Dovetail Games Ts Classic Update!

And they spent almost a year coming up with that package instead of reverting the game back to the last best version.

 

They only care about revenue

 

You do realize that is the primary reason for business right?

 

The emphasis is on the word ONLY

 

You might make money in the short term but no business survives unless it has a customer base that has its needs met. That is the rule of all business - identify a need - fill it at the right price. Elementary my dear Watson.

 

DTG is not the only or the first gaming company to trim back development costs for a product that has a declining future and revenue. It is a business decision. I wish that that they would have been more forthcoming earlier with their intentions. On the other hand if they had, then players and developers would have been moving on to other platforms sooner. There are enough developers both freeware and payware still producing content for the foreseeable future, but in the long run, slowly they will loose interest and stop or move on to producing content for other platforms, especially payware developers (follow the money). As long as the platform still is viable in some form and interest doesn't wane to quickly, it will continue on. Development on the core is done. What you see is what you get. This year's promotion is a three route bundle and a name change. Who knows what it will be next year. How about a free, truly unique railcar for loyalty to the sim for everyone? It would cost DTG nothing but the time to create one, if they still have someone who still knows how to do it.

 

While the core stream seems to have been pulled or postponed as we have not heard anything, I am happily enjoying v75.8, the best version of Train Sim Classic by exploring unplayed DLC and the variety of steam workshop scenarios available. If the devs could revert to v75.8a that would be best to just leave it at that

I just tested separately public beta build v78.1a on the Hudson line and can confirm after passing one of the cab signal plates before Ossining station heading southbound, my in cab signal display illuminations completely disappear not letting me know which signal aspect speed to operate at. The public beta has a slew of issues

 

malikrthr, you say a slew of issues. Other than the signalling problem on the mostly Eastern DTG routes what problems are you having? I have been running it for some time now and find it to be pretty darn good except for the affor mentioned. I'm just embarking on a study of the signalling issue since it works fine on a lot of routes so I'm sure it something in the code that's fairly easy (I hope) to fix.

 

Add headlight flares and trains derailing on turntabled.

I can’t imagine these things would be that hard to fix. Yet it seems like they didn’t even care to try for a whole year.

 

The main issues I have encountered are. Headlight flares not casting properly for AI trains until they are approximately 200ft ahead of the player's train moving in the opposite direction, some audio enhancement mods may crash to desktop in the latest official public build

 

I isued a similar statement about the opening of my wallet last few weeks ago.

 

Of course it wouldnt be hard.
I wish they would just Open Source it.
Doing that would be a sign of good will.

 

While putting TSC's core code in open source seems like a good option, I think it isn't that simple.
Open source does not equal public domain, and you don't want all kinds of people tampering with the source code and releasing their ideas of 'improved' TSC to the unsuspecting player.

Source code needs to be readable, non obfuscated, in a common programming language. And it requires lots of documentation, versioning, testing, more testing and even more testing aka quality assurance.

OpenRails is open source, but its development is still being done by a team of volunteers, and progress is veerrrryyy slow, if not stagnant.
Few people want to devote all of their spare time, essentially their life, to a good cause and still be met with impatience, imprudence, critique, scorn, insults, hate and worse from a certain part of the player base which takes everything for free and granted.

 

Few people want to, but with a game like this, the few people *should* be able to. Maybe someone will make their college thesis be an open rails like wrapper for running TSC routes/stock external to the existing game.

 

Some very good points there highlighting why we have to be careful what we request. We need an open source model with something like a BSD license so that can actually do stuff with the code.

I think we would need to focus just on fixing a few bugs and recompiling the game to run on newer platforms as the years go by so it is more of a preservation project than an improvement project. If anybody did want to make their idea of an improved TSC I would simply say good luck with their fork (where open source software can have variants created from the codebase of another project), but maintain strict rules about contributions on the parent project where nothing is allowed that would break compatibility with existing content.

Preservation of Train Simulator Classic is probably more than enough work for the community without much prospect of improvements, but I personally think that it is worth doing to preserve the creative effort and art that goes into all the content that has appeared throughout the years.