With TSW4 fast approaching, I do feel that London Commuter is being left behind as a failed experiment on a route with further potential. Despite being Rush Hour's Poster route, it never actually received its Rush Hour credentials, yet I think it deserves so much more as it's an interesting & busy route with a variety of traffic. I was surprised it didn't receive the upgrades that SEHS gained, is this because of how the route was built, is it at max capacity before it becomes unstable perhaps? If not, how about showing this great route a bit of love in TSW4 DTG?
would love to see thameslink services included, and some stations still dont have any trains stopping at them (between redhill and gatwick airport)
The key problem appears to be performance. As it is, the route has performance problems and they don't appear to find a solution to it. Therefore, they also didn't add any more locos to it (700 would make great sense). I'll try to add 700 via the editor but it will be a mammoth task to replicate all that is already existing.
The strong impression I get is that London Commuter was by far the hardest of the Rush Hour routes to produce and had a very difficult birth, so to speak. DTG eventually managed to get it into a state that was releasable but I think it's the Buckaroo* of routes now, where changing anything might cause the whole house of cards to come tumbling down (or at least that's how it's perceived internally at DTG, hence the reluctance to update or change anything). Of course, I sincerely hope it does get updated at some point (TOD4 and the 700 being the two 'new' features I'd like to see added, along with the required performance optimisations and scenery updates) as despite the tough start, it's a standout route and I think should be restored to its rightful place as one of the flagship TSW routes by bringing it up to latest standards. *Ask your parents, kids
I agree with this. It would be amazing to see this route get some TLC to bring it up to TOD4 standard and attempt some performance improvements. I’m curious as to what causes the performance degradation in its current form, if it’s known.
From being a route that I wouldn't have thought to buy, to picking it up for £5 last Christmas, it has been an eye opener, and now one of my favourite and most driven routes. I'm happy with the way it is and DTG have said there are no plans to upgrade previous version's routes. istr it had more, higher resolution assets and a larger timetable
As far as I'm aware: - Collision is turned on throughout the route for the third rail where it shouldn't be - The route was created before the use of the auto-testing tool that (afaik) highlights areas of excessive memory usage (so if there's a blade of grass constantly being rendered at 8k or something, I don't think there was a way to know about it before this tool) - That the route ended up significantly behind the initial schedule means that there probably wasn't enough time to conclude the usual optimisation work anyway (no evidence for this point, just trying to think logically about the dev process) - The size of the timetable makes testing it prohibitively time-consuming, so introducing layers with the 700 would be a pretty long-winded exercise (without any direct financial reward for DTG) Very happy to be corrected on any of the above by anyone from DTG who knows what they're talking about, this is just what I've picked up from reading forum posts / Discord over time.
Maybe talented 3rd party devs could be allowed to attempt to fix the performance issues in that route? It is one of the most popular routes for people who love commuter runs because there are simply so many of them.
DTG are very bad at promising things what don't even happen because they said when the BLM that would get fixed, 2 years later "still broken" they complain that the route is to broken for there to be the 700 on there then bloody fix it. And BTW I do like there content but not there promising plus I have no hate for them but I just want to see my payware things to be fixed.
I modder from eastern Europe has added some 700 services to the existing tt and it works fine. Now, he has not added more recently so has he reached the route's limit with these few services. Don't know since he has been quite for a month or so. I have enjoyed running them and since they are part of the Joe tt it is still busy and congested.
I wouldn’t call it a failed experiment. It is what it is at this point, which is one of the best routes from TSW2 that you can generally pick up on a steep discount.
It never got rush hour features because it was too much demand. But don’t forget, consoles will never hold back PC!
Idk how anyone can seriously make this argument given how fragmented PC gaming is with endless different configurations at many different price-points and many different performance levels. PC devs have to consider this and make the game playable on the lowest common denominator PCs among their player base as well as consoles among their player base. (I have a feeling the average TSW player doesn’t have the highest end PC). Anyway, congrats on having a high end PC and sure your investment in new tech and features is wasted thanks to aging hardware but that’s nobody else’s problem. It’s kind of like buying a flying car and complaining that the rest of the world hasn’t laid down the infrastructure for you to use it wherever you want.
I actually find London Brighton performance is essentially solved. At least on gen 9 console I have next to no FPS issue or stuttering.
One of the best routes on TSW in my opinion. I doubt it will ever be updated as this will lead to further problems with the route. I feel it’s in a good place now. Like someone else already mentioned. I too, don’t suffer with any major stuttering on the route. It plays great for me. I mostly use journey mode though, like every route I play.
It's solved for 9'th Gen but not 8'th Gen we need to think about players on 8'th but DTG still haven't fixed it idk why but yeah.
You’ve completely missed the point. I’m not asking for PC to be better, It’s the fact DTG explicitly said several times that console would not hold back PC. But they are, massively holding it back.
The timetable on LBN is what makes it great for me as I cannot stand the Electrostars so the business is why I enjoy it. As you can see in my signature I would also love to see the 700 on LBN as I actually enjoy driving those so I would be able to enjoy the route much more. But is it? I mean there is the editor for PC but not console and many more settings to fiddle with on PC. As said above 'PC' is a very wide term as it includes everything from the old and rather useless PC I am using right now which would get perhaps 15fps on GWE and even less on LBN, to the PC I use for TSW and Transport fever which gets me about 30-50 fps on NTP and 30 odd on SEHS, to the high end PCs people have on here which get 60+ fps. So by that I ask the (rhetorical) question, is PC holding back gen 9 console? This is a thread about LBN however, so I will stop there.
Gen 8 is not holding Gen 9 back or PC back. Each of Gen 8, and 9 have their own separate builds. The issue is indeed Xbox Series S, which is running Gen 9 builds with insufficient RAM. For some reason they can't make a separate build for Series S because Microsoft class it as Gen 9 (apparently). Also when they tried to remove the hitboxes from the third rail after MatJamCa pointed out that they had hitboxes, the world ended, so they concluded that removing the hitboxes would necessitate rebuilding the route from scratch.
What I will say about Series S is totally layman's observations, however I played on my Series S last night on a rush hour GX service and it ran LBN smooth as silk apart from the standard stutters which you get on every platform, even in the Clapham Junction area. I have all the British content, bar Glossop, class 52 and 313 downloaded. I personally prefer it to the PC and actually if it weren't for the sounds I would have waved bye, bye to PC a while ago.
What I am seeing is pathing issues causing the red lights, not the old "redlight issue" where everything freezes. On all redlights I have experienced and waited at, they do clear up and I can get moving. For me, on a congested route like this, waiting is part of the game.
I don’t know about you, but I’m ready and raring to go. Pre-Ordered my deluxe copy last week. Extremely excited to play the three new routes on the 21st September.
What makes London to Brighton good, is that you get the complete route. Unlike SEHS even in its reworked guise which, so far as the conventional services are concerned, run from nowhere to nowhere. And of course Joe’s superb timetable, in fact I’m surprised he hasn’t been head hunted by NR Train Planning..! Like others I’m not particularly fond of the Electrostars though with the caveat if we ever got the much requested 4CIG and 4VEP units, technically these would be like driving cab cars as the powered vehicle was in the centre of the formation. It’s a shame they never sorted out the missing track at Redhill and of course the fiction that is Reigate station. However as we are likely to experience quite soon more directly with the user editor, changing things once baked off in UE is not that easy. I decided to torture myself last night with the all stations Class 700 bus run on SEHS and really wish DTG had done something to put these sets to work on BML, even if it meant paying £5 for a new timetable layer incorporating them.
Now when you think about it we don't get the full route London bridge is missing but it's understandable because it would of broken the game more.
Victoria to Brighton is complete terminus to terminus but I agree London Bridge would have been the icing on the cake or, as you say, the straw that broke the camel’s back.
SEHS to me feels more complete than BML. Adding the 700 to BMl would create just another service pattern, whereas SEHS has that and also services that run at certain times of year, and there is more variety in terms of vehicle formations on services whereas BML each service pattern has a fixed formation.
MS policy is that a specific version for S cannot be made seperatey to the one for X as a seperate SKU; aside from the game detecting which platform it is running on so that it doesn't try to use features that don't exist on it, and obvious things like render resolution, S and X must have the same build However, MS may be bending on this soon, since this policy disallowed Larian from releasing Baldur's Gate 3 on Xbox (which is why its an unintended PS5 console exclusive). Phil Spencer (head of Xbox) himself has met with Larian to discuss it with Larian by all accounts. The stumbling block as reported was that Larian couldn't get split screen to run on S but they could on X, but since MS policy specified that S and X versions had to have feature parity, Larian decided not to release at all
I think London commuter is a great route but I feel it would be complete with London bridge, RedHill to Tonbridge and branch lines
Well that modder is me and no i dont reached any limits. Its long term work because its not just adding service into the timetable, its about creating timing data for the service too and that is what takes a lot of time. So for your update im still working on that timetable. And because a lot of users would like to enjoy that timetable in Journey mode i even mod that (that will come with next update). And i dont want to just add that timetable into the Journey mode so i decide to even create extra Journey for Class 700 on that route (its not done yet, a lot of work but here is some screens: Journey mode: Timetable new added services:
Good luck with that, replicating existing means create around 5k services which are included in timetable right now.
Yes, yes, yes! Now that we have the Class 700/0, this will give this loco some life, as currently it’s only limited to SEHS. I’m not very familiar with TSC. Did DTG ever release a route on TSC with London Bridge?
