Enough Is Enough!!!

First, gemba-walk the silos to identify the value-add activities and leverage opportunities in line with TIMWOODS.

 

That would be a paradigm shift.

 

Who is Tim Woods?

 

It's an acronym:
Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing, Defects, and Skills.

 

Thanks. I have a whole list of acronyms in the back of my notebook from various management meetings I've been to, but that's a new one for me

 

When is enough really enough though?!

 

When this thread reaches page 50 in about 30 comments time

 

In before the lock (as they say on Overclockers UK)!

 

Give this man a promotion

 

They just want to take your money, support and improvements to both the game and DLCs will never be rewarded.

 

FYI, ticket for GP38-2 EOTD pressure was closed without explanation.

 

For me, they don't do anything, at most they do the arts and schedules, I think the logic and programming part is handled by an outsourced company, there's no point in reporting problems to them. The answers given in the tickets appear to be bots with artificial intelligence.

Regarding the GP38-2 EOTD pressure, I could release the fix with mod, but I won't gain anything from it and I won't even have my name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

 

Im not asking for a 2 hour long route Im asking for a route that is actually interesting, London<>Brighton is very boring with the same stopping patterns and everything... if DTG include more branch lines to their mainline routes they would be far more interesting. SEHS is amazing, Dartford, London, Ashford, Faversham its alot to choose from. But DTG just give 40 minute routes that are point to point

 

You make excellent points here. Given that DTG have failed to appeal this game to a broader audience (whether that be the genre or their own lacklustre reputation), it makes sense that they'd need to continue churning out lower quality, high turn around products at increased prices to keep the business going. If they had millions of players then perhaps a more concerted effort could be made to hire more people to support improvements to the core game and to increase quality as we've seen as an example with SCS and their trucking games. So in the end, it is what it is. You either put up with the status quo or move on to better games.

 

The dev team are in-house. The lead software engineer was replying to people in another thread about optimisation recently.

But even if some of the dev team were outsourced, they would still be working for the main developers/publisher, to the same plan, bug fixing, etc. Outsourcing isn't a bad thing and makes no difference to the quality of the software being good or bad (quality is dependent on ability but also decisions from the top), or how bugs are prioritised. Everything operationally is decided by the publisher and management.

 

Projects are definitely outsourced.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/bKvbvv

 

Erm, I don't think London - Brighton is boring at all. It's busy, reasonably long, has diverse scenery and a good variety of trains & services at your disposal.

 

Well, yes, I have seen artwork for TSW mentioned by another third-party too, but I don't see the point of what was said with regards to the claim there is no point reporting bugs to DTG if development is outsourced. Bugs will be dealt with or not regardless of whether the programmers are working in-house or outsourced.

It was mentioned as if outsourcing is a bad thing. There is a lot of outsourcing in the industry.

 

I think I once read that at least some of the QA is outsourced. Obviously not a great idea judging by results.

 

HAHAHAHAHA. That's what I suspected, surely all projects are like this, there must be more hidden developers out there.

https://cassagi.com/project/train-sim-world/

 

London to Brighton ain't boring in the slightest.

 

Does that means that DTG don't do all the work ?!

 

As I said, outsourcing is more common than you might think in games development. I'm sensing a negative reaction to this, here.

Halo – partly outsourced
Civilization VI – partly outsourced
Many game platform conversions – outsourced

I could go on.

It isn't, in itself, a bad thing.

 

I would be surprised if there was a game developer who DIDN'T outsource at least something - Why not use the best work out there to enhance your own product? Or take the case of Creative Assembly and Games Workshop, which was an out-and-out partnership to release one of their titles.

 

Outsourcing? Yes, that’s how DTG manage to make so much content. Anybody care to take a guess at how many different studios and single developers outside of DTG are used for the development of TSW and its DLC content? There’s quite a high probability that some of it has been made in your town. I know there is in the town where I live.

 

? I'm critical of DTG. I'm critical of TSW. I joined this forum only with the aim of complaining about a serious bug.

I'm not defending DTG ignoring bugs. The complete opposite. I'm saying that I don't see what outsourcing development has to do with DTG ignoring bugs.

EDIT: Sorry, I just can't get my head around how you or anyone would come to the completely wrong conclusion that I idolise DTG based on me defending the concept of outsourcing in the industry. You obviously have never paid attention to my past posts. I don't idolise any developer or games publisher. Bizarre suggestion.

 

Would help if the outsources did a good job in the 1st place.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GeXAya

You can see the livery issues with UP 1988 in this shot on Jake Kay's portfolio. Which still showed up on release.....

And no one has ever bothered to fix it.

 

I don't have a problem with outsourcing production. It's obvious to me that testing and QA are where the system breaks down. If products are not thoroughly checked out before release, it doesn't really matter who made them.

 

Exactly this. My brother has built his career of many years as a freelance developer, and getting work on reputation. I mention Halo and Civ VI because those are two of the games he has worked on coding (although he wasn't credited on Halo, which also happens in the industry).

 

More often than not, though, the issue is with the people who decide what issues get attention or not.

Usually the programmers themselves are picking up on bugs as they go along, too, and will fix them as they go (while someone else on the team is uploading another section of code that then breaks something else).

 

You seem to be operating on the assumtion that there is some huge untapped market of potential train sim players out there, who have stayed away from TSW, specifically because reasons. That isn't the case. The market is only so big, especially when you consider that there is considerable overlap (i.e. players owning multiple games) between TSW, TSC, Simrail, Trainz, Run-8, ZUSI and Derail Valley, as well as forthcoming titles like Railroader. These are all bought and played by essentially the same people.

 

Wait, you mean to tell me that DTG doesn't have an in house orchestra for its music? Oh now I'm truly crestfallen

 

As we've seen with traditionally niche hobbies like flight simulation and truck simulators, there is an untapped market out there for those willing to go out and find it.

 

There are plenty of people who have not switched over from Train Simulator to Train Sim World, mainly due to the short routes, weaker rolling stock selection, buggy content and lack of editor. While the editor finally seems to be happening at least, it is still incomplete and currently can't even cook creations into the game.

Then there is also the case of DTG having quite a bad reputation from both present day and past TSC days, so many people simply avoid their products due to quality concerns, and instead keep playing Train Simulator with add-ons from other parties.

So yes, there is a big untapped market.

 

Which are each an order of magnitude bigger than the market for train sims.

 

Yes they are today. Flight sim did for sure have a bigger market even just 4 years ago, but it was still a relatively small community. Truck sims? Nearly non existent before SCS made it a big thing. Again, if you build something right and listen to your community you can gain reach.

 

I can see how outsourcing might make updating older content even more difficult. Its hard enough to go back and fix code you wrote, never mind go and deal with some code you didn't write to start with. I presume people are hired to make the content and perhaps a short period after for a post-release patch, but then the contract probably ends.

If you think about it that matches the pattern of the content, it also might explain why we have several versions of the same items, perhaps each made by different people. I'd rather outsourcing was used for non-core functions rather than having a lot of people who aren't developing and then outsourcing the development. But as discussed on another thread that might also explain why DTG looks a bit top-heavy in non-developers.

 

During TSW2 there was a time I had big hopes the older content would keep being maintained and new features would be brought to it through updates like once a half of year. It was also the time I wasn't afraid of buying any of the older content that I didn't get when TSW2020 was still maintained. This was when something called Preservation Team existed and Adam Lucas was joining every or every other of the roadmap streams to talk about updates for that older content. But then the TSW3 released, preservation team was disbanded, updates were said to be ready for release but just lacking "release time slot", and then Focus bought DTG and Adam finally went to 3rd party. Since that time I have lost hope of anything previously released being updated with anything new or getting bug fixes, maybe except the major game breaking ones happening in every scenario & service. It greatly discourages from buying new editions of TSW, any DLC for TSW, whether it's something new, released 2 months ago, or stuff that I didn't decide to get earlier which I'd still like to play with without the need to have 3 editions of the game installed at the same time.

 

Of course, the completely forgotten mess of a DLC has been outsourced. There hasn't been a single word about that since it was released. It's a shame such beautiful locos were given such a laughable representation. And they will stay that way no matter how many core releases they make...

Edit: it's also the same guy who made Rivet's Jubilees, which were also torn apart for poor livery quality...

 

And based on what Matt posted recently, I would judge that the Preservation Team's work, much as we players benefited, was of no benefit to DTG: it didn't pay for itself with increased sales of the refurbished routes, which was the idea behind it.

 

Hmm, it's almost as outsourcing train modelling and texturing to people who have no insight to trains at all is a bad idea. Who would have thought?

 

I have an idea how they can cut the costs even more - outsourcing everything to AI.

 

Please no.

AI isn't that advanced yet. It'll probably make worse mistakes.

 

Well, outsourcing SW dev is nothing new under the sun. But there´s "outsourcing" and then there´s ´outsourcing´. And given the somewhat bizarre DTG software bugs they chose to ignore, they opted for ´outsourcing´.

Did I mention "outsourcing"? (We´ll make it to 50 pages soon™ ...)

 

Is that even possible at this point?

 

No mistakes need to be shown in any of the promotional material. Just put -10% off pre-order discount and some 60% of the regular consumers will get it before release and another 20% on day 1. The remaining 20% will stay away either because they are uninterested or otherwise waiting until fixes or higher discounts. If fixes don't come, it's only small loss of potential sales, with production cost much lower. There will be threads that AI needs to eat that's why it costs so much.

 

Wow, a bit of pent up emotion I see in that reply, you should find a hobby where you can let off steam. “Incapable of rational thinking” -an ironic statement in the context it is written. But hey enjoy yourself with your personal attacks. Good day

 

Here just to help in the push for 50. *push*

 

We should outsource page 50 of this thread to Mumsnet.

 

Spot on, are DTG listening? one handled EMU routes, recycled 66s, Routes that start and finish in none major places, rushing DLC out then leaving it be, huge fanfares over Steam then forgotten, BR stuff doesn't sell despite a huge potential market, continuous poor output by 3rd parties only rectified by JTs recent effort and the list could go on and on. That's before we mention the excuse book.