Let's Talk About The Tsw2 User Interface Again, Part 5: The Timetable Selection Selection Screen

In the previous part, https://forums.dovetailgames.com/th...in-part-4-the-journey-selection-screen.49755/ we explored the Journey Selection screen. I forgot to count all clicks you ned before actually starting to drive a train, but it is far more than I like. You get tired before even touching a train ...

In this part of the series we will move on and see what the Timetable selection is about. I will also show you how it works in TSxxxx, just to have an idea of a completely different approach. I do not claim it is better in the end, TSW2 and TS are very different games, which we should keep in mind.

As with the other parts, I try to stay clear from opinions on what looks beautiful and what does not. I try to keep focus on what we need here, select something to do with a minimum amount of hassle.

Selecting a timetable drive requires at least, and potentially three screens:



The first screen forces you to select weather and loco.

The weather screen is more or less OK, but it would be nice if it would remember the last selection. I like that it will select the current calendar month. You may also have noticed that selecting snow is disabled if the temperature is above zero.

What I miss in the weather settings is fog. It would be nice if this could be a separate setting.

The screen is combined wit the loco selection. As matt said in one of the streams the order is a arbitrary. I am not really happy with the way it works. Scrolling through the list is a bit cumbersome and not having all locos at the scree, also is not my preferred solution. The distinction between livery and separate loco types is not always very clear. You may notice this for instance with the class 47 which has British Rail and the old green livery used at West Somerset Railway as liveries. If there are multiple liveries, as shown here with the BR182, you need to open an additional screen to switch livery.

In some cases liveries are abused to distinguish train length, like it is done for LIRR. This is really confusing especially for new players, because you do not see a fair number of drives and they seem missing. I have seen a lot of questions in this specific topic.




But what? Which is which one? They look exactly identical? Again confusion. In this case it may be that one of them is the RRO livery but there is no way to see this. They may be identical, but there also may be some differences. For the class 66 this is relevant, the GWE class 66 and the ECW class 66 are different and not fully compatible. You will only see which one you grabbed once you are inside the cab. This clearly is to late.

There is a mod for the lucky bastards that play on PC (I did not test it), but this is something to do better.

Pff, one more screen to go.


In general, this is nice. It shows a route map, to give you some idea what you will have to do and it shows how long it may take and even a description of the service.

Nothing to nag about? Well the two screen approach shows it shortcomings here. At the top, there is a filter that may come handy especially if the services tell a little story. The problem is that sometimes two different locomotives are involved and you can see here only half of the story.

Into my opinion, this should not be solved. It would make it far more complicated if DTG would like to merge in different sort orders and filters, all possible liveries and substitutions into one screen.

So my advice is to invest to make the journey mode better and you the journey mode for story telling and mixing drives with different locomotives. It can be a great tool then, but it is so easy to blow it if you do it with any other thing but story telling. For the G6 the journey chapters are based on difficulty, loosing the story in doing it. The idea of ordering by locomotive is stupid, make a journey based on career and use the first chapter to teach how to drive and do a few simple things. Then you have a lot of room for storytelling in the other chapters.

It may also be an idea to move the weather selection to the second screen and focus the first one on loco selection. It would be feasible than to integrate the livery selection at the same screen in a vertical direction.

Now to conclude this episode, some pics from TS.


TS uses tabs to distinguish scenario types. Each tab is similarly structured. Within each tab you can scroll through all routes you own and pick a scenario to play.
At the left side you can select a route. If you try to do so, the right side of the screen magically changes into a route selection screen. Alternatively you can select a loco, and then you get all scenarios for all routes involving that loco.Like TSW2, it shows that status for each scenario.

This would not work the same way for TSW2. My guess is that there are round 3000 timetable drives right now. May it would be possible to show journeys in this way or the scenarios.

 

You overlooked my major gripe: that the weather selection screen's background is an indoor diorama, so you can't see the weather you're choosing!

 

Agree Bill.
They should get rid of that dingy depressing station and provide an exterior view with the weather you’ve chosen.

 

And on console all the weather sliders are highlighted together so you can’t see which one you are about to move. What’s the weather like in this shed? Nobody knows. Which Dosto is the right Dosto? Nobody knows.

This selection screen is a big fail in design and function. On console you start off with the first loco highlighted and need to move up several clicks to get to the month if you want to change that and then several clicks back down to the locos. It could start with the month highlighted first, like in the on-foot selection screen, so there is a start to a selection flow with only one direction involved. Set the month, then the weather, and then choose the loco. Of all the issues that is probably just a nit-pick of mine.

It is just an example of the lack of attention to the design of the whole UI though. One thing that stands out to me is the lack of consistency in the selection screens. On the route selection screen it is the centre route shown on screen that you have chosen and on the timetable screen it is the leftmost loco shown that is the one you have selected. There needs to be a common style to these things. The screens between them, where you pick explore etc. then timetable etc. have a quartered selection system, others are linear, either vertical or horizontal. It is all over the place, almost like a different person is designing each screen and then it gets cobbled together at the end. The pause screen is a different look and functionality again. Suddenly you are no longer using the left and right dpad or thumbsticks to navigate like everywhere else, you are using the controller triggers this time. The two maps use different console controls to navigate too. It’s a mess and the timetable screen is just one messy part of it. It probably all makes a bit more sense with a mouse on PC but there needs to be a consistent design that works for both PC and console.

This series of threads is a good chance for all of us to get this off our chests. Living with the menu screens for a while has helped me to get used to them but time does not alter the poor design that they started with.

 

I agree it would be nice to have a feature than previews the weather setting. I want to stay clear from opinions on what looks nice or not. There may be people that actually like this presentation.

 

It's a good general point, that more attention is needed if you play with a controller only. I play PC, so I have a mouse and keyboard available, which is helpful.

So, where to put focus when you open a screen is a point you need, as well as more shortcuts for controllers.

 

The new diorama isn’t very good as others mentioned, you can’t see your weather selection. I think they should revert to the old TSW2020 system where you have the default outdoor/shed dioramas and then have unlockable ones based on other routes.

The timetable information and service duration is probably the only thing I actually like about the updated UI.

The route selection screen is easily the ugliest part of it, the player avatar really doesn’t need to be there. It stands out like a sore thumb and if you look at more recent releases like BML and Cane Creek, they’re not even getting the proper uniforms on the menu, just default clothes. Before Rush Hour, you got a nice screen filling shot of the route, it looked much nicer.

Journey mode needs some gameplay changes, not just UI. It’s not as enjoyable as playing through service mode where you can chain services together. Take Tees Valley Class 37 chapter, you do a 3 part coal service in journey and you have to go through a loading screen at the end of each part which resets your locomotive and more often than not, the weather change of the next part makes no sense, it goes from summer to snow blizzard and then back to summer again. Each chapter should be a link of services that you can complete without having to go through a menu or loading screen.
At the moment, the only reason to do journey mode is to tick those boxes in the journey UI, medals and route completion % can be gained by just going through explore. You don’t even get an achievement for completing each route’s journey.

 

I actually like the fact that Journey forces varied conditions on me; left to myself I'd probably run most everything around noon on a clear June day.

What would be cool is if they added a "Random" button to the weather selection screen.

 

I wholeheartedly agree with this. As a bit of a meteorological nerd, one of my favorite things to do in simulators are to replicate a vast array of different weather conditions. Games like Microsoft Flight Simulator come to mind, or even OMSI 2.

If it was possible to adjust fog thickness/intensity, and perhaps add haze conditions into the game, it would allow for more varied and interesting drives. Perhaps I want a dreary scene, with thick fog and a bit of drizzling precipitation. Or maybe rainy conditions, but the visibility is still relatively good. Maybe I want a cold cloudy morning, with bluish/gray skies as opposed to bright orange ones.

The icing on the cake would be to allow a UI option to apply current real world weather conditions. It shouldn't be too difficult to do this, as anyone can fetch current METAR data for free, and the process can be automated. Say you want to go for a drive on London Conmuter and have this imaginary box ticked. It can fetch nearby data from Heathrow or even Gatwick Airports, and have the sim interpret that and adjust the weather conditions accordingly. Note, this isn't dynamic weather, that would be complicated. This is a simple quality-of-life addition that would make the process much quicker for players such as myself.

Besides that, I also do agree that the strip of loco selections and livery selections should be tidied up and given a more cleaner presentation.
Also, it would be very nice if they can actually quantify the Weight, Horsepower, and Max Tractive Effort stats, instead of it being simple bars. Come on, we're all train nerds here! Give us those juicy details depending on which train we've selected.
And of course, it would be very beneficial for everyone if we could select different scene dioramas, much like we used to have in TSW2020.
Personally, this sums up all of the major UI quirks that I would love to see ironed out.

 

This would be very nice. I find when it’s raining in TSW, the fog is far too thick. To the point where it just looks unrealistic.

Some sort of manual or automatic colour temperature adjuster would be nice, as this will really catch the ‘feel’ of the weather. So a cooler blue tinge colour temperature in cold weather and a warmer yellow tinge colour temperature in warmer weather. Currently, I manually adjust this via ReShade and it really makes the weather conditions ‘feel’ a lot more life like.

As you mentioned, we need some variety in cloud colours as we literally only have one basic colour for them right now - plain white. I’d love to see dark, black clouds as a storm moves in, for example. Or nice pink/orange ones as the sun sets.

There is so much potential in the weather system. But all of these things can only become possible if DTG actually puts the time and resources into it.

 

Oh, and when they replace the diorama, they really need to bring back the 3/4 view of the loco so you can actually see what you're getting, since the head-on view doesn't show much.

(Also, they should take a cue from the PC mod which adds a label to each "livery" choice to indicate which route the loco came from)

 

I don't mind the forced weather but if you're doing a multi-part service in journey, it should at least make sense rather than the summer > blizzard > summer example I posted above.

An example to make it better would be part 1 starts with full clouds, part 2 has rain and then part 3 could go back to no rain with full cloud cover again but everything remains wet from the rain in part 2. You'd have a little bit of continuity in the journey services then.

A random button for service mode would be a good idea too though!

 

I wonder who thought the abandoned station diorama with the inability to see the weather and your livery was a good idea? That was a poor design choice

 

Thank you all for your opinions. I see the top priorities seem to be the presentation for the loco and showing off the weather with that.
I also noted that the lack of attention for console players that only have a controller available is a serious point in the UI.

I am a bit surprised there is so little reasons regarding the way you can select a service to drive. It may be I am biased or to critical. It's now up to the devs to listen to our comments. I am still not really convinced they do, sticking to defend the design choices. I do not want to say these are bad, but designing a UI is hard and you really need lots of feedback from the users. I am not sure this feedback is given and used.

 

Sometimes it's hard for people to admit something they designed isn't great and will defend it for eternity. Reminds me of politics.

Making a UI isn't easy but I wonder why change something that didn't really needed to be changed in the first place. I mean who really thought it was a good idea to select your train in an abandoned station with the inability to see your livery or the weather. An AC4400CW looks so out of place in that station in my opinion.

I just wanna thank you for creating this thread allowing users to give their feedback on the ui. Some people like the ui whilst some like me don't. I hope the lesson dtg learns is that they shouldn't be changing things that don't need to be changed in the first place and if they are gonna change things up a bit, give players the option to design the UI and HUD how they would want it. It would be an effective solution in my opinion.

I hope DTG makes changes or at the very least give players options but frankly it seems they try to defend their design choices when there is fair criticism.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Christie

 

The thing is, even in the preview stream before release, Matt indicated dissatisfaction with it and that it should be changed!

And it's not like a diorama is hard to change- in TSW2020 they could be swapped out to the user's taste. And of course there's a mod that re-installs the pre-RH diorama.

 

Well console players can't mod. Also there is no option for players to change the diorama currently in game

 

I would like to choose a train first, then a route now. I think I mentioned it before but scrolling through 8 German routes trying to remember where a shutter or the 101 can be used is stupid now.

Pick a train, pick from the couple it’s usable on and off you go.

(Key thing to remember is Summer 22 core update is either in or very close to production if it’s going ahead)

 

Right. My point is, it should be really easy for DTG to fix it.

 

It is, seeing as a person from the community literally replaced it with the older and more functional diorama menu screen.

Really don’t know why it takes a full year to ‘fix’. Fix as in change the UI annually once again…

 

I'd like to see the whole thing scraped and dumped and started again.

For me I want to select journeys in the following order:
Country -> Loco class -> route -> version of loco -> month -> time -> weather.

With a randomised option available at every point.

Oh and crying out loud if you can't standardise the version of locos across all routes at least tell me which version is which.