Würzburg, because it is too fast.
I suspect that all high-speed rail are bad.
By the way, SKW is boring. "You have the longest route and the longest boring tunnel. I really don't understand who would want this?" said by other.
I bought Dresden-Riesa, I think it is typical German route.
DTG chose SKW, because it is easy to create. But still a lot of problems.


No official explanation to me.

 

Based on Dresden-Reisa and its Stutter, I took some of the advice here: Lowered max frame-rate to 40, turned V-Sync off, and lowered the Sky quality. With dynamic weather it always ends up raining anyway. After these changes there seemed to be a lot less Stutter on this Route.

 

I had frame drops like these when I first started the game, I use some custom settings so it's somewhere between high and ultra, then I took note of how much fps it dropped to and then capped the fps to 53, which was 5 fps above what it normally dropped to, and now it's not so noticable.
I don't have a 4k screen though, I have a 144Hz 1920x1080 and locking it to 53 fps still works great.