Dovetail Games Tsw 5 November 2024 Roadmap - Q&a Thread (answered)

Hello everyone,

I've gone through and timestamped the November 2024 Roadmap last night, which highlights answers to many questions from this thread, as well as answers we were asked live during the evening that you can skim through. Q&A begins at 1:02:30, so feel free to skim from there.

November 2024 Roadmap Livestream


As for the remaining questions in this thread unanswered, I will talk about these below, and then close the thread.
(Thank you to our team, chat moderators and some of you in the community who have provided answers to many!)

Just a quick mention that anything regarding new content that we've not yet shared details about, we won't be able to answer directly - including those relating to the December Season of Reveals event - more will be shared in the coming weeks!

Q: How do community suggestions get used, why hasn't X train come if many people have been suggesting it?
We've talked at length about the LAMPOIL process before, so I would recommend heading to our July 2024 Roadmap where we go into full detail on this. The short story is that all community suggestions are helpful, whether they're really good ideas, or even just a way for us to understand what players want to see from TSW in the future. That being said, even if 80% of our community were saying "you need to add X train!" - it's not necessarily guaranteed by any means, and it doesn't get any special treatment going through our reviewing process, but of course our teams constantly work hard to make sure that what we're releasing is something you all want to see.

Q: Were there any rejected community suggestions in the past?
Oh, plenty! It's probably safe to assume more ideas go through the LAMPOIL process, discussed above, than actually come out of it. It's an intense and thorough breakdown that helps us make the most informed choice for what add-ons to develop. We're presenting new routes/locos to a huge audience and range of players in TSW, and regardless of what region you come from, we've got to find something that appeals to as many passionate fans, and also all-new players, as we can.
I think as a start, the easiest rejections come from Licensing, Scope (is the route too long / too hard to build) and then whether our teams are able to accurately re-create the route (Do we have the right software/tools, and if reference trips are needed, can we go? - this usually concerns new countries).

Q: Will we ever get longer routes from DTG?
We've certainly seen some of our third-party partners really push the lengths of recent routes, but I think as we've mentioned in the above comments regarding suggestions and the viability of new add-ons, the track distance isn't always the main appeal, and we tend to focus more on ensuring that gameplay and scenery details can remain at a high quality, and in some cases that means choosing a selection of track that isn't as long. As we continue to grow our third-party partner programme, it should help bring you all a wider range of routes to choose from, with longer and shorter lengths, and hopefully cover more ground around the world too (No spoilers from me, but we have announced Wales, Japan and the Netherlands all coming to TSW!)

Q: Will NYT be getting any more improvements soon?
Currently, the teams have been focussing on improvements for TSW5 core routes, and we don't have any plans at the moment for NYT.

Q: Any plans for announcements on platforms or on trains?
Nothing to share on this, although we've seen lots of positive suggestions and support for the feature from the community.

Q: On the Season of Reveals, will there be new routes to announce, or it is all updates on previously shared add-ons?
I don't want to spoil the fun, but from our roadmap article you can see our line that says "an event that will fold together all new TSW add-on reveals, additional news on announced projects and updates from a huge range of our third-party development teams" - hopefully looking closer at this should give you a picture of what to expect

Q: Any news on the Dutch route?
See the above answer in relation to the upcoming Season of Reveals event - December should be an exciting time!

Q: Any plans to improve the headlights on trains?
No specific plans for a system-wide improvement regarding headlights.

Q: Will we create a PC Editor official wiki/documentation or official sample content to play with?
We've recently assigned a member of our team to look at ways we can continue to improve the PC Editor, however as of today we don't yet have plans to build out any official wiki pages/documentation when using the tool. It may be something we look at again in future, but we understand using the Editor is a complex process, and there's a certain level of Unreal knowledge you will likely need when starting out. Please visit the PC Editor forums to find a huge amount of Community-led support and documentation!
No news on creating a "Sample pack" of content within the Editor either, but again may be something we consider in the future.

Q: Will the WCML timetable be updating the existing one or is it separate (Like a Full and Reduced option?)
We'll share more about how we're rolling this out when we get closer to releasing it to you all, including any impact that players on gen8 platforms may face. Some of this is still being determined and understood by our teams currently.

Q: When will guard mode on Birmingham Cross City be implemented?
Soon I hope! We've included this on a couple of patch notes so far, but then had issues with seeing it functioning correctly with players. There's more we need to understand because the feature works in our development builds, but we hope to get this out to you all in the upcoming patches. We talked about this on our Roadmap live stream at 1:10:45

Q: Any plan to fix the BR 114 brakes on Frankfurt Fulda?
Our teams are continuing to look at TSW5 core content, and we have this as one of our top reported issues on Frankfurt. We'll share more news when we can get a fix deployed, thank you for being patient.

Q: Will the add-on manager improvements help loading times on consoles, or is this for PC only?
If this was related to the modding optimisations we discussed at 0:54:00 on our livestream, then this will only impact players who have community-created modded content installed on PC platforms, as consoles are unable to install mods for TSW.

Thank you all for the questions folks, and as a final reminder this has been the last roadmap before the new year, so expect more development insights from our teams in January. Have a good week!