Playstation 5 Add-on Limitation Explained.

Discussion in 'TSW General Discussion' started by DTG Natster, Nov 19, 2021.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. DTG Natster

    DTG Natster Producer Staff Member

    Joined:
    Sep 2, 2020
    Messages:
    1,554
    Likes Received:
    10,981
    As many of you are no doubt aware, there is an issue on Playstation 5 where the maximum amount of DLC that can be used at one time is limited to 64GB following a recent PS5 system update.

    What players experience with this is that while they have all their DLC downloaded correctly it doesn’t all show up in the game and it is unclear to them why that is. The reason is that once the game has completed loading 64Gb of DLC the console won’t let it use any further add-ons, so it doesn’t get loaded.

    The total amount of DLC available for Train Sim World 2 far exceeds 64gb so for many of you it’s highly likely you will experience missing content if you have larger collections.

    Currently players can work around this issue by uninstalling any add-ons that they don’t want to use at the moment and this will allow the console to show the add-ons you do want to use, however this is a far from ideal solution and does require quite a lot of re-downloading if you want to later use the add-ons you removed, so this is extremely inconvenient.

    Don’t other games work at over 110GB though? Why is it different for Train Sim World 2?

    On the Playstation 5, the core game is not limited at all and can be as big as we like. It’s specifically the DLC add-ons however that experience this limit. Our core game is roughly 20GB give or take at the moment. Many other larger games out there that are more like 100GB or larger put the add-ons in the core package and then turn it on and off. This is valid for those games because even if you don’t own an outfit or something, you still want to be able to see others that do in a multiplayer game, for example.

    We have tried some experiments with moving large quantities of the add-ons into the core area along the same lines, however this didn’t work the way we had hoped and as such we abandoned going any further with that research. In addition, this would have meant everyone was forced to download and store much bigger core files regardless of whether you owned the add-on that was sitting on your console or not, which didn’t feel like a good solution anyway.

    Our Solution

    In the internal depths of how consoles work, there is actually a separation between when something is downloaded to the console and when it’s available to the game. This process is called “mounting” the content, and it’s here that the limit is actually in place – you can have as much downloaded as you like, but you can only mount up to 64GB.

    Currently our game automatically mounts everything it finds because this has always been perfectly adequate and ensures you always have immediate access to everything you have installed, so for our solution going forwards we are aiming to decouple this and make the game able to be smarter about what it “mounts”.

    What does mounting do?

    If you imagine all of your add-ons are boxes, mounting opens the box (which makes it available to the game) and the limit on the PlayStation 5 is essentially “How many boxes can you have open”

    By default the game currently tries to open every box, what we are looking at doing is making it only mount the add-ons for the route you are using.

    If you select GWE for example, it will only open the box for the GWE route and related add-ons we think are appropriate. The most likely things you are going to want on that route will be mounted. By default you can expect that all relevant substitution and layers will work transparently, it’ll all be mounted automatically.

    Implementation: Step 1

    Step one of this update will be purely about getting the underlying issue resolved and getting the selective auto mounting done based on your route selection, so that when you get the menu list up on the screen you select the route and then it will do the mounting of the add-ons.

    Mounting is done almost instantly and won’t add an unreasonable amount of time to load times.

    Once Step 1 is in complete, you would be able to access all your add-ons without needing to do any reinstalls etc, however because unrelated add-ons won’t be getting mounted by default it does mean that some of the “off the rails” examples such as a GP38-2 on Bakerloo line wouldn’t be available, since if you select Bakerloo line it won’t know you want to also mount the GP38-2. More expected examples such as livery substitutions or add-ons needed for layers however would be automatically made available. Livery designer also won’t be able to let you reskin anything that isn’t mounted (though you wouldn’t lose any liveries if it’s unmounted as those are stored elsewhere).

    Implementation: Step 2

    Step two brings the ability to use a new settings screen so you can manually mount or unmount anything you like beyond what is automatically selected. We are looking at including something like a thermometer bar so you can keep track of how much of your 64GB limit you’ve used up, allowing you to keep adding more and know exactly where you’re at, or indeed to remove any add-ons you don’t want made available and therefore keep your menus clear and focused on what’s important to you right now.

    Conclusion

    We are currently developing the core work for these changes and part of that will also include evaluating when the best time to launch the updates are, we may launch them in two updates or perhaps in a single update. It will come down to how well the solution works and how our testing goes given that this can have quite a fundamental impact on the game and how it loads your add-ons.

    We are also investigating whether this is a good update to bring to other consoles (which also use this concept of mounting add-ons) as there’s potentially memory savings and so forth to be had that might be of particular benefit to the Xbox One and PS4 consoles. This is something that we will be investigating once we have resolved the immediate priority of the difficulties experienced by Playstation 5 players.

    We fully understand the impact this issue is having on our players and are treating it as a high priority to get a resolution. We hope that the above outlines our understanding of it and what we plan to do to resolve it going forwards.

    We will of course be providing more updates as development continues and will provide more detailed explanations of the system and demonstrations once we have it in-game so that you’ll be clear how to use it and get the best from it easily.
     
    • Like Like x 26
    • Helpful Helpful x 17
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page