Pre-order Train Sim World: Main - Spessart Bahn

Cool website, ex_railwayman ... Thank you for the link as I have been searching for such a website for a long time!

 

Totally agreed to you. It is not just new content, but also a new mechanic which makes it quite unique.

 

Dmitri, thanks again for hint. Route is ordered, just waiting for release.
I don't have RSN, so for me, all stuff in this DLC is new. This combitation theory of RSN and MSB is little misleading, because both DLC are separated products. There isn't information that some elemet of MSB DLC require RSN. Only thing that can be different is alternative option for service locomotive and random appearnce of some wagons in trains consists (like CSX stuff in HH and NY) vice versa.

 

Thanks for that, I confess I know little about non-UK stock so that is very useful.

 

I too think it looks very good and am looking forward to its release on Thursday. I don't feel it is bad value for money certainly not for the hours of enjoyment I will get from it.

 

WoW! We're really going to get the manual with the route download? That's a great improvement over previous routes, for which we had to uncover a mysterious URL for the manual. Thanks, DTG.

 

All manuals have always been available via the Steam store page

 

That's news to me - - - thanks! -- EDIT: just checked the store page -- no manual links that I could find.
"FAKE NEWS!" (I'm ashamed of myself for quoting an idiot.)

 

Firstly, most of the additional track you mention has no overhead, therefor it is scenery and not actual route mileage as you cannot drive any of the included stock on it. You'll have to pay an additional £11.99 for a diesel locomotive to use those sections.

Secondly, the desination boards are not new. They are the same as the destination blinds on NTP, they are not an actual dot-matrix display, they are just a model/texture, the same as the blinds in NTP.

The banking operations are new and they are accounted for with a 'coefficient of novelty' in my value equation.

The scenery is on par with RSN, the only new additon is animated cranes (moving cars are found in CSX:HH, thus not new), again accounted for in my coefficient of novelty. To give an example that same coefficient of novelty covers smoke stacks in RSN, as they happened to be new in that DLC.

Compared to RSN, MSB has less objective value and yet has the same £24.99 price tag. In addition to this, parts of the route can only be accessed by diesel and will require an additional payment of £11.99 to use. Total cost to use the complete MSB route is £36.98, which is excessive in my opinion and vastly overpriced when compare objectively to previous DLC for TSW. If a diesel loco was bundled with MSB it would become the 4th best value for money route DLC instead of the 9th (and worst).

 

DO NOT FEED THE TROLL

 

I give my professional opinion derived from over 10 years of train simulation and railway engineering experience, which includes creating content featured in DTG products as well as third party products. I come from a position of someone who wants to see the hobby flourish rather than watch DTG make the same fatal errors they did with Flight Sim World and see TSW, our best shot at a next generation train sim, end up another failed DTG product.

If that's how you define trolling, then I guess I'm a troll.

 

View attachment 10841

Destination displays are actually dot-matrix

 

No they are not, it's a texture like this:



DTG have not coded every dot to turn on and off, there's a texture like the above, which looks just like dot matrix, but is not an actual dot matrix.

 

Yes but you keep repeating the same thing over and over again. We know you don't think this route is value for money you have stated it several times. That is you opinion not fact, what may not seem value for money to you will be to someone else. You don't have to pay £24.99 for the route anyway, you can purchase it now for £20.00 or wait a few months and it will be even cheaper in a sale. I work value for money out as to how much I will use and enjoy a route not how many new trains are supplied. We have heard the demise of DTG predicted for the last few years and yet they are still here!

You do come across as someone with an axe to grind to be honest, that may not be the case but that is how it appears to me, a relative outsider. The fact that it has been confirmed that the editor is coming and yet you still don't seem to believe it or don't want to believe it and still keep repeating the same mantra that we won't see an editor, speaks volumes..

 

What? Are you arguing about a route that never “out now”? I'm sure it will be the best ever!

 

I don't know how much you know of DTG's history, but last year we saw Flight Sim World cancelled. Two weeks prior to the game being cancelled DTG were still calling it a 'flight sim platform for the future' and they were pushing DLC right to the end, this is why I'm sceptical about the validity of DTG's statements on the TSW Editor. A lot of the errors they made with Flight Sim World are being made with TSW and so I point out the issues in the hope that the community and customer base will hold DTG to a higher standard with their wallets, ultimately giving us a better train sim with longevity.

I recognise that ultimate value is subjective, the value I'm speaking of is objective value, which I have specified in my posts. The objective value is based on the actual content contained within the DLC compared to the rest of the TSW DLC. MSB is low value for money when compared objectively to other DLC. Now if you're a German railways superfan and the DB Steuerwagen is your favourite piece of stock to drive, then yes, the DLC has a higher subjective value. Most casual purchasers of DLC will tend towards objective value, as they may not know that much about railways, so they will compare new DLCs to past DLCs and use measures such as route length and number of new locos and stock to decided whether it's good value.

RSN is a very successful DLC and a large part of that was the huge amount of new content it came with, it was great value for money. I would love more DLC like RSN, which is why I was disappointed when I saw the price of MSB. I also think making 15% of the included trackage unelectrified and then releasing a diesel locomotive DLC shortly after will come across to many as a cash grab by DTG, which is a shame, as if MSB had a diesel locomotive included it would become a great value DLC and DTG I'm sure would sell a lot more copies.

I really hope TSW doesn't go the way of FSW, but I can't see that DTG has learned any lessons and no one here seems at all bothered that the Editor has been delayed in 2017 and 2018, and now the 'in the new year' 2019 target is looking unlikely and I'd say by most people's definition we're out of the 'in the new year' period already. So yes, I'm very skeptical about DTG, and I may seem like a stuck record, but so do DTG with their constant Editor delays.

 

I have been around train sims as a gamer since the early 2000's and have seen the constant cries of DTG/RSC "don't know what they are doing/will go bankrupt/have a bad business model" etc, etc since day one and 12 years later they are still here.

I suspect the vast majority of gamers/simmers will make decisions to purchase on whether they are interested in the route or not. As long as it has enough stock to run realistic scenarios/services personally I don't care if it uses recycled stock or not, most people will not be obsessing over such fairly trivial matters. Value for money is down to an individuals perception, not sitting down with a calculator working out how many miles the route is and how much stock is new. I approach train simming as a rail enthusiast not as a casual gamer and would say I am quite a purist so not that easy to please, so if I think I will get use and enjoyment out of a route then I purchase it not try and form some kind of protest movement by not purchasing something I am interested in.

DTG have been using the same model for years, release a route (often with stock already available in other routes) then later DLC to complement it, it obviously works for them so why should now be any different, constant cash flow is very important so extra DLC will aid that.

 

Keep in mind that the Flight Simulator market was already well eatablished by the time Flight Sim World came around. It would of been tough to crack that market, they tried but sadly was not successful , although perhaps with more time they would of done good.

Train Simulators are Dovetail's bread and butter, I don't see it going away anytime soon. They pretty much own that market space

We are only in the second month of 2019.. it's a bit too early to say that the editor won't come out this year.

 

They have intimated in the last few days that the editor isn't too far off. I am sure it wasn't delayed on purpose and it is circumstance that have caused it's delay. Some people just want to believe the worse, there will no doubt be something to complain about when it is released. I don't know much about FSW as it is not my area of interest, maybe DTG "bit off more than they could chew" with it I don't know, but as you say Train Sims are something they do know about and I am sure know their market better than we do.

 

No, DTG said it will be released in ''the new Year''. As it is March next week, that will be the last month of Q1 for 2019, in financial terms, and the end of the financial year calendar in Britain for many Companies, so, we can only hope that it comes out very soon, and we can only presume that it is a BETA version for the community to play with, so, still not a full version, so, exactly when we will get that is anyone's guess, this year.

The other question is will we all have to pay for this editor, when the full version gets released, nobody seems to have asked this yet, to my knowledge.

 

That's because the editor will be as a mod for the Unreal engine, which you can sign up on Epic for free

 

The editor DTG will be releasing is a modified version of the standard UE4 editor, which is free.

Initially it will be released as an ‘open beta’, which basically means some functions may not work or may behave in different ways as advertised.

DTG will then receive feedback from us to iron out the bugs to release a more stable version.

All of this, of course, is free.

 

Almost everything is correct, apart from 'initially released as an open beta'. It will be initially released as a closed beta, meaning that it will not be available to the public and only trusted developers will get access to it.

 

I thought this had already been done?

 

Wait a minute... The closed beta hasn't even started???

To quote Matt P before Christmas:

So the target of a public beta before Christmas was missed and now we learn that the closed beta still hasn't happened? So we've still got to wait for the closed beta to happen, then we've got to wait for the public beta to happen before finally getting a release candidate. That's going to be a months long process, which means it'll be the very end of the year at the earliest before we get a release candidate.

Sounds like you're just kicking the Editor can down the road. I'm more convinced than ever that the Editor isn't coming.

 

I'm not really allowed to tell you Point was, you wouldn't really know if it started or not.

 

So Matt can tell us it was going to happen before Christmas but now after implying that it hasn't happened your response is to say you can neither confirm or deny whether it actually happened?

That just comes across as shady. And some people on here still think it's strange I'm cynical about the Editor.

 

It is disappointing that the editor has been delayed and hasn't been tested properly yet. However there is still a difference between the editor being delayed and the editor not being delivered at all. It is in their interest for there to be an editor and I don't see them previewing one when one isn't going to be released, it would be a very bad move.

I guess we are going to have to wait a while longer which is a shame and they should have been a little more transparent about its progress.

 

Since you tend to bring up FSW, I would just like to point out that people thought the same thing about the SDK for that, which they did deliver.

 

Matt already told us well over a month ago that there were people that had been secretly selected to test out the editor.

I would be severely disappointed if this has not even started yet as the editor just keeps on getting delayed. Everyone is eagerly waiting and has been for a very long time now.

 

The only thing I did was pointing out that before an open beta there is a closed beta. I have no relation to what Matt said over a month ago, as I wasn't even working here at the time.

 

It's the future tense you used which prompted the dubiety, 'It will be initially released' rather than 'it was initially released.'

Then you compounded the issue by saying you're not allowed to tell us whether or not the closed Beta has actually happened. I also noted that any info regarding the closed beta was missing from the most recent Studio Update.

The Editor isn't being built from scratch, it's based on the UE4 Editor. On release of TSW the Editor must have been sufficiently developed to create CSX:HH, yet despite being regarded as a 'key priority' and having two years of development post TSW launch, we still don't have even a public beta. I've worked with indie developers who have built game engines from the ground up complete with a suite of editing tools in two years.

Let's assume we're going to get the Editor at the end of this year. That means it will have taken DTG almost the same amount of time to create the public version of the editor as it took them to develop the whole of TSW itself and the in house version of the Editor. There's something seriously wrong with those timescales. Think about it, DTG could develop, test and release a brand new train simulator game in the time it will have taken to convert the existing UE4 Editor into a public Editor for TSW.

It's pretty obvious that something doesn't add up here.

 

To be honest, I'm shocked for the German community to read about the current progress with the editor. It destroys a lot of positive progress and trust. The Editor is essential for the community. In my POW someone is laying obviously. Clarification needed...

 

See the user's manual.

 

I'm sick and tired of having nearly every thread on this forum being twisted into something or other about the editor -- get your own thread.

 

I've completed the tutorials (some more than once and some to which I will probably return), one scenario and a couple of sessions. So far, I've found this route very impressive. I haven't tried any of the sessions that involve adding a "blocker" engine, but don't see these as the equivalent of shunting, which remains mostly absent from TSW. I'm patiently looking forward to the promised freight scenarios for the Pennine route, but without much hope for shunting activities.

 

Got you.
The admin should be feel free to move the post into the Editor section.

Thanks.

 

The Editor will come when it is ready, cant understand why some people are impatient

 

Only exception is the class 33 in which no manual was ever created for it.

 

Yada yada yada ...

 

I wasn't calling you an idiot -- can't you guess who I had in mind?

 

My apologies -- I had checked the store page available through this forum, not the one on steam.