It's safe to say the segment of the TSW customer base using the public editor is relatively small. Because of this I can understand that the amount of resources DTG can devote to supporting the public editor would also have to be limited. I'm also aware that the editor was released as a beta without any promised support. With all of that said, a few thoughts and observations of my own. Overall, the individuals using the editor are a passionate, knowledgeable, helpful and friendly group of people. Everyone's participation in this group has been amazing! The creativity I've seen here is awesome. So many different talents and areas of interest. Last year during the first couple of months after the initial release of the editor, the DTG engagement with this group was excellent too. There was a lot of participation with written forum responses, written tutorials and some very helpful video tutorials from DTG. It was all very appreciated by the editor user base. Thank you DTG! There was also a lot of feedback from the user base about some important features and fixes that were needed in the editor to round out its utility. DTG was great about acknowledging these issues and reassured us that updates were coming soon and on a regular basis as well as many additional tutorials. Awesome! As the year progressed, the promised additional tutorials never materialized, the updates didn't come and were constantly pushed back on the road map and participation from editor users seemed to begin to tail off on the forum as the wait of a more definitive commitment from DTG with regard to the improvement of the public editor never came. Finally, after a year of patiently waiting, the much anticipated editor update was announced as part of the TSW5 release! The update would include: Ability to package .pak files for distribution (cooking/packing) Fixes for landscape material usage Improvements to Asset loading (Rediscovery of files when re-loading the Editor) Wonderful! As we all know now, something seems to have gone wrong with the update. Not only did one of the most anticipated and long awaited features(cooking) not work, but some of the basic functionality(map view in PIE for example) that worked flawlessly with the original release was now broken. There was an update this past week(never announced) to apparently fix something(no release notes), but that update just appeared to have broken something else that was even more critical to the use and purpose of the editor for route building(laying track). This has been quite disappointing for sure. It's also been very perplexing as to how this has happened and virtually no communication from DTG as to why or what our expectations should be looking ahead. I'm not posting this to be needlessly critical or difficult. I know DTG staff are very busy and most likely stretched thin on time and priorities as I acknowledged at the beginning of this post. Using the editor to create things at many different levels of interest and ability is a passion for this group and I believe we would just like to know what to expect. We love using the editor and we are counting on DTG to make it a fun and productive experience for us. Any effort to get this update straightened out and any communication from DTG would be greatly appreciated. Disclaimer: I'm by no means an editor power user. I'm a beginner that likes to tinker around in the sandbox learning things and having fun. Maybe all of my perceived issues with the editor are due to my gross novice incompetency. If that's the case I humbly apologize and I'll continue to focus on getting better with my editor technique. I'll take no offense with anyone pointing me in the direction of some good tutorials.
When DTG go silent, you got your answer. And don't be so humble, your editor skills have nothing to do with the matter.
Thanks for the reply. I actually found the TSW4 editor pretty easy to use and had a lot of fun with it. The "update" has had me frustrated and feeling a bit bewildered since its release. This week's "patch" with no option to roll back versions seems like a cruel joke. I will say that file discovery seems to be fixed!
Not having used the editor in the last week or so I was initially under the impression that track laying had only become a problem on newly created tiles. Having tried things out a little this morning I think the crashes for me are only occurring on tiles which have not had Lidar applied and are solely defined by SRTM data. I hope my brief observations are accurate and don't muddy the waters even further. Some official feedback from DTG would indeed be very welcome.
DTG spends a lot of effort fixing bugs in order to get you to buy DLC. The public editor is currently free. Note that it is "free" now. You should be able to feel the benefits of this relationship.
UE editor is free. TSC editor is free. SCS truck sim editor is free. All game editors are free. The TSW editor hasn't helped anyone to release a route or loco. Interest in projects is diminishing because people understand that what they see won't become available for the community. Most stuff is still in the track laying phase, which is approximately less than 5% of total work for making a route. What we are seeing - route enhancements, timetables, fixes and mods - has only been enabled to share by a modder, not DTG. It is what it is, a recruitment tool. Once they got enough 3rd parties, the editor gets crippled. That's what's happening. You have two scenarios to choose from: 1) DTG are deliberately breaking the public editor 2) DTG do not have capable programmers It's up to you to decide if OR or AND applies
It serves no purpose. The DTG knows that it will not make the corrections we would like it to make because it is not currently under any threat.
It served a purpose as talents were recruited, for example pilot who was involved in Frankfurt-Fulda. It's more expensive to hire people, needing to train them in TSW editor inhouse first, than to give them a restricted editor they can get used to (but not share content), post the guides and tutorials, and then hire them off the forums, already having experience. Else it wouldn't be there, as it was already written off by the community after 6 years of waiting (it was promised initially in 2017). The only community content DTG are interested in supporting is their own Creators' Club, using simplified high level ingame editors across all platforms. To be clear, I'm not blaming any of the DTG staff communicating (or not) with us. I am sure Matt would love to give us all a full fledged editor, he made great tutorials for TSC and TSW, streamed user created TSC routes and scenarios on his private YT channel. But these decisions are made on a higher company level.
They apparently are not allowed to answer to this question. Alex, Matt and all the others are not bosses, they are all employees. And in fact knowing the why's won't change anything for you using that restricted cut down public editor. It's not working, full stop. Want to make content, join their 3rd party programme. Use the Public Editor to train yourself, simple as that. If they had openly admitted that the editor will never be usable for creating shareable content, probably no one would have been interested. If I had to speculate, they may be afraid of trainsim.cz now making it possible to cook and distribute your route. Now suddenly you can't lay tracks properly. Coincidence? I don't know, fact is the editor is unusable for a proper route project. The fact we still got no released routes proves that. Not even a "my first TSW route" weekend project has been released, as said you can do a pretty short route in TSC in one afternoon, just use the core asset packs, lay track on flat terrain (or quickly import SRTM data - or manipulate terrain yourself, click and drag), make two stations, a few signals, then plant houses and trees, and make a simple scenario (or for TSW, a quick one-service timetable). Save, zip, distribute. (Can't help but add some history, the first ever user created level (WAD) for the original Doom was made purely using a Hex Editor ) In any case you will probably only get an official answer pointing out "technical difficulties" they're "looking into". Weeks of silence, short community uproar, same promises, editor community disappearing or only focusing on mods and timetables.
I would have called that a conspiracy theory until fairly recently Spikee1975 . Now after almost a full year of waiting for a properly functioning public editor I’m afraid you may have nailed it.
I gave up a year ago, I suggest everybody that has hope there will ever be a "close to what we use" (it's not even 60% close) editor do the same and move to a developer that does support you and your valuable time.. It should be very clear by now that this project is not in their interest at all.
Unfortunately I agree. I mentioned this some time ago that I was starting to think it was deliberate that the editor can’t cook and the silence is just making me believe it’s true however far fetched it sounds. Not that I have the talent to do much with the editor but if it’s an advertised feature then it should work. I very much enjoy the work that modders and enthusiasts do for TSW and other games, so DTG need to sort it out or be open that they won’t support it.
We have no way of knowing the truth inside DTG. I only know that DTG is amazingly fast in releasing DLC, but very slow in dealing with some bugs. Regarding the differences in the editor, I highly suspect there are multiple versions. The first version is used internally by DTG, the second version is provided to third-party studios, and the third version is a learning version.
Well I had a play around in the very beginning but it was so painful to use and a few You Tube clips are no substitute for a proper set of user documentation or a manual. covering both the UE quirks (actors?!) and the specifics to building a rail route. In some ways glad I didn't persevere given the lack of any real support from DTG, not even for those of us who might wanted to just cut our teeth on an upscaled model or miniature railway. Kudos to those who have persisted with it but diabolical DTG never adding cooking and the ability to post any finished projects on the Steam Workshop. It really starts to look as if the editor was always intended primarily to be a recruitment tool, as suggested earlier along with being a sweetner to paying for TSW4 for those of us who had a hankering to get creative. If they really wanted large scale contributions from the route building cadre, then more effort should have gone into making it user friendly, along the lines of Trainz Surveyor or even the TSC editor.
Were there any people from the players who demonstrated their fluency with UE editor and DTG's 'derivate' invited to join the full time staff, or even hired by the hour/byte on project basis to develop content for DTG? 3D modelers? Graphic artists? Scripters? Integrators? for it is almost impossible for a normal person to excell in all? on the other hand, really gifted creators often aren't the most suitable team workers?
Well, this time they did specifically promise to give *us* cooking, so if they don't come up with a fix, (or at least a time frame for one), I think the community would be justified in feeling like they've been gaslit.
It's the same everytime, DTG are shying from saying No to the community. Best example are two threads from TS Classic, where for years two DLC (TGV and missing winter textures which was quickly fixed by myself and uploaded for the Hudson Line). In both cases, it was communicated the teams were aware and working hard, which was simply a lie. For years, in the hope people would eventually forget. The fixes never saw the light of day. DTG's behaviour is all documented in here. A lot of old threads will reveal that what could sound as a "conspiracy theory" is just DTG's modus operandi, starting with promising (using the word "definitely") Multiplayer for TSW. (Not just DTG, we had the Skyhook MML "seed for a bigger network" lie debunked also, which was not the fault of the team but its self-appointed spokesman who is no longer with SHG.)
Think we should have the fix for cooking soon - another confusing case of works in dev, didnt work in shipping, but think that's been tracked down just waiting for a build to test and confirm. Broken track laying... that's a new one on me, i'll get someone to look at it, I can only assume its related to how asset loading has been changed to fix the asset library issue perhaps. Certainly nothing pertaining to track laying itself has been touched. ... and we have a full time engineer starting very soon now, dedicated to working on the public editor. It's taken far too long, but it'll come good. But, ignore me, continue to judge with your eyes and we'll hopefully turn your views around with actions. Matt.
A little less conversation, a little more action If Trainz is coming to consoles including their Surveyor route builder, there's some needed competition.
As easy as Surveyor is to work with, I don’t fancy route building on a console. Will be interesting to see whether it’s the full version of Trainz as on PC. I remember buying their iPad or was it Android version and like stepping back to 2002, very cut down.
You know as a big nobody, I think I'll take that . It's just time to accept that the TSW editor has been Dovetail's clunkiest and worst-supported product by a longshot despite the fact that many people bought into the idea even several years before it's first release. And it's time to change that. Also are there any plans on making new tutorial streams alongside with future development?
I'll talk to community team but yes I believe once the editor is in a place to support them that there's a strong desire to get back to that. Matt.
Not a single reference about the editor on the roadmap. Way to try to restore our trust that you are actually trying to fix it, DTG.
They mentioned it in the roadmap stream. They have since today a full-time software engineer working on fixing bugs and improving the editor. They also mentioned adding more documentation.
I'll talk... I believe... strong desire... A politician couldn't have chosen more careful non-binding wording.
