i have been looking at where another kind of transport sim looks to be exploring and how their conjectured plans may relate to TSW 6 and 7 and beyond. My first topic for consideration is passengers in Germany. I want to see the S-Bahn Main-Weser added to connect Frankfurt to Kassel and Göttingen as local services. So what is the issue ? Take a mode i do not use myself: conductor. Here a conductor arrives in Frankfurt am Main on a train from Mainz and walks through the station to a train to Kassel on S-Bahn Main-Weser, not because DB does it irl, but because a player wants a 2 task scenario on two different train types. Question: was the conductor going to Frankfurt as a passenger living in Mainz to their work in Frankfurt on S-Bahn Main-Weser? Regardless, with the conductor is a passenger who chatted with the conductor on their trip is Mainz to Marburg, be they real or ai. All of this is timetable based ... and what may disturb on-time trains here ? Freight, for one. Passenger services are by timetable. Cargo may be by near-time demand scheduling. There is the port by Bremen and there is the port of Bremerhaven once we have Bremerhaven connected to Hannover by freight thru Bremen.. Some players may want to prepare freight consists as in port container cargo or by driving cars into car carrier wagons in off-loading ships in the port.. You imagine what you might want to do in a train world with multiplayer that is transport multi-modal. Multiplayer cargo, unlike multiplayer time-tabled passenger service, is an ai scheduling challenge much more like a project of capturing a castle in an MMO than driving a subway train or a city tram from end-point to end-point. Cargo should mean the possibility of faults on a freight locomotive affecting timeliness of a passenger service. TSW8 or TSW9 ? Is it the case that we must plan now, in TSW7, to take freight out of the existing passenger timetabling ? Even a far richer passenger rail game experience pales in comparison to a far richer cargo loading to freight consist scheduled freight train running experience for grain, petroleum and factory-fresh vehicles in, say, Canada. This is not suggestions, but a question: should freight be separated from passenger, leaving passenger timetables as permitting cross-route connections in a more modular map version of UE, and freight services become a separate arena of game play with a UI split not now found in the game ? And then there is the lok driver who lives in Mainz arriving in Frankfurt and being driven out to the freight yard to their assigned lok. Or should the driver have also been able to take a tram to Mainz Hbf to start their working day not knowing their freight assignment in advance ? This is ai for multi-player version of TSW with agent ai far beyond where we will be in TSW 6.
If I'm reading this right, you're proposing all freight services have a separate timetable and do not interact with passenger services at all? There's no such thing as a stupid idea, unless it's this.
Dovetail have ruled out multiplayer in TSW. I'd love to see it, but the reason given was that they'd have to sacrifice too much of the simulation to get it working. SimRail doesn't have that issue and has a better simulation than TSW, so if you want to play a multiplayer train simulator right now I'd urge you to get it. There is a lot of hostility in the TSW community towards multiplayer. The reasons given are flaky, and I reckon that a lot of those complaining would shut up if they tried SimRail. Its multiplayer works pretty much flawlessly - I'm just patiently waiting for a UK route as that's when I'll really be able to get into driving in the game.
I’ve been dabbling a bit with SimRail since the Lodz extension came out. The MP is okay and despite the clamping down on idle chit chat, occasionally you can have a bit of a laugh with other players. It also adds an element of randomness where the signalboxes are manned by live players. I was doing an EN57 run out of Lodz the other evening and even though on time got sidelined at an intermediate station for a delayed fast freight to go by me. Didn’t mind in the slightest and joked with the signaller I would go and look at the TSW forum while waiting. But ultimately I still crave a decent single player game within SimRail, so I don’t end up doing random A to B’s depending what’s available and how much time I have to play.
All fun and games till the dispatcher ends up delaying your permission of entry by 5 minutes lmao Anywho, to OP's Question/Suggestion having multiplayer... They (DTG) should probably get a grip on their game currently which is single-player. Multiplayer adds a whole host of new performance loads.
Many current DTG routes couldn't work in the same way that SimRail does. Many modern routes are controlled by large signalling centres with a handful of workstations, where most of the routing and regulating is done by computer (ARS). So not many people are going to be able to play as signaller. The train service level in SimRail is very much enhanced so there are far more trains to pick from than the real timetable. Routes like NTP would not have that much to do or opportunity to actually get on and drive a service if only 7 or 8 are active at any one time.
Remember simrail was built from the start with multiplayer functionality. Tsw was not. Now tsw is really large with large changes made to the core and adding in multiplayer would probably break the game. There's a ton of moving parts and if it barely works in singleplayer, it definitely wouldn't work in singleplayer
It was announced as a feature when they unveiled the game. DTG always intended to add it in the early days. DTG had working prototypes of multiplayer in TSW, same as TS. They said that the simulation would need to be dumbed down to work in multiplayer in the case of TSW, but it seems like a flaky excuse to me. SimRail's simulation isn't well documented, but considering that what we have in the game is largely better than both TS and TSW, it's obviously possible to get a good simulation working in a multiplayer environment. I suspect that the trains in SimRail's multiplayer that are driven by other players are just sending minimal data to the server. The drivers will be experiencing the full simulation, but everyone else is just downloading position data and other things like that. I don't know how DTG's implementations of multiplayer in TS and TSW differed.
The fact it’s pointless already so if they are going to waste resources on it they will do the bare minimum of co-op
That they are struggling to use full timetables with 1 player. Imagine thinking DTG could optimise the game for multiple players, all using full physics trains at once?
Separating passenger and freight is a ridiculous idea, pretty far out! No thanks. Not interested in multiplayer either. TSW would’ve needed to have it in from day one in order to cater to it properly, like SimRail. I haven’t purchased the latter because it doesn’t have much of a single player experience and more importantly, it’s missing UK content which is a must for me to even consider purchasing the game. I don’t see TSW getting multiplayer, ever. However I do think whenever TSW’s successor appears, it will have a MP component.
