So for as long as TSW has been a thing, DTG has told us PTC is flat-out impossible, not just cost-prohibitive or time-consuming, but literally not possible. This modder seems to be doing magic, then! Not sure what's going on under the hood, but the in-game results seem impressive to me! Maybe worth DTG's time to reach out and see what they could learn?
Without knowing what they've said, they obviously don't mean technically impossible, that would be preposterous.
It's far from impossible. In fact, it's very possible. It's just a time/money investment like anything else.
It's just so much more complex than AWS/TPWS even LZB/PZB and there isn't just one version. Different systems are currently implemented by each railroad. Not to mention it requires GPS navigation and centralized control to monitor and control train movements. It pretty much controls what an engineer is allowed to do with his/her train.
I remember Matt addressing it and being more emphatically "it's never happening" than i can recall him ever being about a topic, so i assumed there was some techincal limitation, but i guess i just read a bit too much into it. Regarding it needing a GPS system- wouldn't that have other benefits in the game like eliminating the annoying, "distance to target goes up sometimes" bug on really curvy routes? Would it help us get working EBULA? Sorry if these are dumb questions lol But, maybe it would be a feature worth investing in?
Matt never did say it was impossible just exactly what CatusJuice said Time and Money. Each region runs it own version so it would be different for each route.
my guess is it would also increase the game by some gigabytes for each DLC it is going to be used in it sound pretty complex to me but i could be wrong and do not forget we get even more bugs in the game that way
1) PTC is not a system, it is a regulatory standard. Railroads are free to meet that standard with any system which accomplishes the goal, and they have. 2) One form of PTC is already in the game: ATC/ACSES as implemented on the Northeast Corridor and a variant on LIRR. And another, ETCS, is (wonkily) implemented on Luzerne-Sursee. But for other routes, other systems would have to be built. 3) For the Southern California routes, the system (I-ETMS) not only uses mechanisms which (at present) Simugraph is not built to model, like GPS, but it also relies on a lot of proprietary data which is not publicly available.
