Wcml South - Not Good Enough

Why not both? There is betterhelp.com, just go the pub first and connect with there wifi.

Problem solved.

 

Anyone who thinks DTG have an incredible reputation needs to give their head a wobble unfortunately. Route quality is patchy, and communication? Hit and miss. The more we hold them to account the better!

 

Well at least they previewed the most anticipated route first. At least there is a chance, albeit very small, that some issues can be corrected prior to release.

Personally I doubt it but at least we have that 1% chance it may happen.

Remember it was hope that took out the Galactic Empire.

 

Whatever you say OB1, but the sith lord is in charge of Focus, search your feeling, you it to be true. So your chances of DTG fixing things are slim.

 

Accountability is key when it comes to getting things fixed, otherwise DTG will not fix it or will put it on the long finger.

 

Thing is Focus is not going to have invested into DTG just to maintain status que, they are gonna want growth beyond what's currently going on eventually. For now I'm sure the scenario you're saying is playing out, where DTG's basically being left to do their own thing. But if in another few years Dovetail's games remain as is in terms of sales, or worse a decline happens it probably won't remain that way. Especially if Focus does start putting further investment into them with things like a dedicated US audio team like you suggest. They're not gonna be happy if those investments don't result in a growth spurt in a increase of player numbers.

 

Another day passed, and DTG still haven't come up with a sincere explanation to the player. They just said some empty words like "working to understand if any improvements can be made prior to the release on September 17th", "would love to confirm a date for when you can expect these changes", "will keep you updated regularly". Yes, they promised the suspension improvements for 350, 377/2 and 72 stock. However, we don't know how long are we going to wait for these improvements, and they refused to talk about the biggest and most annoying issue: empty timetable, which upsetted many people.

Community made mods can solve these issues, but it's DTG's responsibility to fix the messy made by themselves, poor nighttime lighting, wrong PIS displace, lack of suspension and empty timetable, all of these issue can and should be fixed by them.Their slience have already caused many people cancel pre-order, and if the upcoming German route has similar issues, it would be even more cancellation of pre-order. Prehaps DTG won't change until they spot the sharp drop of their product sales, but who know?

 

They don’t have to. DTG are always quiet on things like this unfortunately, in terms of the behind the scenes development, there really isn’t much transparency.

it’s likely that WCML will probably get 2, maybe 3 updates in its lifetime. Even then, most of these issues will still exist. It’ll be the way it is unfortunately. Nothing we can do.

 

Another day of weekend.

 

It’ll be interesting to see what response we may or may not get this week. If we can see that elements of the game such as the lighting, and timetable maybe fixed for launch or at least given a solid date, many wouldn’t have cancelled preorders or still be on the fence.

 

It would be nice to see something beyond the bland and pointless platitudes Alex was no doubt instructed to post on Friday afternoon, by someone further up the food chain.

I think the disappointment for me comes from the fact the people running this claim to be train and sim fans, in which case the red line for mediocrity should start and stop with their integrity.

Just hoping that the German and California routes tick enough boxes to justify reinstating the Deluxe order and that someone in DTG Towers this morning will be collating the posts from the weekend, feeling a bit of empathy and kicking someone’s (or their own) backside to put extra polish on WCML.

 

I suspect DTG will already have resources committed to the next DLC and the WCML will be a let's hope it still sells anyway release which is the Rivet way so it seems.

 

Me too, before committing I want to hear that the 710 timetable in particular is fleshed out because the Overground is a big attraction to me. I've reached the stage now where I really see the Pendo as just an ai train so short is the route for it., I can drive it in TSC instead. As you say the lighting is also critical, maybe these are two things that can be tweaked without too much trouble, at the very least a promise to attend to these things after launch if necessary.

 

Regarding the lighting, sadly it’s not that simple.

In my humble opinion DTG need to set a standard for the lighting setup that works in all seasons, weathers and times of day (the way lighting is baked and the way they set up materials and textures to interact with it) and once that’s done and working make that the bare minimum we see on any DLC going forward, either made by DTG themselves or by 3rd parties. Get it right once and for all then do it right all the time, no excuses. There is no reason at all, other than poor management, why this keeps happening. People have been rightly lauding JT’s Blackpool-Preston route (and it is wonderful) but that is far from perfect in this regard. DTG have to take the lead on this and sort it out for all developers, once and for all. In the screenshots for JT’s WCMLOS I’ve already seen the tell tale signs that the same issues will exist on that route too sadly.

In addition to the lighting, it is utterly unacceptable, from the players point of view, that this complete mess with tunnel lighting is still the way it is. For the most part this has been this way since TSW3 was introduced except for the fact that some tunnels, on some routes, have it nailed. So they can do it, but again there is zero consistency as to whether or not it will be done right. Again, set up a workflow for tunnels, verify it works then make sure it is done that way 100% of the time. It really isn’t hard. One of Rivet’s trademarks is the complete inability to set-up tunnel lighting correctly yet here we are again, on the 7th iteration of the game and after 8 or 9 years of development, with the tunnels looking a mess. Imagine making a train simulator where you can’t even make tunnels look correct? It’s farcical. Put simply, if it doesn’t work or you can’t get it to work consistently then remove the feature until you can. Churning out route after route with broken tunnel lighting that will never ever get fixed is totally counterproductive.

I don’t know what process DTG puts in place for this sort of thing, but even the most basic elements of management have you look for areas to improve, develop a way to make the improvement then set in stone processes to make sure the previous undesirable practices don’t re-occur. In my industry they’re called Standard Operating Procedures. It might not hurt the people responsible for this game’s development to maybe look into it a bit.

 

Interesting. So we could have the crazy situation whereby DTG have to remaster a brand new route! It is farcical and we can't blame the publishers for it either.

 

FTFY.

 

Another way of looking at it (literally!) is to just not bother with the night time runs.

I’ve played mebbe 10 in the entire time I’ve been on this game (TSW2 during the first lockdown). Night runs are way too dark and pointless. Complete waste of time IMHO. Nothing to see == no reason to play.

This sort of darkness works well for Alien or Doom 3, but it’s just not real Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester etc, so I ignore those runs.

 

Again, night time lighting in this game is in a better state than the day time setup. At least it’s consistent.

The biggest issue is that they are clearly running out of time and are sacrificing placing actual lights which are what make the night time scene look correct. Fife Circle is a good example of this. Bits of it are actually good, but then chunks of it are missing any sort of lighting at all (Haymarket Yard, Murrayfield Stadium, the Forth Road Bridge and the section by the caravan parks being examples that come straight to mind). Back in TSW2 days this game relied largely on a reflective material on the building windows to fake lights (albeit really poorly). Often that is the only light source at night (which doesn’t actually emit light) so it looks so pitch black. Absolutely bloody awful, frankly.

I stand by what I said in a previous post however…generally DTG are much improved in this regard. I’m not talking early TSW3 routes, but certainly the TSW4 standard has been a step up with many many more light sources being placed at night. Don’t believe me? Drive Maintalbahn at night with a touch of fog. It’s every bit as good as Dresden was. Without stating the obvious, the reason Dresden-Riesa was lauded as the new standard was because it actually had lights placed along the route. The world is lit at night, if it isn’t lit in game it’s going to look trash. A simple equation to solve.

From what I’ve seen in the editor though the current way this is setup is that you have to place every single light, every single street lamp, every yard light, every billboard or building illumination etc on a whole route one by one. No wonder it takes a lot of time!! Again, I find it really strange that there has seemingly been no development in this area in the last 8 or 9 years (based on what you can see in the public editor). Yes it might take a bit of time to develop road or pavement assets to automatically have street lamps placed on it etc but it would payback 1000 times over when done, surely?

 

If there was only a switch to remove those from journey mode I would be so satisfied and finally be able to complete all my journeys

 

Obviously I wasn’t saying that was a solution It’s just MY way of dealing with it - ignore the bit that’s utterly rubbish and enjoy the rest of it. Wasn’t for 1 second suggesting it was acceptable to anyone else, or implying everyone else should just ignore the night runs. Personally I ignore the night runs because they are just utter rubbish.

 

Sorry, I wasn’t replying to you. I’ll edit my post to make that clear.

 

Yeah, you’re right, that’s solution. Make the game daytime only. Much easier than bothering to create a workable night scene.

If there was a rolling eye emoji it would be placed here.

 

Got me thinking about firing up the Editor to see if I can slap some lighting in … hmmm …. yeah, why not … if I get anywhere I’ll post a screenshot… wish me luck

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Half an hour later, fortified with coffee and toast... I'm clearly being naive here... there goes the rest of the day

 

It's called cashing grab from the players. We are past the days DTG and TSW were for the players by taking there time to produce good content until now everything's on marketing and quantity over quality. Whether they are half-baked or not, the upper executives have there shareholders to pay. Our only hope is to rely on third part developers as Just Trains (Forget River, I'm sure most of us here know why, *cough *cough)

 

Night time driving done properly can be quite entrancing and entertaining. Look no further than the truck sims. Even Run 8 on its old custom graphics generally does night time better than TSW. Out in the desert, you can just see the hills and mountains silhouetted against the not quite black sky.

There really does seem to be a disparity between the choice of UE for TSW and employing programming and modelling gurus who can get the best from it.

 

Jetwash, you can probably answer this- how much of a performance impact, if any, would sorting the lighting out have? Is it possible that its regarded as low hanging fruit for milking performance?

 

The lighting as it is is just a set of variables that, as far as I’m aware, can be changed for zero performance impact. The same goes for materials (a good example of materials being set up incorrectly is that sometimes you will see certain surfaces inside the train cab reflecting sunlight that isn’t visible in the rest of the interior. Those same materials flash blue when going in and out of the tunnels because they’re reflecting light they shouldn’t be reflecting). The randomly lit carriages in the WCMLS stream are almost certainly a combination of incorrectly set up materials and the lighting inside Euston being inconsistently set up. Don’t get me wrong though, UE4 lighting is a minefield, which is why they need to figure out a setup that works (including how the world looks from inside the locomotive itself) then ruthlessly apply it 100% of the time across all developers. 3rd parties should only be allowed to deviate from that standard if they can demonstrate what they’re doing is an improvement on the baseline standard.

Performance degradation comes from reducing pop-in, increasing shadow draw etc but the lighting variables themselves have no material impact on performance. It’s the reason the ‘low’ setting on my lighting mod only contains lighting changes because those alone have zero impact on the games performance.

One other thing I forgot to mention above is that the time of day system in this game is totally broken. I don’t know if that is UE4 or it’s simply not been set up right (I’d guess the latter) but it gets dark and light at incorrect times of day and doesn’t take geography into account. A good example is in Scotland, in the summer, the sky will stay light until well after 2200. In TSW it is pitch black at about 2000. Conversely, in Winter it doesn’t get light in Scotland until way later than it does in England. The game takes no account of that at all. This again is something that is not difficult to implement in game (Armstrong Powerhouse did it with their Sky enhancements for TSC because it was broken by default there too) and would go a long way to making the game far more enjoyable and realistic. It seems to get dark and light in the USA at the same times of day as in Britain, which is obviously wrong too.

 

I

I also hate playing night runs and scenarios in TSW ..a question i would ask to any RR employees or those who worked for RR in past is the night lighting that bad in real life .. I know they carry lantern s at night or most rail facilities have decent lighting ..other wise when ive tried playing night runs in past im thinking how do RR employees stand working at night even the train headights in TSW dim cant see much at all ...as for the over bright daytime lighting on sunny days in TSW I just set cloud cover to heavy with the in game slider makes a lot better .

 

I've found by experimentation that there appear to be at least two different, both wrong, time of day system used. Most of the UK routes appear to use a ToD system that runs 1 hour 'ahead' in summer (sun goes down too early), and most of the recent German routes (at least Niddertalbahn and Bremen from memory) run 2 hours 'ahead'. LIRR2 is also afflicted with the latter.

You would have thought that it can't be that hard to get this right, including an adjustment for Summer Time for those countries that use it?

 

Thanks, great answer, and I appreciate the depth and explanation of it. I hope (but have low expectation of) that DTG can at least learn from these missteps that mar an otherwise genre leading product.

 

Think it also makes the decision not to layer into Birmingham NS & Manchester even worse, both commercially and player wise.

As it stands I’m not buying TSW5. The standard of the route should have been in keeping with Goblin and its very much lower, combined with the unbranded trains & stations it doesn’t have any appeal for me.

Had they layered in to make New Street and Piccadilly more realistic I’d possibly have taken the plunge.

 

I would say this. I don’t have any formal training in this sort of thing, everything I’ve learnt is from reading literature on UE4 then trying to put it into practice (within the confines of altering things outside of the editor) and I think it’s fair to say that’s the same for many of the people that mod this game. I enjoy DTG’s train sims but I got to the point that I just couldn’t enjoy it with the inconsistent state of the visuals anymore.

It is very clear to me though that I’m not the only person who feels this way. The two mods that have largely sat undisturbed at the top of the TSW list on TSC relate to a lighting and graphics mod that attempts to bring more fidelity to the graphics, and a mod that fixes, as far as is possible though hex editing, incorrectly and inconsistently (that word again) set up lights on the locos and train units. As much a surprise to me as anyone else those two mods have been downloaded a combined 91,257 times since TSW4 came out and I believe that speaks volumes.

I don’t think it’s coincidence. People want to see this side of the game improve yet DTG, who claim to listen to our feedback, are completely ignoring it. Set a high standard and apply it consistently, that’s all many of us are asking for. The sad thing is we’re sat here roughly two weeks before the 7th iteration of the game releases and these same old problems are not only there, but as bad as they’ve ever been. Not only that but again there is no sign of many of the graphical benefits that are not only built in to UE4, but utilised as standard in virtually all new games.

 

I think DTG listen to their customers/players feedback and they act accordingly, so long as it suits DTG's agenda. For example some players ask for a short route, so DTG will produce a short route, but if players ask for a longer route it does not suit or DTG are not willing to do it due to cost or time. As the saying goes you can please some of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time, but this doesn't excuse DTG from producing a poor TSW or route.

 

It seems DTG have simply lost the will to improve the core (okay after 8 years they finally updated the map). TSW in 2024 has apparently become a money spinner by constantly churning out at times unfinished and unpolished content with regular cadence, secure in the knowledge that despite the forums bemoaning the state of the game, a solid, less demanding player base will buy whatever they make. It makes me sad that TSW will never reach its true potential, nevertheless I do still enjoy the game warts and all.

 

I'm a bit late to the party here, but I should at least summarise my thoughts:

• The trains themselves seem good, although the sounds could use some fine tuning, I don't think they sound bad.
• I am annoyed that my question about TASS was ignored twice, I would have liked to see it in action.
• It would be nice to see some more passengers along the route, particularly at Euston.
• The lighting definitely needs looking at, although, as others have stated this seems to be a constant problem. To be honest, I don't think the night lighting around Euston looks bad, but as you move away from Euston it just looks too dark.
• My biggest problem is with the timetable, the 710 table with its 90 minute gaps is just weird. The 350 timetable is better, but it still seems a little quiet. The main reason I didn't mind the shorter route was that I hoped for a complex timetable.

Overall, will I buy the deluxe edition? If the other routes are good and at least some progress is made with these problems by the 17th then probably yes.

 

I fully appreciate that DTG is not going to please me or anybody else all of the time. Route length, train branding, etc don’t bother me as much as things that shouldn’t be recurring in version 5 of the game. Dumbing down the timetable (unless this is proven to destroy performance) is one unacceptable issue. We’ve been told on livestreams in the past that the number of services don’t impact performance, rather the number of different train models on a route, so I can never understand it when DTG does not make full use of the timetable(s) for each and every route.

 

Quite a coincidence, players asked for London to Peterborough, they chose Peterborough to Doncaster instead. They also asked for the North London Line, instead again we got the Goblin Line. Though I'll kind of let of the Goblin Line slightly being it's a fairly decent route.

 

It will be dev time setting up and testing the timetable.

 

I, I, I asked for Posh to Donny (Ok, York). I, um, also didn't ask for North London line.

 

I would've preferred the north london line Or even better a combination of the goblin and north London line which is available in TSC. There were many requests for the North London line

 

The silence from DTG continues. Even a "yeah we dropped the ball on this one" would be better than allowing the boil to fester like this. It would have potentially been an exercise in damage limitation but again one gets the impression of fingers being stuck in ears etc. Maybe engagement with the community only occurs when there's a potential sale to be made, but otherwise the mentality is that the community can go screw itself..
Who knows, but that's how it looks to me..

 

It will be dev time, but surely they should be allocating enough dev time to do the timetables justice - otherwise the routes just look empty.

 

I'd love to see what UK routes have been most requested.
I'll guess at the top ten (excluding released and upcoming routes)

ECML South, GEML South, South East London network to link up to Dartford, Riviera Line, Merseyrail, ECML Newcastle to Edinburgh, Birmingham to Liverpool, North London Line, C2C, Metropolitan Line.

 

Merseyrail has definitely been requested several times and I would love to see this in TSW, all lines, which will be a big ask, but it would be super cool.

 

I think it is wise to wait until we get review streams from Ambassadors until we make up our minds about night lighting. Agreed it’s not ideal but I did notice a big difference between the picture on the TV (which I was watching as the main screen) and the iPad screen which I had in front of me for comments. The lighting on the iPad screen appeared clearer and brighter. Maybe that’s just my experience but I think it is worth waiting for an unbiased review.

 

Back to the subject of night lighting. It's pretty clear that DTG do not consider this issue to be important enough to invest the development time necessary to solve it.

Maybe their market analysts tell them it's not a big issue with most players, I don't know. But I'm another player who avoids driving after dark.

So instead of dealing with core issues like lighting, save game etc., we get gimmicky features like eye adaptation, hopping and bouncy-castle suspension.

We know that they can get night lighting at least half right. In fact they got it right in the very first route, SPG, presumably because they took the time necessary.

They need to get night lighting consistently correct, so that we can all enjoy the pleasures of driving 24/7.

 

Without wanting to sound like a broken record, the night lighting is the night lighting and is the same on EVERY ToDv4 route in the game. The difference again is whether or not the developers (Rivet) have gone through and added more lights to the route since the stream. It is the actual lights that are missing and I would put money on the answer to that question being no.

Either way, the actual lighting of the moon, stars, sky etc will not change.

 

The British Ace is one of the only streams I watch to get a fair and honest opinion on the route. Most of the time his feelings are on the same wave length as mine so anything he says I'll take on board. I wonder when the ambassadors will release review videos?

 

You'll be waiting a long time for an unbiased review from some of the ambassadors...

 

I avoid all ambassador content.

They’re effectively DTG employees and aren’t going to be excessively negative or bite the hand that feeds them.

Unfortunately, given the sheer number of DTG Ambassadors, it’s often difficult to find someone on YouTube who isn’t one, or someone hoping to be one.