Lol no, R* didn't scale back on the physics to allow for better graphics. Graphics and physics don't have much in common anyway - one will be mostly CPU and the other will be mostly GPU. They scaled back on realistic physics because it got in the way of fun for many players. Nope. That's the point you completely seem to miss. TSW is filled with badly made, unoptimized assets. They look bad and cause bad performance. Many of these are known, confirmed examples. It's not a performance vs graphics problem. It's simply a quality problem. TSW could be much better both visually and performance wise if proper care would be taken when creating assets.
They scaled it back to allow for far more interactive objects, including pedestrians to be rendered at once within a scene. They've openly said that. It was to have more density of stuff going on to make the game look more realistic in other ways while reducing the realism in ways people would notice less. Players ADORED the more detailed physics not just because of the realistic parts of it, but also because of the ways the system could be broken to allow for emergent gameplay. GTAIV's multiplayer was constantly full of people having competitions, for example, for how far across the map you could launch your car, Skyrim Giant-esque from a particular set of swings in not-Brooklyn, even years after GTAV launched, because one of the biggest complaints of players was the kinds of fun the sequel removed, like setting up a human domino rally on a staircase. Also, when it comes to certain features like Raytracing, it's not a clean GPU/CPU split. CPU load spikes when a game's raytracing is turned on, and you will still see bottlenecking of RT performance if you have a lower end CPU. (I learned that one the hard way when I thought a mid-tier Ryzen would be fine as long as I had a beefy GPU and had to stick with raster rendering until getting a CPU upgrade) Hell, when GTAV launched on Gen7 consoles it had its own hardware bottleneck on graphics unrelated to either CPU or GPU in the form of I/O speeds. The game couldn't read the data fast enough over one SATA interface, hence the way it streamed data from one DVD while the other had to be fully installed to the XBox or PS3 hard drive - and the resulting "one neat trick" on 360 to eliminate texture pop-in which was to install the play disc to an external drive, so then for one thing, your DVD drive didn't sound like it was trying to take off, and for another, the USB interface could read the data far faster than the optical drive could, resulting in an immediately noticeable effect on the game's otherwise slow pop. I'm not arguing it's not filled with simple issues to solve, like rendering hundreds of passengers visible onscreen per coach in out of service stock in sidings, using up a bunch of texture memory and the like for something which objectively should not be there. But while it's inarguable that there are optimisation problems in TSW, and that UE5 has some workarounds for some of the core engine issues with UE4, the fact remains that to get something that runs without many of TSW's issues you essentially need to be designing something that better works within the framework of what Unreal Engine fundamentally was built to handle. Hence things like all the complaints about Obsidian's RPGs in UE5 not having "Real" seamless open worlds like Bethesda's do. Of course they don't, when you try that in UE, you run into all sorts of performance problems. (Even running a simple UE5 graphical overlay on Oblivion, the performance goes to hell). Even in UE4 on consoles you can produce a 120fps raytraced tour de force of a corridor based shooter that very skilfully gives the impression at first glance of taking place within a larger world, but where the illusion falls apart the moment you stop blasting through it in a line and push up against the limitations. Running Train is pulling this off pretty well, because it's not trying to be anything outside of that box. Fundamentally all videogames are about "faking it", and how well you pull that off depends on how well you work within the predefined limits of the tools you have, which is why I am an advocate for the proliferation of more in-house engines wherever possible. They all have their strengths and weaknesses (Looking at you RedEngine and the Witcher 3 NPCs lacking appearance persistence between looking away and back at them) but when designed from the ground up for something, there's far fewer tricks the devs need to use to create the illusion they want without compromising it. That's the real fundamental root quality issue, and it's baked in the moment you make the decisions at the start of a project within your own set of limitations (financial, etc). "Lazy devs" is an appealingly simple explanation, but also "Lazy Devs" is how you get stuff which takes the path of least resistance to achieve something that looks great by not trying to do anything too far outside of what your off the shelf engine's designed for.
0.9.2 Hotfix Features -Level, Distance Traveled, and Accumulated Points are now displayed on the Main Menu. Note: Because Distance Traveled is a newly added cloud save variable data, stats from previous runs will not carry over. Your stat will begin from zero. Apologize for inconvenience. -In the Evaluation screen, details showing your selected Difficulty Multiplier and the Train Model used during the run has been added. -Visual Improvements: Added a blob shadow effect beneath AI traffic car. -Pressing Shift + Middle Mouse Button will now instantly reset all camera properties back to their default values. -Stop tolerace on free mode increase to ±10m -Add new style of stop marker -Add an option to significantly reduce AI train spawning to improve performance on low-end PCs. Fixes & Adjustments: -Diagram 1677A Fixes: Fixed an issue where players could not proceed past the Kanamori home signal. -Diagram 1677A Fixes: departures from Ise Station are now 70 seconds earlier to balance the timetable. -Updated engine RPM logic DC85 series. When the torque converter is locked, the engine is now mechanically locked to the wheels. -Reduced overall damping and running resistance so trains should now maintain momentum better and lose less speed while coasting. -Resolved an issue where 3rd-party Mascon plugins caused conflicting button registration with Xbox Controllers. Xbox controllers should now function normally. (hopefully this is last time) -Fixed a HUD mashup glitch where the ZUIKI HUD would randomly display while using an Xbox controller. -Fixed a bug where the controller (B) button would fail to register on the session-end notification. -Clamped maximum forward speed to slighty faster for AI traffic to eliminate the "car centipede" reverse bug. -Fixed UI background stretching issues on ultrawide monitors. -Corrected inaccurate entrance/exit speed limits displayed on certain timetables. -Updated the entrance and exit speed limits for Takahashi Station. -Fixed various typos, misspellings, and translation errors. -Added a missing wiper mesh to static train models. -Downsized several non-critical textures (such as bolts, labels, etc.) and reassigned assets to different streaming groups to reduce VRAM overhead. While this should alleviate texture blurring, if you are still experiencing blurry textures on lower-spec systems, please try the following steps: 1. Increase System Pagefile: Ensure your Windows virtual memory (paging file) has at least 2GB to 4GB allocated. 2. Set your graphics settings and AI Train Frequency to Low or Medium BEFORE loading into a scenario to minimize peak RAM usage during map loading. 3. Once the scenario loads completely, check if the textures display in correctly (not blurry).
Amazing Game really enjoying the visuals and Game play. Never thought I could get to Japan for £16 virtually speaking. Have combined my love of train sims with my passion for all things Blender 3D and Video FX compositing. More experiments exploring how characters might look and story mode ideas with cut scenes etc. Flying Plane window idea. The People are from Procedural Crowds from Diffuse Studios and the 2nd Character in image is from Human Generator. The last image is a test walking Animation.
Dude, the issue is that you keep going into much deeper topics than what the issues with TSW actually are. And it's LOVE like this: When they can't get even basic material properties right. This is not a technical limitation. This is not a know-how limitation. This is not a performance concern. This is a full team of devs ignoring the fact that a single material property is set incorrectly. Something that could be fixed in a matter of minutes. Or how the boxcars in Clinchfield Railroad cause framerate drops because some badly set up animation or something along the lines. They even suspect the probably clause, because they used to mention it back in the day in a live stream. Probably another 15 minute job, yet never fixed through the years. And this is just two examples. And TSW is filled to the brim with LOVE like this, causing ugly visuals and bad performance. And these are easy quick fixes you would normally assign to an intern. Everything else like raytracing, virtual shadow mapping, etc are just extra. These are also important and areas where DTG is lacking, but these technologies or the UE4 vs UE5 differences are not the issue with TSW.
