To be fair - I don't believe I've ever heard DTG blame consoles for route size - their usual restriction "reason" is development time.
Matt was complaining about the XBOX Series S on the WCML Euston - Milton Keynes route live stream again last week. I can't give you the exact time stamp, but it's getting to be a regular thing with him, as soon as someone asks an awkward question in the live chat.
that tends to be about memory and concurrent variations of trains on the route (timetables and layers) - more than route length.
Black Ops 6 + TSW 5 are going to do numbers on storage, man. I only have 10 games on my internal drive (XSX) and that includes smaller games like Minecraft and RDR1. - and that's with about 40 on my external drive, many of which can only run on the internal drive. Only Microsoft to blame, though. It's a modern gaming console, it should have enough space for modern games.
Standalone loco DLCs have been uncoupled to a "home" route since TSW3...but locos included with route DLCs has never been a thing and was never planned to be.
Actually I think I was being quite complimentary of the Series S - it's the gen8 consoles that have been giving this years routes heartburn (as always), Series S actually runs them well and i'm not seeing any memory issues there at all. Route length is limited primarily by the time required to make it. While in theory there is a practical limit to how much route you could make, because all the track is loaded in ram all the time, actually track doesn't take *that* much ram up. The business of the timetable accounts for more of that and the variety of trains loaded at once is bigger. Whether the route is 10 miles or 1000 miles though, the same amount of route scenery is loaded at any given time regardless. The practical limit on route lengths is much more about the time to make them. Worth also noting that a loco on your storage doesnt take that much room up really - its a small percentage of the total package size, its almost all the route itself. I appreciate it's a growing issue but I don't see any change coming on that front going forwards, new content simply takes up new space. Matt.
Matt....I think the primary concern with many is the requirement to redownload every DLC annually with each release. Has the idea of releasing small patch files to the Pak files to make them "TSW5 compatible" and the ability to import them in been considered? I appreciate it's way too late in the game for TSW5, but maybe for future releases as this 'issue' is only getting worse each year
Looks like a new hard drive next year for me then. They aren’t cheap as well I’ve had a look at some…. It’s either that or delete this for that and swap that out for this which is going to get annoying. That’s not even mentioning other games too… I think it’s about time consoles come with plenty of memory. Games are growing in size pretty fast now… It will be interesting to see what the PS5 Pro has memory wise. Absolutely disgusting if its the typical 650gb even 1TB isn’t THAT much space nowadays. It’s just not enough. Just a way for Sony / Microsoft to get you to spend more money. You pay a fortune as it is for the console itself plus your games…. The cheek.
It's not really viable - you can't just "make it compatible". The whole thing is re-cooked and packed from source and the nature of the shipping binaries is that they don't patch well, and it's even worse if even a small change is made to an internal structure (which often happens) as that can quite dramatically change the layout inside the pak file, rendering the patch file basically as big as the original. You can't do it with a batch file because even if PC's could - console's can't, and afaik they don't offer any mechanism to copy DLC files from one game to another. If it's a new game, it's gotta have all new DLC, and I say this with a tear in my eye because the amount of work this creates for us is enormous. If we can find a solution, you bet yourself we will employ it. For Xbox this year, we re-recooked everything, every single DLC package, so that it had all the new audio formats. So even if this had been an in-place upgrade, it'd have been an unavoidable full download. Matt.
Thanks for the insight Matt....its definitely more of a complexity than I realised. It looks like I need faster internet to make this annual download a little less painful
To be fair, if I needed more space, I just delete routes off my hard drive and redownload them when I want to play on them again. They're only a couple of GB so it doesn't take that long for the download
Only joined the DTG express train with TSW3 (on PC), no TSW4 until the recent PS5 offer of $25 for the TSW4 special edition, a great deal imo. But since I mainly roll with Steam and more recently classic DMU stock I only have limited routes installed on PS5, those which are Steam & DMU friendly. Also I don't use the HUD except where required for scenarios, so that means I can only handle learning a few routes at a time. A hard-wired route & space limiting feature. Very happy about the opportunity to pickup the TSW5 starter pack for free, but I hope the PS5 configuration will just let me download a few TSW4 routes initially, with the remainder, space permitting as needed, in the leadup to TSW6
