I was just investigating how the selectable layers would work. I looked at a couple of routes and which layers I would want to appear or not appear. I looked at WCL and found that you could either have all the NTP layers turned off or not, so if I want the class 101 to appear or maybe the 47 but not the others, that is not possible. I looked at Dresden to Riesa to see if I could turn the class 110 off, but it is not possible you have to disable the complete RE50(?) layer, which wouldn't be desirable. I then looked at Blackpool and found that the loco's from NTP are all individually selectable, it appears therefore I can stop the class 40 appearing without losing the layers. I haven't driven a service yet to try this out. I am guessing then this is how each individual timetable is set up? I haven't delved into the timetable editor yet but I am getting close to doing so. So from what I can see the selectable layers could be good or could end up not being such a good solution.
It’s going to be one those things that’s good if it’s utilised correctly. Every dev seems to have its own way of doing something & even then they aren’t consistent. I’d probably recommend looking at other routes from Rivet to see how the layers are setup & check if it’s a case of all layers from one route are bundled into one, or an as per service/train selection. For the 110 that’s just a substitution which I don’t believe the layer selector would pick up.
Yes, hopefully going forward developers might set them up similar to Blackpool. I will go through all the routes I think just to see how they are set up.
It’s certainly something that I think has a lot of potential, hopefully it will lead to things like a substitution checklist so we can disable things subbing around. Another good one would be potentially forcing a sub onto a layer. In any case it’s a smart addition & hopefully DTG & Co really run with it, getting these custom tools into the timetable mode is great.
I looked at the layers selection in the Frankfurt route and there is quite a big list. I don’t have many of those layers yet due to them not being available in early access on PS5 but the route certainly looks like some layers may need to be disabled to get decent performance judging by the performance without them. It may take a lot of trial and error to find out what to disable, and if you are knowledgeable about the route that may be easier, but I might struggle. I don’t like the idea of having to disable layers to get a route to work though, it should really just be for personal preferences, but it is being marketed as a tool to increase performance. If it is required to prevent game crashes then that will be a shame. The German routes also have a lot of substitution so it could get extra confusing and we already know it can’t be used to disable substitutions of particular locos, just services. It is going to be one of those features that will vary in usefulness based on the route and like many things in TSW it will be the one thing you want to do that isn’t possible. I’ll likely only use it if I have to (to solve a specific issue for instance) as I generally like to have as many trains as possible in a timetable.
Personally I haven’t noticed any issues with performance on that route (although I’ve only done 6 runs & 4 of those didn’t go into FrankfurtHBF). It wasn’t solid 60fps but then any busy station in TSW rarely is. I did have one instance of notably poor performance at MKC on WCML, I spawned a 350 service and got sub 30fps until I was a couple of miles clear of the station. It wasn’t particularly busy either. I think from looking at other posts on the forum, the performance seems to be very inconsistent across TSW5. There is also one thing to remember, making sure the map is zoomed out. If you zoom too far in, it tanks performance, even when it’s not open.
