First of all, this game is lifeless, meaning there are far too few people visible. I'm aware that moving objects require computing power, but not that much. There are really no people on the streets or at work, just those getting on or off the trains. Then again, I have discovered many other mistakes and flaws that make the realism factor quite low and spoil the fun. Some of them have been posted in different threads, but I wouldn't want to seek them all and post my opinion in multiple small portions. Here's my list: 1. operating procedures and general game functions a) I got an insight into the procedure used on the old Spessart ramp when a loco pushes the train. These services are generally misrepresented in TSW because - the loco used for pushing was a different type, the BR 151 with a maximum starting torque of 395 kN - the pushing locomotive wasn't coupled to the train, so that the train didn't have to stop to uncouple - in fact, the pushing loco stopped in front of the tunnel and took the way back to Laufach - the speed limit for this procedure was different and not track-related, it was 60 km/h Even when the coupling and decoupling was created to give the engineer a few more tasks, it's pretty silly to make the engineer walk all the way from the front loco to the back to do the uncoupling, and then make him walk back to continue the service ... b) Far too often the indicated speed limits are irrelevant, because either the train will never pass that spot or a different speed limit follows closely but isn't shown early enough to react in a sophisticated manner. It would be better to show all speed limits within the next 1500 m, but at least the next two. During the "Whistler & Gronk" scenario you have to reduce the train's speed from 72 km/h to 32 km/h within 80 m, which is technically impossible for any train, let alone a freight train. Afaik, on german routes the engineers know the route's profile showing all speed limits for their service. The game doesn't reproduce this info in a way suitable for the fulfilment of the tasks. c) The boarding times at the stations are too long. That way keeping to the timetable is extremely difficult to impossible, if you don't want to exceed the speed limit. The situation is worst for commuter trains. d) The distance to signals and those to the next stop are measured differently, both should be calculated to the leading edge of the train, and never to the position of the engineer. Otherwise there should be some info about the distance between those two positions. e) The counting of driven km (or mls) on a route is different from the sum of driven km (or mls) for the locos on that route. f) The counting of scenarios on the NTP route is irritating. With both DLCs NTP and Heavy Freight Pack available, the sum of all scenarios is 8, but the freight scenarios performed are either counted or not counted, depending on whether you look at the service selection screen or the player profile. A similar mistake may appear on other routes as well, but I haven't checked that. g) The task description at the upper left of the screen uses a too small font when three rows are necessary. I don't have a spyglass at hand when gaming. h) The tasks during services pop up too late, the engineer can and will be much quicker. i) How is it possible that some services do not receive any reward at all and others can only achieve bronze medals even though all tasks have been completed 100%? The criteria are not comprehensible. j) The conversion factor between km/h and mph is 1.609, which means that a technical top speed of 20 mph would be 32.18 km/h. So why is it given as 40 km/h on HUD for the class 08 loco? 2. infrastructure objects and sound a) All barriers of railway crossings are permanently closed. This is ridiculous. b) The cars on the streets and parking spots also could be more realistic. In DLCs for british routes the car windows are opaque, so you cannot tell whether it has RHD or not. The depicted cars in Germany have clear windows and LHD, but the license plates really suck. In the game cars in Germany have yellow license plates at the back, and mostly no license plate at the front, all of them without any license info. c) The route maps you have to place at all the stations show english texts at german stations. How silly is that? d) Another point about cars: they are honking too much and too often. It sounds like in an italian town ... e) I don't know about station announcements in the UK or in America, but in Germany there will be no warning announcements unless a train is at the station or approaching it. However, there may be announcements about delays. 3. map flaws a) I've detected some bridges in the RRO DLC, where a pedestrian drops through the floor to the level below. b) In the TVL DLC there's a region you can reach where the game simply closes the session. No invisible barrier is blocking your path. c) The tunnel glitch east of New York Penn station. Although I don't think it's worth mentioning it, seeing how long it exists and didn't get fixed. I hate to say it, but it's definitely bad that there's no direct competitor, and I mean bad for the customer! I'd expect with other fish in the pond these flaws would get fixed much quicker.
Car licence plates made it to your list. That’s some next level nitpickery. We can hope for an Italian route so at least the horn honking will be realistic
I don't think that's nitpickery. There have to be different models for everything, and there are specialities for every country too. I've seen yellow schoolbusses in the Peninsula DLC, and the cars use the left side of the street in the UK. So why isn't it done correctly for german routes?
I just wanted to thank you for the considerable effort that you have put in to explain some of the issues that you have found with TSW, by providing valuable and constructive feedback. Don't let any slightly absurd (and ironically extremely nit-picking) responses dissuade you from having your say - overall you have provided a great deal of substantive feedback. I recognise a lot of your issues. I agree that there is a general lack of life in the simulations, but this is improving over time as the makers start to think about learning how to optimise the resources. Maybe you could consider the simulation to be an extremely accurate simulation of the COVID-19 lock-down.... ;-) I do not know about much about German operating procedures, but I can say that the MSB route is one of the best all-round routes on TSW - so the "experience" works for me.... The functionality of the safety mechanisms and signalling is probably the best in TSW. I disagree with you about the speed limits. It is perfectly acceptable to have a low speed limit following a high speed limit over a short distance, because there is a variety of traction on the routes - you have to learn the route to not get tripped up by a sudden slow limit - it's part of the simulation. But I agree that some in-game information, such as a labelled map would be useful to help with route-learning and operations. You are right about the distance measurement being critically wrong in TSW. And the makers know this - in the other Train Simulator (TS1) you get an accurate distance measurement, and you even get an ETA (Expected Time of Arrival) to next objective calculated based on the expected performance and linespeeds, etc. Counting in the UI is also often completely broken - but they have fixed scenario counting on some of the routes (although maybe not for the purpose of trophies/achievements). You are right also about the "medal" rewards - these are completely nonsense - probably as a result of no benchmarking/testing. I agree about level crossing barriers - they "just" need a hinge script and an interlock with signalling.... but a train driver never really should see an open barrier (with road traffic going through), except when the level crossing is at the end of a platform behind a signal. The inclusion of traffic is relatively recent - go back a year or two and there was none at all.... It is getting better. There is also a surprising amount of detail inside the cars/vehicles, if you walk up to them and have a look. I didn't realise the German route maps were written in English.... Can you give an example, with a screenshot? If you have discovered a ghosted (non-physical) floor on a footbridge that is normal to access on RRO, then you could report that as a bug - it might get fixed - it's a two second job, unless a physical pantograph passes very close to it (in which case there could be a physics issue - and the walkway should be barriered off, or the bridge raised). You should report the session-ending "Out of Bounds" bug on TVL - that's quite serious and should be fixed. It is always worth mentioning the NY Penn tunnel and the tunnel at Standedge on NTP. Both of these tunnels are easy to fix, but it is potentially a long and tedious job to optimise the textures for the NY Penn one (which potentially includes all of the textures above ground that you can't see). Alternatively they could lay out the tunnels on completely new dedicated map tiles - and portal into them (so that the infrastructure above doesn't lag them) - but that requires a level redesign - not complex or particularly time-consuming though. These tunnel issues are completely immersion-breaking - they simply ruin the experience. I disagree with you about no competitors... sort of.... Yes you are right in a way - there is no competitor that has produced a Train Simulator that looks as good as TSW, with a demanding focus on authenticity (one of your key criteria...?) - but..... that is another way of saying that TSW is the best one out there.... ;-) But you can always get Trainz, and Derail Valley is coming on quite well. Quite simply, TS1 and TSW are the best train simulators that you can get that cost under £10,000.
That's some "previous-level" welcome to give to someone that makes their first post on the Forum. Now I understand why so many people on the Forum are just lurkers and readers, when their first attempt to speak gets bashed - it makes putting in the effort seem utterly pointless.
Thanks, Plastic Pal, I appreciate your reply. And indeed, my post was meant as constructive criticism. I like the game and I would like to see it more immersive and realistic. Some of the things mentioned above have been detected during me strolling along the track to solve all the jobs. I ran along almost the complete routes. Providing screenshots is no problem, I just need to complete the current service. In fact, I should have done them right away.
Finally the screenshots are done. For the map flaws I will provide bug reports, but there are some others too. I apologize for the generalization about English texts on German route maps, perhaps I was too surprised by it. With a closer look I found that this only applies to the RRO DLC, but there are also some typos. RRO route map with annotations On the MSB route map I found a negligable typo, the town is called Gemünden am Main. MSB route map In the opening post I wrote about the top speed of the Class 08. Here's a comparison patched together from two screenshots. imperial and metric speed scaling, the latter showing a false top speed
The speedometer in the HUD doesn’t actually show the top speed of a train. It is divided into segments of 5, 10, 20 etc mph or kmh and the last large segment just happens to be shaded differently. The point at which the shading changes isn’t necessarily the speed limit of the loco/train. It’s just an artistic choice for the look of the HUD.
Nicely said, but then again why is it shaded differently in the first place? I mean, the HUD doesn't need to be artistically brilliant, it serves a purpose and the info presented should be as accurate as possible. To me the only valid reason for a different shading would be to indicate the loco's top speed. Ok, I'm not an artist but an engineer (not on locos though), but technical solutions need to be easily comprehensible.
Regarding the typos on the posters... what can I say other than basic Quality Assurance appears to have fallen short on the artwork, with the "Schwelm" typo sticking out for me as a bit of an obvious howler. This must be one of those very rare mistakes that slipped through the net. It is obviously very easy to fix the texture. The speedometer gauges, as represented on the HUD are a different matter. In a sense, both of the HUDs (whether in mph or kph) are "wrong". This is because they both present a linear scale on the HUD, whereas the actual scale depicted in the train artwork is non-linear (higher speeds are indicated with lessening deflection of the needle). The greyed-out zone is depicting an over-speed zone - this is the unmarked/blank area (on the loco's gauge) between "20" and the final un-numbered dot at FSD (Full Scale Deflection), which given the non-linearity of the gauge, would probably be hit at about 28mph to 30mph. You need this in real life, and on the HUD, because if the FSD for the actual needle rested at 20mph then in the event that you exceeded 20mph you would have no idea whether it was 20.1mph or 30mph, and how much braking to apply. The HUDs themselves present linear gauges, which to be fair, is much more user-friendly to the average person/player. If you want the full immersion, then don't look the HUD.... ;-) The linear numbered scaling on the HUD bearing kph does not match the one bearing mph. A closer match for the major markers on the HUDs (in mph/kph) would be: 5/8, 10/16, 15/24, 20/32, 25/40 - this would make a mess of the subdivisions in kph, and nobody wants a scale that goes up in 8s. You could re-arrange the position of the major division ticks on the kph scale as 10/20/30/40 (without the 50), or 5/10/15/20/25/30/35/40/45/50 (which is extremely cluttered). But you need the 50, because the real loco gauge will just about exceed 45kph, and probably rests at FSD at around 48kph (the dot beyond 20mph). In short - the scalings shown on both the mph HUD and the kph HUD are ideal design compromise decisions (in my opinion). The only error is that on the kph HUD the greyed out zone should start at 32kmh, and not 40kph. This could be easily fixed. As an aside - what they have done with the Class 08 HUDs is a vast improvement on the Class 09, which has a mph HUD that goes to 50mph but should stop at 30mph for FSD (but the kph HUD for the Class 09 is basically ideal as it goes up to 50kph). If any HUD should be significantly changed - it would be the Class 09's mph HUD - maybe they will switch it out with the very much better Class 08 design. Hint, hint.
Hi When in 1 route there is a sinal that the loco can go at 127 km then 10m after that another with a maximun speed 40km
