I see this from Facebook and holy cow new 3th party dev for tsw f yea Translation/ Railway Simulation After a long time we will also publish an add-on for a railway simulator, in this case Train-Sim-World. The work on it has also already begun, numerous objects for a map with breathtaking landscapes have already been made. Further buildings and objects are currently being worked on. The route is located in southern Germany, further details and information about. https://www.halycon.de/news/halycon...Ey-wdzU0d10FeaC_iI_aem_pXHKHwQRCiq7nyGJ7ilI4w
This has to be the most unexpected announcement for a german 3rd party route. Did they ever release a route in Tsw or Tsc before? This could be the year we get the most route dlcs for germany and damn im hyped for Halycons route. Praying for a route that brings either a flirt 3 (Munich-Rosenheim), a Siemens mireo or a Desiro HC. Even better would be a wittenberger cab car. I wonder when this will apear on the roadmap.
They did publish 5 routes and, I think, 4 rolling stock and loco packs about 20 years ago for MSTS. The first two routes and loco packs were from the infant days of MSTS, came with photo cabs (not bad though for the time) and had models of lesser finesse than what came later to MSTS from others. The latter two routes were the Marschbahn starting at Hamburg and terminating at Westerland (Sylt) and the Black Forest line in two versions. One represented the current time period and the other one took place in 1972. Those 3 routes and the latter loco packs were of superb quality for MSTS. Also the loco packs were huge in their content variety. They also published german versions of TRS2006 and 2007 with region-specific content. For TSC nothing comes to mind though. If their history of train simulation content is any indication of what's to come.... then we're talking TSG like quality.
Nah the Höllentalbahn is the hell (ok yea sry for this) but yea I’m happy I hope we get better traxxes or other modern German trains
With the current TSW steam situation, I doubt it'll happen. Though a steam era route would be more preferable to another modern German route, increases the variety
The range of southern german routes that are visual stunning is way to big to guess the location. The dlcs from Halycon for MSTS are way to old to be counted in as a hint for the era of the route. Does not mean older eras are from the table. Still its the first Tsw dlc they make, so they most likely wont try anything far away from the usual, just to see what the players think of theyre first route dlc.
Just revisted their website for the first time in say 15 years only to discover it looks exactly the same (seriously, what else did I expect? german wikipedia still looks like it did 10 years ago). That being said.... Nobody needs a wayback-machine to look up what they published 20 years ago, so take a look for yourselves https://www.halycon.de/index.php?do=gamelist&category_id=27&mode=list&offset=170 . All the addons are still there. Even more impressive: all the patches, bonus packs etc. are still available for download after all these years. You don't get that very often these days. Sure, the screenshots being shown (especially the ones on the actual last page from the first route "Legenden zwischen Spree und Oder" done by EuroTrainsim [my very first route addon I got for MSTS in 2003] being all taken from the route editor) don't look like much these days. But back then... my word! Also totally forgot they did a collaboration with German Railroads for the Schwarzwaldbahn 1972 Deluxe addon under the ProTrain moniker of all things (the other two big german publishers and dev studios. German Railroads exclusiveley making content of past decades from the 60's to the 90's of high quality and ProTrain [Bluesky Interactive] producing content of the current era mostly with mixed quality and often times deaf ears to their community). Wow, that really took me back. Fun days.
Nice! I’m not familiar with any of their previous train sim work but I do think they made a good number of all the OMSI 2 addons I’ve bought.
Well, colour me surprised. That came out of nowhere. Interesting that they’re talking about this before DTG do. So, based on this post, it’s a route in southern Germany apparently aimed for a 2025 release. I’ll be watching with great interest.
Yeah, verry funny good old days. ProTrain was something like Rivet today: mostly moderate to poor quality and in large numbers (I think there were around 20 ProTrain DLCs). Halycon was the counterpart with loving details and high quality (for the time) a bit like TSG today. Ah yes. Really the good old days, even if you often got annoyed - like today. And there was discussion just like today, often without success.
Yeah, I thought DTG controlled the announcement of new developers and the release of info quite close to their chests. This and the other thread which mentioned about another US developer, I'm quite surprised at. Will see if DTG shut it down or acknowledge it I suppose.
Hadn't thought of comparing them to rivet, but you're right, it's rather fitting. Except back then there was a growing and higher quality freeware scene when it came to rolling stock and locos at least and or other payware products with better rolling stock or just a better cab or sound you could very easily edit or substitute whole trains just by overwriting the not so good ones with your choice and just renaming them so the consists still worked. Textures could also easily be modded without owning any pro tools, assets could be built with gmax for free or other cheap tools. So that at least was bearable to a certain point. Nowadays with TSW there is nothing that is as easily modded. And building trains for UE takes ages, whereas for MSTS it could be done in weeks, at least for the professionals who earned their whole income from that. There was an editor from day one for everyone. And keep in mind we're talking about the pre predecessor to TSW, sort of at least. I fear I've drifted off slightly. Well, let's just hope our expectations from days past won't be crushed and halycon becomes the second TSG so to speak.
IIRC Protrain was middling quality, think I bought their Rhine Valley add on for MSTS. The 103 was good but the scenery was a bit… garish. Still at that point it was most welcome as up to then the only way to drive that route was in Zusi 2. Never bothered with their Trainz stuff. Will indeed be interesting to see how DTG react to this, given their almost EA (as in Electronic Arts) desire to manage every aspect of the sim from publishing DLC to how it’s publicised. Another third party also starts to lend credence to the theory DTG are stepping back from developing their own content (reducing their in house talent accordingly) to become a 3rd party publishing conduit.
To be fair Vern, that was the very first German route ever for MSTS. After that the people who built the 103 split with the company and founded their own - German Railroads. And the quality did improve significantly by their third route which I bought before buying the first one. So I too was a tad disappointed by the Rhine valley.
Puddington Bear That's right, repaints were very easy to create and the corresponding files could be opened with Paint or Photoshop and then edited. I also created and published a freeware route (fictional German branch line) back then. Good times. We will never get such an open game structure as the MSTS again. This was perfect for the freeware scene. Also sorry for being off topic. In the German forum it was announced that this is a completely new team, so no one is left from the former Halycon Marschbahn team.
Nothing is stopping third parties from making whatever they want. DTG just has no plans currently to do it in house. German steam could be interesting.
The problem is that steam physics is a core matter and therefore not something a DLC developer can fix. It's squarely withing DTG's remit.
That's true of everything in the game. You can only do what the program can do. However, within that limit (which is huge and you CAN do steam in a basic way), it can be done. It's just up to the developer to do it or not. I'm sure there are "workarounds" too but that requires extra work. Again, that's up to the developer how much work they want to put in and what they want to model. Hell, you could have battery trains or solar trains if you wanted to develop the workarounds and systems to "plug into" the existing system. All that really matters is the power going in and the traction for the physics to work. You could design a hand-powered "rail cart" and it'd "work" even without an "engine" per se. Just a short rail car that generates X amount of force when you click on the little guy to move. The diesel engines don't simulate actual details of gas combustion after all. Just the output to the system.
This came totally out of left field... didn't see it until just now Honestly, I've never heard of them before. Haven't played the other simulators like Trainz or MSTS, or any other stuff they've worked on in the past. But judging by the reactions in this thread, I'm quite hyped for what they are going to deliver already That's my biggest concern at this point, that DTG might throw a spanner in the works out of sheer spite. Or lust for control, or whatever. Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. They'd still get some revenue from their work, while being able to concentrate more on polishing and fine-tuning it. I know I'm daydreaming here, but let's be optimistic for a change
I don't think it's realistic to compare the studio with what they released 20+ years ago, it's highly unlikely that anyone from that time still works for them. Halycon is a known publisher for OMSI, they occasionally release something even nowadays when others moved on. It's usually... meh quality. They do stuff for quantity, not for quality. They released plenty of AI packs to increase overall variety, plenty of maps from popular and large cities that wouldn't be otherwise present in the game, but it was never a work of passion, mostly just getting things done and quickly move to another project. I think they would do great with stuff like wagon packs, but I don't have too high expectation from a full route. They may soon find out that it's way more complicated and time-consuming than what their standards usually are. Notably though, I believe they also serve as a publisher to various one-man developers, which may be a wholly different story, as those are usually passion-driven.
That's the TSC Blackforest Adventures route. Remember Salzburg Rosenheim HMA Dresden to Riesa BML NLL Goblin Line Mittenwaldbahn WCML South WCML Shap ECML Cajon Pass NEC Trenton to Boston started life as TSC routes and then arrived in TSW
They haven’t made a new route yet. It looks like they’re developing one, but I’d say saying they “made” one is not accurate.
According to their own statements, no one from the former MSTS team (which did a good job!) is still on board.
The former. They have now removed the "Southern Germany" hint from their website. It seems like they Halycon it would be vague enough not to be considered a DLC announcement that had to be coordinated with DTG, but once people started writing articles speculating on the exact route, they weren't that pleased
