Upcoming Release Frankfurt S-bahn: Coming Soon!

Thanks for the infantilizing rebuke. I'm surprised i'm even able to type a reply out through all my confused anger, but i'll do my best. One letter at a time like a child.

You're right i should just be happy for whatever slop DTG cranks out, and what does it matter how they treat their customers?

 

So you think that my experience should be limited because you're playing on hardware thats 5 years old?
Its hardly PC players fault that Sony and Microsoft stores both impose limitations and restricts sales on their platforms stores (and its only because they have a monopoly in their respective markets that they can get away with it).

 

Pc master race in the house!!! Woot woot!

 

Not at all, but Ive invested in my hardware and Im well aware when 10th Gen consoles come out in a couple of years time, my experience will be reduced compared to theirs. Its the way of the world.

But let me enjoy the fruits of my investment for the next couple of years please.

 

I don’t think your experience should be limited. I just don’t think console players should be paying for you to have a better experience.

 

Now on that point I find it impossible to disagree with you, perhaps consoles should be priced marginally cheaper than PCs given your experience will be less than mine. Id have zero complaints should that happen.

 

That's not what we talk about here. We talk about that DTG invest not enough resources in optimizing. So that we could all have the same advanced stuff. It's about making bigger profits with lesser effort. Especially with your profile name you should know that.

 

You made nothing wrong. We are customers. And the completly normal expectation of customers in a capitalist market society is, that a manufacturer hits the expectations of their customers and not the opposite way. The opposite way we had in soviet communist economies. And the result is very known.

 

Describing the consoles as 5 year old tech is misleading. They are the latest consoles, they are the baseline that the biggest games are developed to run on. With work, a full TSW release should work on them fine.

 

Pointless getting into it with that poster. He'll just type you to death.

And I agree with you. DTG is being neither transparent nor customer- centric.

It's crazy that for the last couple of years we've been tracking the slow demise of gen8 consoles. Are we now doomed to spend the next two years watching the diminution of the game on 9th gen? Console sales are the lifeblood of TSW. Without console players TSW cannot prosper. They appear to be self- sabotaging.

I've looked at the specs. PS5 and the current Microsoft machine are as hefty as many current PC's. It's clearly a software issue at this point.

 

2) release both timetables, as you've already spent the effort required to make it.

For goodness sake, the PS4 has the full WCML timetable (with CL3 of course) and can toggle layers, same too the ECML. So it seems like the precedent is to release both and slow the player to toggle layers. Can that not just be what happens here..

 

Just FYI, Matt did post in another thread early this morning (before all the forum posts claiming silence, btw):

 

Yes he described the problem. The adding of more and more graphic- and lyfestylegimicks, that need a ton of memory and then they find no way for proper optimization the data consumption.

Don't forget BML had 50 percent more timetable Services than the new S-Bahn-Frankfurt route and BML was longer, but Gen 9 could handle it.

DTG should go back to a basic train simulator, than all customers could get the train experience. Otherwise even PC players will have a problem in about 2 years with shorter and shorter routes with rolling stock becomes smaller and smaller.

 

The problem with FSB is not the number of services, it's the ridiculous tangle of trackage, switches and signals that devour memory and processing cycles. London Victoria was child's play in comparison.

The only station in the game on a similar scale is Munich, and that one is notorious for performance lags.

 

"Optimization" is one of the current buzzwords du jour being parroted in complaints, but only the people with access to the source code, which is not any of us, know what's actually optimization-related.

There's a lot more involved in system resource use than just timetable services, and it's been said that non-driveable AI services are notably less resource-intensive than driveable ones (can't find any info on the number of driveable services vs AI in BML). Also, BML was developed for TSW2, so I'm not sure there's even a basis for comparison. BML for TSW2 on Steam is a 4.7GB download; for TSW5 it's 6.6GB. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Frankfurt S-Bahn is going to be significantly larger.

I doubt DTG is going to let PC users be so impacted, or that this is going to be an issue for gen 9 too often. That would be too much of a financial risk. I'm just as surprised as anyone that they've bumped up against the gen 9 ceiling, but it seems likely they were surprised too.

 

I for one have certainly lost interest in the route. The lesson from Frankfurt - Fulda (and HMA before) should have been “only do a route you can do justice”, not “just shaft consoles in doubt”.

I’m sure this is not the end of TSW on consoles - far too much money there. But it is the end of feature parity between PC and gen 9, which might as well be the end if DTG seriously consider this their fix for the issues on console.

So, they’ve finally broken the core enough that they have no idea how to fix it. One thing’s certain: the marketing for the next couple of releases will be very interesting.

 

Thank you for the advice. And I have.

What I meant with my comment, is that every train you see in TSW (including AI) is a full-on simulation. Not just the model is fully rendered, but also the driving characteristics. That costs CPU cycles, and is done very differently in GTA.

In the latter, (for example) all the AI cars are handled by the same bit of code, give or take a few parameter tweaks to make a truck more heavy than a sports car. This model is simplistic compared to the simulation model in TSW, but gets the job done.

AI driven vehicles in GTA get swapped out for a better simulated model when the player gets into one. This means that there's only one simulated model on the road at any given time, as all the other cars share the simplified AI handling model. This is something that Rockstar's custom engine can do natively, but is not possible in Unreal Engine (or any other commercially available engine).

Rockstar's engine also scales down model complexity as the model is further away from you, saving on both CPU and GPU load.

It's very expensive to design your own engine these days, and it's defendable that DTG chose an off-the-shelve engine. None of the commercially available engines are really suitable for the kind of world that TSW needs (large open spaces, with no way to cut corners by removing distant objects from view, as those objects are not obstructed from view in real life either).

If you look at what the big budget games do (GTA, Flight Simulator 202x), keep in mind that those are not called big budget games for nothing. A lot of money goes into the custom engines for those games.

 

The problem with that is that people start complaining about blurry textures and model warping.

You can't please them all, all of the time.

 

Question for DTG, assuming they are still reading this come Monday morning, was any consideration given to creating split timetables based on route taken? A large part of the joy of playing TSW is meeting other services coming the other way, your current solution is for console players to miss out on 40% of those services.

While it would mean missing out on traffic around the stations at each end, if I'm running a service along the length of the S1 route then I don't really care if the game is simulating traffic running on the S8/9 route. Would creating 'S1' and 'S8/9' timetables allow the game to function correctly whilst allowing us to still enjoy all our previously purchased layers?

Of course, I would still want to see a 'user beware' Full timetable, but I'm wondering if splitting the timetable based on route taken may offer a better solution for my 6 month old PS5 Pro than just culling 40% of the trains I own.

 

There's quite a few posts here treating PS5 Pro as though it's a generational leap, which isn't helped by the fact it's called a "Gen 9" console. The reality is that the PS5 Pro chip is practically the same chip in the original base PS5, based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture from 2019. That's getting on a bit in technology terms.

This isn't a post in defence of DTG by the way, just trying to add in a perspective about the capabilities of the latest gen consoles vs the latest gen PCs. If you've got a recent PC, then it's likely you're already 2-3 generations of CPU/GPU ahead of the latest consoles, and so (unfortunately) that gap is opening up again.

 

Although it would be nice if DTG utilised the extra 1.5GB of game allocated RAM, it would at least delay how long it takes the memory leak to cause problems.

 

Everyone on console feels the same, so why should pc get priority?

 

Completely agree with you.

 

Lol, that's why I stopped taking routes from DTG - I don't approve of such cheating of players, regardless of what device they play on

 

From what little DTG is saying and the curtailing of the console content, it seems ( as others have suggested) that DTG is biting off more than it can chew with this route.

Although PC players will get the full fat route, it sounds like you will need a fairly high end machine or turn down your settings to play it well.

This does not bode well for future content. If DTG cannot solve the optimization issue and/ or if this route is not successful, they might choose to stick to more mundane routes with simpler track work, trains and scenery elements.

Either way the future of the game we all love is becoming cloudier then ever and the shrinking of content may not be limited to freight, US routes and steam, but also route length and complexity in general.

I'm very curious to see what response DTG will make when they see the mostly negative reaction in these pages in the cool light of Monday morning. That's if they really do pay attention to what players in the forum say. ( I'm skeptical ).

 

Don’t worry the two replies that said just shrug your shoulders - they are the people who buy it regardless of quality because they just can’t do without their train fix.

 

It's simply the nature of the sector. PC tech/performance is being upgraded continually, whereas with consoles it remains static until a generational step-change every decade or so. Very soon we will be looking at TSW PC parity for 10th-gen consoles, with reduced feature sets for aging 9th gen machines.

 

I know you're only the messenger, but "it's complicated" is just another version of "we're working on it", and frankly that's just not good enough at this point.

TSW5 has been on-sale at full price for 8 months now, and while PC players with lots of memory overhead can power through, we're ALL playing an inferior product.

And even though the won't acknowledge it, TSW6 is in full-scale development, and they'll want us to pay up again for the new version, but what confidence do i have that this huge issue will be fixed, let alone all the smaller ones?

They're not upgrading the engine and certainly not rewriting the code from scratch, so why should we believe it will be fixed? What will be different?

 

you're making it sound as if those who genuinely enjoy the game despite its flaws are some empty-brained and servile ....s who would buy a mouldy bread and call it the pinnacle of baking ... I personally enjoy the game a lot despite its flaws, most of which I try to discuss on this forum in a civil manner...

I just dont mix in conspiracy theories about some evil corporation that wants to purposefully shaft part of its consumer base because they enjoy the suffering of ppl being ignored or some other crybaby bs... it's on the same level as a customer at a bookstore being angry cos we didnt find a book for them thats listed as available as if we hid books on purpose so we dont have to serve them (when in fact the book can be stolen, thrown somewhere by ...... customers etc) or us not having a book cos we want to deny ppl forbidden knowledge etc

I usually dont respond to comments in threads in this kind of manner, but a discussion on a route that actually looks good with lots of interesting gameplay is getting bogged down, almost downright spammed by pages and pages of endless crying over supposed evil intentions of DTG... making up / overinterpreting reasons and then going berserk about that is called creating a strawman... and I got an impression this thread has become infested with those

how about we wait for an official statement and in the meantime, can we pls get back to discussing actual stuff about the route/locos? thx

 

It was said a few posts above that the 9th gen consoles are already outdated and we are waiting for the 10th generation... I just want to point out that the recently released PS5 Pro, which is definitely more powerful than the current PS5, went completely unnoticed by DTG, so the question is whether any generation 10 will interest DTG, rather it generally seems like they are quietly abandoning consoles as such, but no one has the strength to say it out loud..... And in general, I understand the emotions of those discussing, if only because the full-scale product and the low-intensity product will cost the same price, at least it seems that way for now

 

Anyone know the % of services consoles don't have? Because whatever that is, will be the % of the £30 price tag I'm willing to pay for.

 

About 40% it seems

 

If I recorded correctly 1000 versus 600 approx.

 

Cheers. I'll wait until it's £18 on sale then

 

Mostly AI I expect, but a busy Mainz, Frankfurt and Wiesbaden is the fun of it. Timetable mode rules!

 

I believe, all of us, console players we need to do this.

I was really looking forward for this route, as I have been using the S8 and S9 for years.

But now, DTG has crossed a line, and we need to send a message, and this is the only way we can make them to listen.

 

That reduced timetable on PS5 pro (!) ist an enormous outrage!

 

So it's like the route itself doesn't matter, or what? You sound like the services are all that matter, but the route, scenery, and everything else is just something easy to do? No, I disagree. This is where the most work and money goes into creating a route, so it would still be unfair to ask for 40% off the price just for fewer services you can drive. I definitely want the full timetable, but your logic doesn't make sense. It's like wanting a sale for GTA that has no cars. In the end, it's just a timetable; you still have free roam or scenario planner and can drive any type of train from A to B.

 

Yes, in Frankfurt we need a crowded timetable. We can have Niedertalbahn, with just 4 locomotives, but not Frankfurt.

I can tolerate, shuttering, stupid passengers behaviour, not ideal drawing distance… but empty timetables and poor rendering even inside the cockpit of the train. I cannot.

 

I like the Birmingham Cross City route itself. But it's a poor route BECAUSE of how empty New Street is. Kills any and all immersion

 

The "problem" with PS5Pro is that the performance improvements over the original PS5 all go into rendering - higher native res, better AI resolution scaling, frame generation, raytracing etc. none of the improvements actually go into the CPU compute speed.

The actual CPU isn't different from the original PS5, just clocked a bit higher, And that's the problem here - running AI timetables and simulation models is a CPU task, not a GPU task, and thus runs on the bit of hardware that Sony gave the least amount of attention to while setting the specs for PS5Pro.

Both PS5 and PS5 Pro have a CPU with eight AMD Zen2 cores, clocked at 3.5 GHz, where the PS5 Pro can "boost" them to 3.85 GHz (the PS5 can't boost the clock speed). That's just marginally faster, and in no way comparable to what modern day CPUs can do (Zen2 is a core design from 2019). PS5 Pro's CPU also can't boost the CPU speed indefinitely, as the CPU will eventually "throttle" back to 3.5 GHz as it gets hotter.

Zen2 is tech from 2019 - six years old. It's quite outdated and lacks a lot of performance enhancement present in its current PC offspring (Zen3 and Zen4, with Zen5 on the horizon). Compared to those, Zen2 doesn't support the latest memory speeds, contains a lot less cache RAM (and the several cores of the CPU. can't access data stored i nthe cache by the other cores, unlike the case in Zen3 and en4). Zen2 CPUs also get hotter when stressed (and cut back on its performance so not to overheat) compared to Zen3 and Zen4.

Zen3 can boost over 4 GHz on most CPU SKUs, and Zen4 over 5GHz on most SKUs, compared to 3.85GHz for the one in the PS5PRo.

Let me put it this way: at the moment, if you'd be in the market for a PC, you definitely wouldn't want to buy one with a Zen2 CPU on board.

So TL;DR:
The PS5Pro is much better in graphic calculations compared to the PS5, but isn't better in the department where calculations for timetables and simulation models gets done (the CPU). Both the PS5 and the PS5Pro rely on six year old tech for this bit of the machine (AMD Zen2 cores, which were released in 2019. AMD is currently up to Zen4 for its PC CPUs, with Zen5 on the horizon).

 

maybe if you was only getting 60% of the route I could understand your logic, but your still getting the full route with all stations included so your logic is utterly flawed.

 

Don’t forget the blurry textures, so it’s not worth any Money to spend for it

 

When is 80% off or if they find a way to add full timetable before i might consider buy it

 

The services make up most of the content, the route is empty without them. Either way, it's only 60% of the services.

 

Tbf, I suspect the real reason the consoles are only getting 60% of the services is because TSW5 has a memory leak issue on consoles. Been a problem since tsw5 released and they can't be bothered to fix it

 

Why should we talk about here about the wonderful route and the variety of trains, if the mainpart of us customers will not have a chance to use it by paying the full price?

 

Yes even without trains you will get the whole route with all stations.

 

Then they should make enough effort to fix it. Otherwise we will not buy such reduced stuff.

 

TBH I could live with 60 %. I think the route would be busy enough with. What I absolutely don't like is the reduced amount of trains. Especially that route lives from the variety of trains. And especially without Intercity and the iconic ICE 1 a key part is missing.