Ny-trenton: Usa Content Is Still Severely Flawed

I gave in and bought the route plus Acela in the dog end of the sale yesterday evening.

Okay only £20 but it’s all a bit meargh… Performance is very choppy and stuttery, worse than Niddertalbahn even with the latter’s high density foliage. That does odd things to the Acela sound which is a bit LOVE anyway, just a constant whine with no rise of fall in pitch as the traction motors spool up or down. However the stutter puts a momentary lower “whoop” into the sound which totally destroys immersion.

As noted in another thread I switched the safety systems on, then on departure from Newark got whacked by a 45 MPH speed reduction with no time to slow down = penalty brake stop.

I know it’s a cliche but finger once again hovering over the refund button.

 

I looked at this route but decided to wait until it's either way cheaper or DTG patch it. I don't understand why it was so rushed? As has been said by others it was the chance to do something good like London Commuter on a busy US route. I can understand how US gamers feel about this.

 

May as well get your money back. You've seen first hand the disaster. If they choose to fix it in the future you will be able to buy back in at a deeper discount. Refund is win-win for you as a consumer.

 

Yep, really don't know what compelled me to buy it - the forlorn hope that it couldn't really be that bad, could it?!
But it is/was.
Only thing now, I'll probably get a refund yellow card off Steam having also sent West Rhine back, but the next item up Leicester to Nottingham/Derby looking to be worth buying and keeping.

 

Yes , I don't understand why anyone who is concerned with this route's quality would pay for it now, even at a discount. If the route is ever improved, then it would be a waste of time to drive a lot of subpar services now. You would probably want to drive them again with a busier timetable and more to look at, if that ever happens. On the other hand, if they don't improve the route, then it doesn't make sense to pay money for it in the first place. Even if it was free, I would download it to check it out, but not to play it in its current form. This DLC was clearly more than DTG could handle. A lesson learned for all involved, I think.

 

To be constructive, if dtg would charge another 10 euros for the enhanced "true to life" timetable i would buy the route + timetable pack full price.

But in the current state..., nope

 

The other thing, it's not even that long to get a decent high speed run. After crawling out of Penn and not getting more than about 70 MPH to Newark, crawling out of Newark then getting hit by the 45 MPH ACSES, that only left just over 40 miles to Trenton! I guess we got spoiled by SKW but if you're going to do a high speed route, it needs to be good for some sustained fast running.

 

I agree with this as well. If DTG said, look, it was more work than we thought, so we can't charge less because we've already put the work in, but we can fix it up and charge a little more, I would respect their honesty and consider paying the full price plus extra, depending on the total cost and whatever new work they do. This is an interesting idea really, charge for the route whatever reflects the value. If players won't pay for quality then that's on them, and DTG could always point to that as evidence that the player base won't pay for high quality. A different approach than the current price points and release dates, for sure

 

I don’t think this route would even get a loco add on DLC. A. Sad end to something that could have been great. I mean 1/3 of the playable services are yard moves. What did they think would happen?

 

I will buy it full price if they improve the timetable. As it is it is one of the few routes that I wouldn't even purchase even at 50% off.

It looks very well done overall, apart from the area around NYP, which I could live with but the timetable really is a disappointment.

 

I mean they said they were proud of the so called effort aka lazy attempts they made of this route...forget the yard moves.. first mistake was taking a bit of the LIRR parts to put in this dlc instead of scratch.....But they did this to themselves, especially high standards coming from London Commuter dlc. This dlc should've been thought for work...And the nerve to not even try to revise or patch a better timetable in the future. but Bakerloo had a timetable patch, Rapid Transit one of the OLDEST dlcs even had a timetable patch as part of an option....Again NO excuses. And this is all before we can get to bugs/issues.

 

It shows the scenery sloppily, too.

・The truck during the stop of the warehouse is a fresh cream state.
・The border step of a station and the road in artificiality.
・The color of the surface of the water is funny.
・A cab car and brakes of ASC-64 are improper.

 

Some sort of patch preview:



This was posted today.

 

I appreciate this guy is doing what he needs to do to get what he wants from the freebie bin, but this is the same person who's told me TSW3 doesn't have any more performance issues than TSW2 and yet posts this video which puts stutters and micropauses on full display. No need to wonder why many tend to ignore the fanfare cheerleading from "ambassadors".

 

Everyone's experience is different depending on platform and hardware. Some people may have performance issues, some may not. Ambassadors have a whole channel where they report any bugs that they find. If you think they're just getting free, then you're wrong. There's much more to their job than you think.

 

Just going by what this one particular "ambassador" has told me. Clearly his claims of a mostly stutter free / micropausing expericence was not true. Therefore, my opinion on the matter stands.

 

Given that consoles have the same performance specs as a minimum across the board, you’d expect performance on them to be absolutely polished. At least by now when we have TSW 3. They keep listing optimisation improvements in the roadmap - where are they? They’re a long long time coming.

 

You can even see the game stuttering while his facecam is still smooth, so it's not even issues with the video encoding.

 

Yes that is what I noticed. At first I thought ok, it's a recording. But as you mention the face cam vs the game is smooth vs stuttery. Hence why I don't take anything this "ambassador" says at face value (in terms of game performance). He's either towing the company line or is simply ignoring the obvious (as I believe many do with this game).

 

I never trust any opinion when someone has a vested interest in something. I always look for reviews and opinions from those that have nothing to lose.

 

I suspect they are there just to appease folks like me who call it out all the time. Yeah, it's on the roadmap, but probably not being worked on all that much since the rush to get tons of routes and paid paint jobs out a month takes priority. Still unsure how they expect to bring in and keep long term customers with such a poor performing game.

 

It is possible he doesn't notice the stutter. I know people who can play games at 30fps without their eyes starting to hurt, after all. But yeah, if people are pointing it out, you can't really say "it's not there", that would be like me saying there's no problem with say, the colours of signals, if a red/green colour blind person was saying they couldn't tell the difference. It's obviously a problem for the people who can see it and I will take them at their word and suggest DTG need to accommodate that.

 

30FPS wouldn't be ideal after seeing 60FPS, but it would be nice to have the option to lock the frames at a lower setting if it would remove the stuttering. But I suspect the issue goes deeper. It's not that the game slows from 60 to say a 45 constant FPS. It's the rapid 60-40 back and forth in super fast succession that causes the stutter to show up. Used to happen mostly when another train was passing by (in TSW2), but now it's everywhere in TSW3. The only route I barely saw it on a TSW3 branded route was on a mostly clear day run on Boston Providence. But add rain and it starts to creep back in.

 

That's where playing on a VRR display makes the Niddertalbahn tolerable to me on XBox, as an example. It's constantly fluctuating between 45-60, but it's definitely noticeable the handful of times in a run that it drops as low as 40

 

Ever heard of G-Sync/Freesync?

It's disgusting to read such uninformed tirades against a community member paul.pavlinovich that served us for years with unpayed work (Raildriver labels, Tutorials, [...])

Get better hardware and stop complaining FFS

 

I always thought that Paul was pretty objective when he was posting regularly. And his Raildriver contributions and tutorials were very useful for me.

I assume he was using his RD when making this video, though he didn't mention any refinements in its operation with NYT, which are supposed to be part of the update patch.

 

Well, on the subject of him not noticing the stuttering there, it is indeed possible some of the issues are FPS-related and if he's playing the game on a VRR display but encoding his video capture at 60fps, then issues that don't show up to him during gameplay will be visible to anyone viewing his video. Even to him if he were to watch it back in its entirety, though when editing you usually skip over a fair bit.

However some of the stutter as it appears there looks like stuff I am familiar with seeing even with VRR turned on, it's just an issue with TSW3 in general, and YMMV on how much it stands out to you personally.

 

Can't say I noticed any stuttering, but then, at my age, the whole world seems to be stuttering at times.

 

I've remoddeled the pillar model at Penn Station that stuck through trains. Mod should be up soon.

 

How long it took you?

 

Scaling is a second, making a new texture a bit longer. Most time is setting up UE Editor to export the model/textures and package the files.

 

That says more than the last 6 Railfan Streams together. Its just embarrassing at this point.

Great that People like you still putting the effort into routes that should be top notch in the first place.

 

While DTG wrings their hands and give excuses on why something won't / can't be done, you have corrected one of their long standing flaws in an afternoon. Praise to you and jeers to DTG.

 

Probably already mentioned here, but the 13:33 service from Sunnyside Yard to Penn seems to have the wrong routing. I end up at track 12 rather than 11 and am unable to complete it. Has DTG said something about it, or maybe I'm the dumb one instead?

 

So how many UK routes and loco add ons in total are incoming?

 

1 loco dlc. Skyhooks uk route. 2 uk routes by dtg (peak forest and another new one) and another one by just trains.

 

Does that include the peak forest steam route?

 

I mentioned peak forest in my comment

 

yea sorry man. I'm old and blind lol

 

I guess at this point at least we are being acknowledged. I’m just somewhat confused on the matter of signaling and amount of services. So when LIRR services was brought up it was mentioned that the signaling was outdated and couldn’t handle any more been added. It was tried and basically it would eventually lead to stuck trains. So it seems that we have a new route but have same or very similar issues that the signaling can’t handle the amount of services even though on a previous statement Matt had say he was confident that the current signally would be able to handle all services that are on the route realistically.I just don’t know is it coding or just too complex to implement into TSW3

 

In this case, it was mostly due to lack of time since services are added little by little and tested and they simply had to stop to release it on time. There definitely has been an improvement in how acses/ases and atc works. Not perfect but still better than what lirr suffers from. It's probably complex to implement and dtg wants to continue improving it. I'm no dev myself and have no experience with all this but I would assume it isn't easy

 

Well I thought I wouldn't be back here because I wanted to move on from NYT, but here I am because even though I don't own NYT for so many reasons, it is affecting me anyway due to its recent patch which was also inexplicably applied to BPE and HAR and has made both of these routes worse. Go here if you want to to read the specifics https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/patch-notes.68977/

I am adding this to the USA content megathread as well because it provides yet more evidence of the neglected status of the USA routes. Any drive on HAR or BPE, even just one drive, would have shown the negative effects of the patch on these routes. Either nobody tested it, not even once, because they don't care, or they tested it and released the patch anyway, because they don't care. LIRR, SFJ, BPE, HAR and NYT are all in different states of broken right now, and that is all the US passenger there is. Really it is a lost cause. DTG don't know how to make US passenger routes, they don't know how to fix US passenger routes, and whatever attempts are made just make things worse. Is it all just fine because the content sells? I guess that is ultimately up to us as individuals to decide, but in my opinion the players are disrespected.

 

Surprised to see this thread alive again lol

But yeah agreed, now I just turn ATC/ACSES off when driving a US passenger route. I hope this isn’t the last patch for a long time, because it really wasn’t all that good.

 

I tried playing it with ATC/ACES off.I can’t get over how bad the timetable is. Even during the afternoon rush hour.I counted only two services to Trenton. So many awful gaps. I have gone back playing Harlem and really appreciate that route even more.

 

Hopefully things improves with new ownership but not expecting anything different in the near term. Honestly not surprised with the latest route MML.

 

I find that the action of closing and opening door on acela is really fast, is that the case in reality?

 

I found something constructive again about the skyline in Manhattan. I've been playing the new PGA golf tour from EA since last week, because 2K can't implement its PGA golf license as convincingly as EA does. Volumetric clouds alone and a Tiger Woods don't make the gameplay any better either. Back to topic: there is a new golf course in New Jersey, west of Manahttan island. About the same distance as Sunnyside Yard on the east side. From the golf course you can clearly see what the opposite skyline might look like. Also not 100% perfect, modeled relatively low poly, only minimal textures, but convincing in the end. This way the golfer really gets the impression that he is close to NYC. An extended skyline of LIRR would also make the difference, including a light map for the night, since power outages are rather rare in NYC.

 

I see that EA went with the basic logic known as ‘we should probably try and make New York look like New York’.

DTG on the other hand seem to think that just telling us we’re in New York is good enough.

 

TBF I have seen my capital city play three different cities in a single movie, maybe DTG is inspired by Hollywood.

 

It's a well representation of the route only the service pattern is lacking ,also a pity about no static freight ,however don't see that changing in the foreseeable future,but stand to be corrected