Tsc - Taurus Mountains Coming Soon

Yes even if not strictly prototypical, putting the actual speed limits on the track would be better from the simulation point of view. I took one of those curves at 105 km/h and felt like the train was going to tilt over. If this is likely in a patch, I'll hold back from going through and updating my own copy for personal use.

As regards the sound issue, I probably need to do an uphill run see what happens on full throttle. However the idle sound is definitely overwhelming all the other ambient sounds when the train is coasting and once the engine is under power should not be layering into the "Run" effects. Will check later if I have EFX enabled, probably not as I'm only using the built in Realtek sound system.

 

I think keeping the real track speed limits is better. Time tables don't always keep trains on the speed limit, so in this case, you shouldn't be driving 100 km/h either, even if the track allows it. There are other routes as well where the track speed limits are pretty high, but the scenarios even warn you that it's your responsibility to drive in a way that is comfortable to the passengers.

 

But in this case if you actually drive at the line speed, you can immediately tell you are cornering too fast, in fact I thought I was going to derail. That track geometry is not physically capable of taking a train at 90 km/h, let alone 110. As I said, I don't know how the real TCDD approach speed limit signing, but just about any other rail network in the world you would not post a higher speed limit than what trains can actually traverse the curve (with a slight overlap margin). We would be having Morpeth (1969/1994) Rail accidents at Morpeth - Wikipedia style incidents every other day. In the UK, as we know, not only do you get the speed limit board at the restriction, you get the yellow triangle advance warning plus AWS and these days TPWS will monitor you have reduced speed appropriately and put the brakes in if you haven't. Ditto Germany with PZB/Indusi.

 

Did you derail though? If you didn't, then clearly the speed limit was safe. Nowdays many speed limits are lower on purpose for comfort reasons, but the trains themselves can take the curves much faster. I assume that is the case here too, if the route in real life has a 110km/h limit as well.

The Sacramento Northern route is similar to this. There is a speed limit that feels very fast in the curves, but that's the way it was back then and the train doesn't derail. It just feels fast and not comfortable to ride on, therefore it's up to the drivers to drive "responsibly". So if it's a similar story here, then I think it is fine this way.

 

The only reason I didn't derail is probably because the tolerances in the sim are not that realistic. The fact is, the *paper* speed limit, as provided on the accompanying timetable is 70 km/h or as shown (equivalent to the UK sectional appendix) and that's what should be appearing on the HUD. That's only going to happen if you highlight the track and change the speed limit on there. I suspect the track rule for the route was simply defined as 110 km/h so all the track got that as default, except where altered for points, crossings and stations.

Guess we will have to agree to disagree but for me this inaccurate representation of the actual speed you can do spoils the operational side of the route.

 

That might be the case as well, that's why I said I am fine with it only if the track limit is 110km/h all the way in real life as well. If real life has slower sections, then it should be represented that way in the game too.

 

Hello dear Train Community. Thanks for these feedbacks. We do take note of the problems you mentioned and the points you want to be improved (especially 110 km/h track speed confusion, low FPS due to dynamic lighting, performance issues etc.) and we are going to try to fix all of them.

OldVern, could you please check the "Train Simulator - Settings - Audio" screen? Is EFX checkbox selected?

 

Yes EFX is selected. As regards my feedback, the level of the engine idle versus the track sounds is definitely on the loud side. However I need to investigate further whether it is continuing to play under the run sounds - I need to find an uphill scenario so I can max the throttle.

Yes I think I was probably mistaken about the idle sound playing when under power, please disregard that one.

 

Interestingly the line (HUD) speed at the other end of the line, starting from Yenice heading towards Durak is shown as 70 km/h, as per the timetable sheet.

I'm sure the guys will sort it out. In the meantime, I'm having great fun now I've got a heavy freight train and can open up the power.

Well done and thanks to the team for a great add on.

 

As part of the Steam Winter Sale, we have arranged 20% discount on the sale price of Taurus Mountains. Those who haven't got it yet should not miss this opportunity. Any kind of support you will give us by getting our work will pave the way for us to do more and quality work. Thank you all.

 

I didn't think new items could go on sale that quickly by Steam rules. I am surprised you were able to arrange this. Looks like a potential pickup for sure for those thinking about it.

 

Hello Cyclone,

Normally, a newly released content is not immediately discounted. But we, as a developer, took this discount decision with the recommendation by DTG. We thought we could reach more people this way. Frankly, we wanted to have some contribution for people who are already suffering from inflation and crises around the world.

 

Right, I know DTG made the recommendation. But I didn't think Steam itself would allow an early discount on a new item. They typically make you wait more than a month, I think, to let you apply a discount.

That said, I got the release date wrong. It was November 18. It has been more than a month. So all good anyway.

 

andmodeltrain

Hello, I'm hoping you're making progress updating the scenery.

As to the file distribution, I have found the route to work perfectly packing all the assets into an .ap file except for the *.out scripts. I've left these files and their folders outside the .ap.

Also for the update you can save some space by deleting all the .xml files (8 MB) from the Assets, which are not needed (except for .proxyxml!)

And I really hope you remove the ugly LODs - in many places, good 2D trees can make the scenery look much more realistic.


In addition, your TimeOfDay files have incorrect sun/moon azimuths. (Values must be between -1.5 and 1.5, it's in radians from the sky's zenith).
You've set them all to -76 which makes no sense (apparently TS uses zero then). Also the huge moon looks better at MoonScaleVal 0.4.

Correct azimuth values for that region would be Spring, Autumn: -0.64 / Summer: -0.24 / Winter: -1

Apart from that, I must say I really enjoy this route and there is a lot to discover. Just Freeroaming on a summer's morning, making stops and checking out the scenery. Beautiful sounds!

Cheers!

Love it...

 

Hi torfmeister,

First of all, we would like to thank you very much for these valuable opinions and corrections. We have now completed our first update and handed it over to the QA team for testing.
I can say that we overhauled all the LODs in the trees and changed almost everything with them to improve performance and their looks.
I will definitely look into the "TimeOfDay" and change the values as you mentioned. After doing my tests with the new values, I will try to add the new "TimeOfDay" file to the update that will come out in a few days.
I would like to write the changes we made for the new update:

- DE 24000 Cab Occlusion values have been overhauled, providing a more realistic in-cab sound level.
- Speed limits on the entire line have been reworked. Thus, instead of the 110 km speed limit, especially for passenger trains, speed limits were defined along the line as in real. Also I have added markers showing correct speed limits on HUD.
- For increased performance, all of the passenger car lights, which are designed with shadow enabled, have been replaced with shadowless versions. In fact, thanks to the FPSGuard system we have developed, it takes some precautions when the system catches low FPS in order to compensate for the performance losses in FPS (eg: removing the passengers inside the wagon, activating the shadowless lights instead of shadow enabled lights etc.). However, we changed the shadow enabled wagon lights because we detected instantaneous FPS fluctuations while FPSGuard constantly tries to prevent it.
- We have reworked textures, bodies and LOD structures of all Tree objects. Problems like LOD near pop-up issues, 2D-3D textures not matching have been completely fixed. Both the performance is increased and a much more beautiful scenery view can be captured visually.
- Visual anomalies in some parts of the line have been fixed, objects have been added/removed in some places.
- Scenarios have been overhauled and some of them have been revised with German and Spanish translations.
- Voice over has been added to the "64742 Freight Service (Belemedik - Yenice)" scenario.
- The visuals of the "Introduction to Taurus Mountains 1 & 2" scenarios have been replaced with HTML versions and the texts have been simplified.
- Added 3 new standard scenarios.

I will give more information about the upcoming update in the following days. Thanks for your support.

 

Just reading this, sounds promising. Absolute premium content - and the DE24000 is surely one of the finest modelled and scripted locos in the TSC universe.

 

3 new standard scenarios? This is a nice little bonus. I love seeing scenarios added after the fact to increase the value.

 

Any sign of Career scenarios?

 

We have added the Career Scenarios to the update, but the scoring system that must work through the DTG database cannot be activated for our scenarios. Although the settings and features of the scenarios are the same as the Career Scenarios on other routes, the scoring system is not responding. We need some more help with this, any ideas?

 

My rough understanding is that you need to register your career scenario as official, both the guid and the (md5) hash, proving it has not been modified.

Without it, a career scenario is just a flexible one with scoring, instead of the binary behavior of standard (late by a second, failed).
People can create and share career scenarios on the workshop, and this could be used to farm xp.
Not really an issue as no one is flexing player levels (except for fun), but achievements are also tied to it, hence a closed system.

(E.g. I could fix the last Sherman Hill GTEL scenario, which is to my best knowledge broken, so I'd feel just. The achievement is also literal impossible now. But from a system perspective, this would be cheating. Same with Monumental on NS Coal. That said, there have been experiments, and of course the cheat program.)

Maybe you knew all this. I'd talk with DTG directly to get some help.

 

My guess is there's some kind of file that lists the Career scenarios and locks them from editing. If they are not locked by such a file, it makes me think one can edit them and even upload them to the Steam Workshop. This can I believe be done for Standard scenarios and possibly unlocked Career scenarios. It may be that someone also forgot to lock the scenarios.

Since the originals are in the AP file, this protects them from harm and copies can just be deleted after experiments by the player.

 

Hello andmodeltrain

Is there any news on the update for your fantastic route? Maybe you're sorting out things and wait till TSC update is stable?

 

Hello torfmeister.
Actually, we completed the update in March 2023. But since the problem with the scoring of Career scenarios was still not solved, we changed Career scenarios back to Standard scenarios. Since then we have been waiting for the update to be released by DTG.

Since the process of updating the core TSC is taking all the time of the QA team, they had to postpone the 3rd Party updates a little.
We hope that the update will be published very soon.

By the way, we also put the TimeOfDay data you sent in the update. We would like to thank you very much for your feedback.

 

Hello dear Train Simulator community,

Just the let you know the major update for Taurus Mountains will be released on 18 May 2023 at 10am (UK time). Updates will be made automatically via Steam.

The changes and additions with this update are as follows:
- DE 24000 Cab Occlusion values have been overhauled, providing a more realistic in-cab sound level.
- Speed limits on the entire line have been reworked. Thus, instead of the 110 km speed limit, especially for passenger trains, speed limits were defined along the line as in real timetables. Also I have added markers showing correct speed limits on HUD.
- For increased performance, all of the passenger car lights, which are designed with shadow enabled, have been replaced with shadowless versions. In fact, thanks to the FPSGuard system we have developed, it takes some precautions when the system catches low FPS in order to compensate for the performance losses in FPS (eg: removing the passengers inside the wagon, activating the shadowless lights instead of shadow enabled lights etc.). However, we changed the shadow enabled wagon lights because we detected instantaneous FPS fluctuations while FPSGuard constantly tries to prevent it.
- We have reworked textures, bodies and LOD structures of all Tree objects. Problems like LOD near pop-up issues, 2D-3D textures not matching have been completely fixed. Both the performance is increased and a much more beautiful scenery view can be captured visually.
- Visual anomalies in some parts of the line have been fixed, objects have been added/removed in some places.
- Scenarios have been overhauled and some of them have been revised with German and Spanish translations.
- Voice over has been added to the "64742 Freight Service (Belemedik - Yenice)" scenario.
- The visuals of the "Introduction to Taurus Mountains 1 & 2" scenarios have been replaced with HTML versions and the texts have been simplified.
- Added 3 new standard scenarios.

Cheers.