Starting with the new Rivet Edinburgh-Glasgow they added inboard passenger train annoucements as the long requested feature for TSW. Since Rivet created away to implement annoucements I like the Special Projects Team to take the technology from rivet add the in train passenger annoucements to each route and also trying to get the rights each passenger railroad company to give them access to their passenger train annoucement recordings. This will increase the immerson all of the passenger train route DLC's in the game.
It feels like too much to ask for. I think it is a good idea for future routes once dtg have learned and mastered the tech but considering how there are many dlc in the legacy content, it would be too much work for the special projects team which is a small team and they have a major backlog of fixing legacy content and adding new features such as the brand new lighting system and helping 3rd party developers where appropriate. Recording the actual announcements in house and matching them up with the services and having them play with no issues would be a large task. Imagine the work that would have to go into london commuter for example where there are around 1400 services and multiple different service patterns meaning you have to create unique sound recordings for all of them. Almost every single modern passenger route would need announcements which is basically like every single route. All modern uk routes, modern german routes and American passenger routes. All have their own unique recordings.
They should start with the LIRR. All of their recorded announcements are online anyway so they wouldnt have to record anything. Creating the blueprint should be a piece of cake especially given that they already have functions for grabbing the service info from the timetable. Just set up a collision volume at each station so that when the train hits it, it triggers an event to check if the service stops there, and if so, play the announcement for that station. Easy peasy!
For the Deutsche Bahn routes they will exactly sound the same as each other due to the trains using Ingo Ruff announcements. OBB routes do use Chris Lohner the voice you hear on 182 PZB Sifa Spring Brake Zwangsbremsung in-game and real life Examples HRR S3 HRR Dosto RE2 Essen Duisburg Main Spessart Bahn Riesa Dresden RE50 OBB/DB BR223 182 1016/1116 DB BR183 OBB 1216 Chris Lohner
If you're familiar with how blueprints work in Unreal, then you'd see it's really not, especially given that they already have functions that grab the service info from the timetable. That's how the ASI works on the Metro-North route to update the next station in the cab of the M7. No reason why they couldn't configure the same event that updates the operator's screen at each station to also play an announcement.
They've said once Rivet has shared the tech and how difficult it is, then they'll consider it on a case by case basis. So it will be a 'not on the plan until its done' deal. I suspect the flagship routes might, but I doubt some of the lesser ones will..
