Dovetail Games February Roadmap Q & A - Tuesday, Feb 13th

Hello everyone, closing the thread here and will wrap up the questions through this morning

I have since timestamped the YouTube VOD for the Q&A live stream last night, which highlights every question asked and our answers for each one that you can skim through easily.


As for the remaining questions in this thread unanswered that I can provide a response for, I will talk about these below.

Q: Will the 158 and 170 be in a single dlc?
For context, the Class 170 is the key loco for Fife Circle, which is a route developed by Rivet Games, and the Scotrail Class 158 is a loco pack developed by Skyhook Games. You can view these on our Roadmap graphic in our February Roadmap thread, and on that you will see these are separate releases with different timeframes on when you can expect them. We'll share more information for both of these closer to their releases.

Q: Will onboard train announcements be included with the upcoming London Overground route?
It's a feature we started developing a first pass for, but it didn't get to at a level we were happy with. We provided a more in-depth explanation as to the implementation of this system, how it compares to third-party announcements and a mention for platform announcements in the Q&A stream last night from 26:45.

Q: What content are the announced third-parties currently working on?
We're not at a point where we can talk more about this, and the projects they're developing, but we hope to share more with you soon. The best place to stay updated on more news about these are from our Dovetail Live articles, Roadmaps and livestreams.

Q: Will we ever get a UK freight locomotive that is not a Class 66?
Right now, the best indication of upcoming content is what is shown on the monthly roadmap. We do have an unannounced UK Loco included on this, and we will share more news about this when we are closer to its release.

Q: Will existing routes be updated to contain the new content as layers, whether AI or not? Also any prospect of route mergers being involved?
When we look for future content, there are many cases where we need to weigh up mismatching years between content from an add-on to a new release and decide if the trade-off is worth including between how out of place it may feel, versus the additional variety of gameplay it can provide. Our goal remains to utilise as much of your collections as possible. We talk more about how we utilise back catalogue add-ons when it comes to planning our new routes in the Q&A stream at 33:00

Finally, we discussed in great detail about the topic of route merging and the challenges we face with this in our Q&A stream from 1:09:00 onwards.

Q: What is our progress with Steam simulation?
We talked about this more in our Q&A stream at 55:31, our teams at Dovetail currently aren't actively developing Steam content or working on further improvements, however, we are supporting our third-party partners who wish to create and release new steam content in the future.

Q: What is our status on the PC Editor?
We talked about the PC Editor in our Q&A stream at 36:15, the immediate plan is to work on creating shorter-form videos in the form of tutorials/guides for using the PC Editor, to help support the community using the tool as best as we can. Regarding when we will have updates for the Editor, this is something we are still working on and committed to improving, however, we expect it may be a few months before we can get improvements for the Editor. We'll keep you updated on if this changes and when we have more news.

Q: Any work going on on improving the save game function
This is something that the team have on their list to continue to improve where we can, and we do still have a few outstanding issues relating to specific loco set-up cases not retaining between saves that are on our ticket log.

Q: The Roadmap image for the London Overground route lists a 'Holloway Road' station, hopefully this is just a typo
Yes! We have an updated version of this which correctly names the 'Upper Holloway' station, and this is how it is spelt in-game too.

Q: When can we expect Suspension Improvements?
This was talked about in our Q&A stream last night from 45:30, as a summary it's a feature we're still working on and it's taking longer than we expected to get it working to a level we're happy with releasing. We've made good progression, and we aim to share more videos showing the feature soon, however, Matt notes that the issue with this feature is that when it doesn't work quite as intended, it can quickly make trains derail and fly off the tracks as it completely impacts the core experience of the simulation, which is a fine balance. As an update, in our test builds the 4024 and Class 66 both have these improvements implemented.

Q: Do we have a fix for the camera speed on external cameras?
We're still investigating this one, but we understand it's a frustrating issue and we're working hard to ensure we can get a resolution out as soon as possible.

Q: Plan to add a JSON(+HTTP?) API to TSW4 so external applications could access data
After checking with Matt, we've not got anything to share yet on this.

Q: The benefit of bringing in more third parties and testing processes?
Matt gives a really good answer to this in our Q&A stream at 1:03:22 which I recommend listening to, which goes into detail on the added variety and diversity of more content, and how that ties into what we release.

Q: Will DTG implement an autosave feature to avoid console players needing to keep going back to the pause menu to save manually in case of crashes please?
This can be a feature we look into adding as we generally aim to help improve functionality and ease-of-use as much as we can.

Q: Do we have any more Remasters planned?
Currently nothing to announce, and it's worth noting these remasters typically can start as personal projects, but we are investigating the success of the recent WSR Remaster and how that can be formally introduced into our production. Again, nothing to share and we're still assessing our options into the future, so we'll share more news about the potential for more remasters when we can!


All the additional questions on this thread were directly answered in our live stream, which you can find linked above and you can use the description to jump to our responses. Captions are also available for these too!

Please keep in mind that many of the questions asked are related to our upcoming announced routes from the Dovetail Direct, and for a good deal of those we are too early to have answers. This is dependant on whether we can't share that information yet or we don't know the specifics at this time, and we aim to share more with you in the coming weeks and months ahead!