Dovetail Games Formation Designer (pc Beta) - What You Need To Know

The Formation Designer Beta is here for Steam and Epic players!

Formation Designer is going into open beta to allow players to provide feedback on what experience they have using it and help us get it to the best possible place. One of the big challenges of a system like this is the sheer volume and variety of train vehicles that can be coupled together, you can make some incredible stuff using this and use your collection in a whole new way. You’ll also be able to utilise those formations in both the free roam and scenario planner systems.

Accessing Formation Designer:

To access the Formation Designer head over to the Creators Club section of the in-game menu and you’ll find a brand-new button to take you there. Inside, you can create and manage your formations. Within the Editor itself, you can add rail vehicles, flip them, and even add some of your other formations! Try making a formation of five wagons, then make a new formation and add that five-wagon formation a few times to quickly make big formations!

In this article we’d like to outline the status of known issues, limitations and such as well as pose some more specific questions for players to look at and provide feedback on. Please don’t hold back, we want to hear from you!



The basics:

Formation Designer gives you a ton of flexibility to build the formations you want to see, but you will need to always keep in mind that the vehicles in the sim are built with the functionality of their real-world counterparts. Within many multiple units, the different vehicles are quite unique in functionality, one might provide the compressor for the brakes, another might have the pantograph to pick up power and others may have the motors to make it move.

If you try making creative new formations out of a set of vehicles you may find you’re missing (or doubling up on) key parts that make the formation work. One example of this is if you try to make a fake Class 466 by coupling the two end cars of a Class 465 together, while it will look the part – you’re missing a compressor, so you will eventually find the brakes don’t work. Some combinations will work better for static screenshots rather than long driving sessions, but Formation Designer will let you explore and be as creative as you want.



Future improvements:

Here is where we're going to be targeting improvements first:

General Clutter

The list of vehicles is shown in a completely verbose form currently, whereas other screens in the game group vehicles by their class this currently does not happen. This means that the BR185 will show up numerous times where it should show up only once.

Creators Club

There is currently no integration with Creators Club, this will come in the latter stages of the beta.

Multiple Unit Formations

In this case we’re referring to something like a Class 323 EMU from Glossop Line or the 1972 stock underground train from Bakerloo Line. These are trains where they are made up of multiple vehicles but generally used only as a group together. Currently not all formations are available to be selected, you’ll find the Class 323’s are there but the 1972 stock isn’t for example. In the latter case you’ll instead find all its component vehicles in the list. We have some work ongoing to resolve the way formations work and tidy the user interface up here.

Additionally, the vehicles which are normally component parts of a multiple unit will somewhat confusingly show up in the User Interface with the “Formation” icon even though they only add one item. This will be changed.

Multiple Instances of the Same Vehicle

If you own a number of German packages there’s a good chance you have a number of copies of the BR185 or the Dosto coach set. This means you’ll find numerous instances of them shown in the list of potential vehicles in Formation Designer. The User Interface does not currently tell you which package each one comes from, we will be adding this information as well as looking at letting you specifically filter by the package.

Cargo

The last major pending item is that currently it is not possible to load cargo onto the vehicles. We are enhancing the cargo system to resolve this and it will ultimately allow you to simply pick from a list of available suitable loads. This will then have the expected effect on the performance of the train, it’s weight and so forth.

Other areas of investigation

There are also some other issues we’d like to identify so that you have a complete understanding of where Formation Designer is at for the beginning of the Public Beta on PC. These are all known and things we'll be working on in the background.

• There are cases where the UI may show the length of a formation (in meters) incorrectly.

• There are cases where the designer does not correctly identify vehicles that could be added, for example you may pick a locomotive and then the vehicle you want to put next to it doesn’t show. Please report any instances of this you find detailing the vehicles in question.
• Similarly, you may find that some vehicles do not show up at all. If you find any then please let us know.
• It is not currently possible to re-order vehicles in a formation.
• It is not currently possible to change the name of a formation (the option is there, but it doesn’t make the change).
• Support for custom liveries is currently not working as completely as required, please report any instances where you try to use a custom livery vehicle or formation and find it not working as expected. This may well be impacted by the prior issues noted about formations.
• The UI for selecting a vehicle sometimes asks for repeated information such as selecting a locomotive will then ask you to pick the locomotive again via a different means. This will be cleaned up.
• The Gradient Rating is not always accurate at estimating the ability of a train to make the various gradients. This formula is being revised to tune it down to a more reasonable estimation.
  

 

[WE'LL USE THIS SPACE TO UPDATE WITH ANNOUNCEMENTS OR EXTRA DETAILS]