I was on the Birmingham cross city run, stopped at one station and I like to look outside as the passengers are loading, I tend to keep the doors open that bit longer because they are still boarding. Anyway I heard church bells ringing, I glanced at the time and it was 9a.m. I thought that was a nice touch, wouldn't have thought things like that were programmed in. Col
Amen, that IS a nice touch! Visit Cologne main station on SKA at around noon and you´ll hear the mighty cathedral bells. And the Rheinländer on Linke Rheinstrecke are really train devoted people. They ring their church bells every time your train passes.
Talking of details, I also noticed no children among the people, also no cows, sheep or horses in the fields. Col.
There're quite a few animals displayed on TSW. No dogs, but you can hear them barking on some routes. And I seem to have heart shouting kids around Miltenberg station.
There are also cows and sheep on the Northern Trans-Pennine, WSR, TWL and other old routes. There still some details missing in my opinion, such as dogs, chickens and cats. It would be nice to see them added along the scenary, with more sounds; also seen the new trend of DTG to make parts of towns and areas outside the line explorable. Imagine a Bernina line with some wild animals along the slopes near the tracks! After all, this is also a sort of Open World!
I remember being held up for almost 2 hours because of an incident with a cow on the ECML a few years back
Although I appreciate seeing animals in TSW4 -- sometimes quite close by, I have to mention that Trainz has animals, too: ones that move around and make the appropriate sounds, which adds to the realistic ambience However, I'll admit that I do not find Trainz as satisfying overall as TSW.
Birds have already appeared on the earliest TSC/RW/RS routes, like Somerset Dorset Joint Railway... The feature I'm missing most is MSTS's deer.haz, the animated deer that would flee when using the horn Screenshot courtesy of ElvasTower
https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/passengers-standing-on-track.79314/#post-806125 AI passengers at stations often walk off the platform edge or jump under trains, because the AI boundaries weren't set correctly.... I get people jumping in front of my train all the time, and end-up running them over. I guess DTG don't want people killing AI children. Only takes one complaint to give DTG a bad name.
Matt addressed this in a stream once. The real reason is that all the NPCs use a standard-size mannikin, and children would mean adding more in different sizes, at the inevitable performance cost.
