Tsw: Diesel Duty

I'm not sure, but he way it works in Gran Turismo feels entirely different from how it behaves (and sounds) in Project Cars (PC2 is virtually unusable with a G29 wheel, which is slick as anything on GT Sport) so I think they do quite a bit of work per game. It's not just a translation of the rumble from the DS4 controller anyway.

 

For now, yes, but these areas of the route haven't been used for rail traffic until now. Isn't it possible that all three loaders (the third handles scrap metal) may become "practical" withe the arrival of this new shunting engine? I'm hopeful, anyway, especially since working container cranes have been available in TS for quite some time (although both DTG and 3rd party route makers often placed them incorrectly in regard to the tracks and left them inanimate and unusable).

 

Don't be so sure of that. Since walking through these yard areas is possible and the manual switches are fully operable, my guess is that trains could already enter them as well. Testing this theory would just be a matter of finding an activity in which an operable engine is not too far away and commandeering it, as Harmer, Nickhawk and others have done to set up activities without an editor [e.g.: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1165064044 ] -- I may give this a try myself.

 

Bruh. Synthetic.angel, I think this is a perfect opportunity for TSW. Third parties are joining in, that means we’ll see dlc that we’ve never seen before in TSW. Everything we’ve always wanted is, and can be, here. Longer routes, routes from other countries, all that and more. I see this as an opportunity for DTG to really make TSW a very interesting game, not throw it away along with TS20XX. This is TSW’s salvation, not death. So I don’t see your point. This could be the one thing we’ve been waiting for years, and it’s finally here.

 

Same "spooling up for takeoff" noise as before for me. Do you find it makes a difference?

I'm literally just looking at the TSW home screen with the list of DLC and the fan is running at fast-swinging-Spiderman-in-4K or GT-Sport-in-VR-mode speeds. What in God's name is it doing?!

 

As if anyone is actually against third party developments for TSW... You must be living in cuckoo land.

Don't like third party? Don't buy their products. Simple as.

 

I’ll definitely buy some Third party content if they do US,Ireland or Scotland.

 

Freight cars in other condition. In the article there was a picture of empty autorac cars. The first time in TSW on german routes.

 

Guys, did anybody notice the cooling fan lids raised on some screenshots, while they are lowered in others? Looks really immersive to be honest. Can’t wait to see more of it . Cheers

 

The autorack cars, I'm pretty sure, first appeared with the Main-Spessart route. At least, they're a common sight in the freight activities there.

 

I meant that autorack cars was always loaded with cars if they appeared in the german dlc's. Now there will be unloaded autorack cars too.

 

Yes, these autorack cars look ridiculous being loaded with the same cars in both directions We definitely need an empty version as well.

 

Looking forward to this add-on greatly, though a bit disappointing that there's no new rolling stock added. Even color/livery variations of the same car would be welcome. Still the loco itself looks great!

Adding to the 3rd-party discussion a bit- think it will be fantastic, especially if it enables content that DTG can't/won't develop themselves. Many have been asking for a German shunter, DTG said they had issues getting access, and now a 3rd-party has filled the gap- i'd say this bodes well for the future.

My biggest fear is that DTG will NOT enforce cross-platform development for paid DLC. DTG decided to make this game cross-platform and (other than HH, which annoys me, but it is what it is) have stayed admirably consistent with all subsequent content.

We console players pay just as much (if not more due to lack of preorder discount) as PC players, so in my opinion 3rd-parties should have to release as cross-platform or as freeware.

 

I've done something similar to you but with a hyperthreaded CPU. You'll noticed that my 2c/4t screenshot is very similar to yours. This suggests that it's not really an issue with using more than 2 (or 4) cores, it's an issue with using more than 4 threads, regardless of how many physical cores are being used.

 

I would imagine that going forwards, anything that's released via DTG gets released on all platforms. Once a public editor is out, then it's a free-for-all, and I would expect very little of that to make its way to consoles just because of the various problems regarding testing, especially if it's just one guy who only has a PC. Some of the inherent problems with consoles can also affect cross-platform releases, such as this one highlighted by Ed, who did audio setup and physics on some of the old BR stuff, on the Discord server concerning the BR 155:

A certain user will probably be happy to hear what's causing the bug, at least.

 

You're oversimplifying Synthia's position. I know, it's easy to have a knee-jerk reaction to such a contrarian comment. "What?! Why wouldn't you want more content available? We're dying for more content!"

Humour me a little bit, will you? If I am understanding synthetic.angel's position correctly (and do please correct me if I am misinterpreting), it is not that people are inherently opposed to 3rd-party content coming to TSW, but rather the premise of which it is. By that I mean, in order to have a vast and expansive library of (working) third-party content, you need a robust framework of functionality. In the mystical land of Computer Science, there exists functions known as an interfaces and parent functions. An interface describes the framework for child methods (functions) to build off of, saying to a child function, "you need to be able to do X, but you are free to decide how X is accomplished," whereas a parent function says to a child function, "you extend my functionality to more specific areas."
Theoretically, in an ideal world, DTG would have the perfect codebase, free of all possible bugs, or at the very least design the framework to be easily adjusted without breaking anything if a bug comes up. Such a robust codebase would allow third-parties, who are not in control of the prescribed interfaces or parent functions, to use the interfaces with the sound knowledge that everything will work as intended.

However, we do not live in an ideal world. All software has bugs of varying degrees, even if they haven't been discovered yet. Part of the job description of a software engineer is to design software to be easily fixable if a bug in a particular area of the program becomes known. Theoretically, if a bug is tracked down and sourced within a program's inferface, that means that the bug also exists in any method that implements that interface (through inheritance). A programmer should be able to fix the code in the parent function and now all the child functions showing symptoms should be cured, but this is not the rule of thumb in TSW.

It may not be obvious to someone whose never studies software engineering, but based on observations of bug fixes and retroactive fixes to individual DLCs, it is very easy to conclude that TSW has a fragmented codebase, and where you would expect in a well-designed piece of software that all locomotives should share the same simulation model (or at least each type: steam, diesel, and electric), TSW fragments the locomotives to their own simulation models. This is evident by the fact that DTG had to retroactively fix the physics model of GWE and CSX: HH once they had figured out how to properly model diesel traction in WSR. As a programmer, this is extremely alarming, and this is the point that I believe synthetic.angel is trying to make. If something similar were to happen, I don't know, three years into the future of TSW, where an issue is found that affects all signalling (I suspect this will happen once they start trying to merge routes together), all previously DLCs based on a fragmented codebase will have to be individually fixed. That is a big problem that will only be extrapolated by dealing with content made out-of-house. Instead, the software engineers should be spending more time communicating with the programmers about how to design the game's systems around a more central codebase. That way, if something is found to be broken with the adhesion model or with the weather or whatever, all it takes is an adjustment to the parent interface to inherently fix the issue in all dependant child methods.

It is a long-term maintainability concern. At least that is my interpretation of all of this.

Cheers,
Callum

 

Not really. If he is right about the 155 cut-out (which is probably the implementation on PS4 of a reasonable standard that protects your ears and your audio equipment), then I think that it is a bit grim that he is also saying that it is "bad luck" that nobody bothered to test it..... to check that the content complied. Presumably it is also "bad luck" that nobody bothered to test the Class 47 on XBox or PS4.

Not testing stuff is not "bad luck" - it's just total incompetence and disregard for the customer.

But... it's somehow good luck that both XBox and PS4 players have paid lots of £CA$H for their broken DLC content. So - good luck for the people that make DLCs (for now), but bad luck for anyone that buys them in a broken and never to be fixed state.

 

What you have described is just one aspect of my concerns with going to 3rd party now, without having a stable UI and/or a stable core (which I had doubted actually existed, except as copies in each DLC...., but given the Class 33 being disrupted by the new routine for ethanol loaders...., I have now changed my mind....).

NB: This link between the Class 33 and the ethanol loaders is just a guess of mine - if I am wrong... then I am happy to be corrected by the person(s) that might be thinking about fixing the two loading/refuelling bugs...., in the two respective DLCs...

What you have described is the very basic framework that needs to be solidly in place before letting the reins go.... Apart from everything else, DTG have presumably just burdened themselves with supporting the Editor, with their set of 3rd party partners. It's going to be impossible to manage this, based on the fact that they couldn't even get the DB BR 155 or the Class 47 to work.

There are too many cooks involved, where nobody yet knows the correct recipes, or what kitchen utensils or ingredients are needed to make the feast. Some of the cooks don't even know where the kitchen is, and nobody has any sense of taste... in order to test whether the food will be too salty, too hot, or just poisonous. And the guest list hasn't even be finalised - so nobody knows how much food needs to be made. Now is not the time to start the party.

My main concern is that what DTG have been doing with TSW is to provide a technology demonstrator, based on UE, for a small group of content franchisees - with the full intention of stepping back and becoming further detached from the content (and the bugs), and just collecting the tythe from the IP/branding.

I think that they fully expected that they could do this with UE. And I think there is a general fallacy at play, which is to believe that TSW will somehow seamlessly and easily replace Train Simulator - but it won't. Because it can't. Because UE isn't quite what they think it is - it offers the opportunity to make fantastic looking content, but it comes at a price - you have to very robustly triangle the developed content.

When content creators try to make scenarios with any amount of traffic.... (say three or more trains in any one area), or try to load up the world with more high res textures, and then try to force a good looking LoD on it, with lovely lighting effects... and they try to do this with 200mph bullet trains... then they are going to hit a really nasty brick wall. Quickly. And then they'll realise that they have to slice up the route - cutting it in half (say, like Oakville) - to get it out of the door, in a broken and inoperable state.

The worst thing is that as the quality nose-dives, PC customers will come to expect (and perhaps want) lower and lower standards, and the PS4 and XBox customers will just disappear.

TSW is not ready yet. Fix the basics first.

 

synthetic.angel Callum B.

You both make good and well reasoned points here about maintainability of the code base, and I agree it could be a long-term problem if not properly managed, but sometimes i wonder if the Train-Sim (the hobby as a whole, not any one particular title ) community suffers from a collective Stockholm Syndrome.

I'm including myself here, of course, because when i think of TSW (even acknowledging every bug, of which there are quite a few), it seems MILES ahead of its predecessors in the stability department. I boot it up on Xbox, and...it just works- no CTDs, no corrupted saves, no missing dependencies.

Now this isn't exactly a high bar, but the PC train sims i've played are some of the most unstable, shockingly poor quality software i've ever come across. The original MSTS and Auran Trainz are ancient history now, so i won't bore everyone with horror stories, but just a couple examples from TS20XX:

The version i bought (i THINK it was TS2017, but don't hold me to it) came bundled with the Pacific Surfliner route, which didn't particulary interest me, but somewhere down the line i installed a scenario pack for it on Steam Workshop from an author whose work i had enjoyed from other routes- figured i'd give it a try. TS immediately stopped working- talking insta CTD on loading ANY scenario on ANY route. So, i uninstalled the pack- same result. Uninstalled ALL workshop content- same result. Unistalled and reinstalled the entire game and all DLC.....SAME RESULT. After uninstalling and then re-installing every route one at a time, i finally discovered that just the mere fact of Pacific Surfliner being installed was causing the error. Once i uninstalled it, everything else worked just fine, and i was able to reproduce the error multiple times. So, that's an entire route that i paid for, that i never even got to load up, let alone play.

I've still never figured out the reason, and honestly don't even care anymore. Anytime an enticing TS add-on is released, i think about that example plus contemplate the literal HOURS of tinkering required to get acceptable lighting and wagon sounds, which are then undone every single time the title is updated, and i fire up TSW on Xbox instead and actually drive some trains.

I'm willing to listen, but it's hard for me to imagine anyone can convince me that building on the industry-standard UE platform could possibly be worse than that Frankenstein's monster of a code base (Kuju says hi from 2001!).

/rant

 

And you know what? RailWorks didn't used to be like that way back in 2011/2012, because it was in a similar situation to where TSW is today. And I think that's the crux of all of this: the fear of repeating history.
I wish I had all of the answers, but I don't. What I can say is that I hope DTG, with all of their expanded staff from the tiny RSC it used to be back then, will be able to make the right decisions from here on out.

 

That's not entirely correct either. In the first two screenshots, you can see that your GPU is maxed out and slowing things down. Of course the CPU is not maxed out in that kind of situation. The 4 thread screenshot shows a CPU bottleneck with CPU usage of only about 80% so there is some room for improvement but it's nowhere as significant as some people think.

 

That's true. I'll grab some new screenshots with more CPU dependency and update this post.

EDIT: I disabled hyperthreading on my CPU to simplify things a little bit and I think it demonstrates the point just as well. These screenshots were taken a couple miles north of San Jose looking down a straight mainline. The UE4 seems to be making handy use of the third core to push performance but from there on, the core usage is moreso spread out than increased.
(Also note my CPU turboing on the lower core counts, but this doesn't affect the data enough to worry about, really.)
1 core:

2 cores:

3 cores:

4 cores:

6 cores:


Just for funsies, here is what it looks like with all 12 threads:


You can see it's hugging that one thread there in the middle, despite having more opportunities to spread out. Whatever content pipeline that core is working on seems to be the bottleneck when it comes to multithreading. It appears that some of the other workloads were more successfully distributed.

 

Yeah,... I love this

Yeah....!!!!

 

This is a fair point- was out of the sim scene for quite a number of years, so didn't realize there was a "golden age" so to speak. My bad experiences with TS over the past few years were so similar to the ones from the MSTS days that i just assumed it was one unbroken line of the same old crap.

I'm so old-school i'm still blown away by dynamically generated road numbers- i remember when getting a loco pack with 5 different ones was luxurious! *cries*

 

I can't say if it was a golden age more than it was just simpler times. Simpler technology, simpler software structure, simpler locomotive features... a lot less hairy than where TSW finds itself today. Back then, there was no such thing as special locomotive scripting like you find in "Pro Range" DLC today, let alone a fragmented codebase where each locomotive was logically unique from all the others. That ol' game engine has been tugged and stretched beyond what Kuju themselves could have ever possibly fathomed back in 2007, though at a performance and stability cost.

 

Ok. I got it. You can see the GPU usage going up as you give it more CPU power but then it breaks because the parallelization can only go so far. While the resource monitor reports that TSW has 60 threads, most of them are for doing not very intensive tasks.

 

Here we go again. On Discord just this week Matt commented there are more console players of TSW than PC players. So why switch game plan and cater to the minority?

 

I like come on Ireland

 

You can pre-order at the Rivet site for the normal loco DLC price.

 

would explain why TSW hasnt gained anything but headbob in 12+ months - its a console game for DTG.(eg <30 mile routes)

I do wonder when TSW will die on PC - hopefully its coming soon, finally put the entire thing to rest :'D

 

And again many many times it has been stated that short routes are not a console restriction at all, purely time to build. Stick to TS2020 is the answer

 

The issue with short routes will forever go round and round in a never ending loop as far as DTG is concerned.

They have X amount of time to produce content, limiting their developing potential and only allowing them to build 30-40 mile routes.

Despite people wanting longer routes, I don’t think management care about this as they’re only interesting in churning out DLC after DLC. Regardless of length and quality.

This is why I fully accept third party developments, because they potentially don’t have these restrictions or policies from the higher ups.

 

One big reedeming feature to this issue would be DTG figuring out how to merge all those routes together. That would be fair to a certain degree. One way i imagine this is for them to make like joint maps, which basically brigde the gap between two dlc releases in the same country. Take for example Ruhr Sieg Nord and Rhein Ruhr Osten. Wouldn’t it be great if they offered a free third map that combines these two into one if you own both of them? Everything would be optional of course and you still could download any of the separate maps. Cheers

 

People like conspiracy theories and seem to not want to believe what they are told if it doesn't fit their rhetoric. It is the same with the editor, if they don't want to believe it is in development then it isn't in development.

 

Nice attitude, if you don't like it don't play it! I don't want the "entire thing put to rest"! I use a PC, I think the fact it is available on console is a positive move and as has been stated on numerous occassions, TSW being available on console has no effect on route length, it is down to development time.

 

Exactly right!

 

Agree with your analysis in general, but i think it's more a question of resources (time and financial) than desire.

I'm hoping that 3rd parties taking over a lot of the loco DLC will give DTG the time (and revenue) to be able to spend longer on the routes and only have to put out maybe 4 routes a year. They could then be longer and more detailed, with more variety in services. Continuing on, these new routes then provide new loco DLC opportunities for 3rd parties. Could be quite a virtuous circle, if managed properly. Further down the line you might have 3rd parties take on development of routes that require more local involvement and time on the ground (e.g. Japan, Brazil, etc) than DGT are able to afford.

 

Release date?

 

Release date is unknown, it might be announced on a DTG stream.

I expect it somewhere this or next week.

 

Ah finally . It looks fantastic, cant wait to drive down to that port.
I just hope we get a decent amount of Scenario´s and Services. And that it can be added to RSN at least in the future.

 

It might be for the next Thursday or the other one

 

I'm Hedging my bets on Thursday April 16th. Plus they have said that it is currently only on Main Spessart Bahn. Perhaps later it will; arrive on the other two German Routes.

Hentis

 

I hope that this locomotive will also appear in Ruhr-Sieg Nord route. It could be nice to bring some coal to nice power plant there.
And maybe it could be a reason to buy RRO and HRR DLCs. I skipped them.

 

Just put on youtube by Rivet Games

 

Thank you so much for this. Looks lovely . Cheers

 

You're welcome

 

Have to sit down that chair as soon as possible...
Great job Rivet Games!!!

 

Agreed it looks very well done I myself can't wait to sit down in the drivers seat too.

 

I am also looking forward.

But one thing... in the docks there is a scrapyard, a big storage area for logs. If there also was an Ea(n)os Gondola/Open car, one type of carriage could be used for carriing scrap and cut logs...

 

You really talk a load of rubbish TS20xx has been using the same engine its not new unlike TSW game engine is. Plus if you actually have nothing nice to say why do you bother coming on the forums?