Atomic Systems

J1o2h3n4 wrote:I'll re-ask the question again :- just prior to the update, I D/L some of KeithMRoss's scenarios for the WCML and WCML_Shap.But - the only place I can find mention of these is Main menu>profile>workshop.On the old menu system, once you found and highlighted the scenario in question. It would load up and run.Then I used to be able to find those same scenario's in the Routes or Vehicle selection menus.But on this new system, albeit I've found mention of them, highlighting them does nothing. Ive searched the Routes/Vehicle menus and still cannot find them.So what am I not doing?

On my rig, I also can't directly play workshop downloaded scenarios from profile/workshop as there's no Play button. What happens on my system is that workshop scenarios are loaded into their route folders, and are accessible/driveable from Drive/Standard/route just like any other scenario. I subscribed to a workshop scenario a short while ago and it did the same. Hardly convenient, but better than nothing I suppose. I haven't checked what happens when I hit unsubscribe yet, I'm building up to it.

Andym

So we have our annual Kuju engine dress-up event where Dovetail tinker with an antiquated engine that should have been retired a decade ago. This continues despite the fact that almost all of their download content packs have silly non game stopping but highly "annoying-to-customer" bugs, in addition to their own inhouse contents pack generally being percieved as of being lower quality than content released by third party developers.

Rather than pampering to their marketing department requests to implement essentially trivial upgrades to the simulation so they can re-market the game every year to keep attracting new customers, what about your existing customers who have and continue to spend a good deal of their hard earned cash on the download content which must be your main revenue income stream??? Some said something about common sense and wrong priorities? I agree! A free update to TS2015 does not make up for hundreds of pounds many on this forum have spent on DLC for this simulator on Steam with almost everyone of the content packages having issues such as woeful sound and/or bugs. It simply is not good enough Dovetail. It points to miss-placed management priorites and a non functioning testing department (no track joint sounds in donner pass how was this missed???) Perhapes we expect too much of the simulation however Dovetail need to understand when a customer has spent £300 / £400 on software we demand the very best quality that can be achieved and 3rd party content has shown us that Dovetail consistantly fall short in this regard.

It really is no mystery as to why critisim of Dovetail can become quite heated on not just this forum but everywhere else you go be it another forum or social media.

The old kuju engine reached the limit of what can be done with it a long time ago - Dovetail need to leave it well alone now and use the time more constructively. Customers are aware of the limitations of the game engine and are prepared to live with it. It looks OK, good enough to last until the next generation is released. We do need the DLC content bug fixed and brought up to the latest standards though as it is not the game engine thats spoils the simulator. We dont need a new version of TS every year - you have no real competitiors. What else is a new customer going to buy? The huge amount of availble content for TS2014 almost guarantees new customers will purchase it regardless whether or not is is TS2013, 2014 or 2022. However when they start buying more DLC packs on Steam this is when they may begin to regret their original purchase choice.

With the announcement of the next gen TS this even more the case, I suspect Dovetail would like all current customers to move over to the next gen when it is released? Well they need to concentrate more on looking after current customers and not trying to attract new ones. Customers do not want a new menu system when the old one sufficied and especially so when there are numerous DLC content packs they have purchased requiring attention to resolve things like woeful sound, levers and controls that do not work properly (if at all) or not as they do in the prototype.

It is only the fact that there is no real competitor to challange Dovetail at the moment that they are surviving and we put up with the poor quality control. There must be others out their looking for a slice of Train Sim revenue pie so I think Dovetail need to change their priorities if they are to survive becuase customer service I am told is the key to an organisations survival (so I have been told by all my past and current employers.)

I do think Dovetail are trying up to a certain point but I dont think it is enough. They need to get this frankly embarressing issues with the DLC sorted out.

As for my first impression of 2015. I loaded up a scenario I have been working on for some time on SECML route. Due to the variety of stock and number of services I have running I appeared to have reached an upper memory limit. I can only guess as I do not get a memory warning in the game, just a crash to desktop and un unhelpful generic error. In TS2014 I could reliably drive my loco into the platform at Waverly pickup and then get as far as 1/4 accross the Forth Road bridge before crash to desktop. Tested same scenario twice yesterday and I cant even get to Haymarket now. That is my first impressions of TS2015.

msmith4000 wrote:As for my first impression of 2015. I loaded up a scenario I have been working on for some time on SECML route. Due to the variety of stock and number of services I have running I appeared to have reached an upper memory limit. I can only guess as I do not get a memory warning in the game, just a crash to desktop and un unhelpful generic error. In TS2014 I could reliably drive my loco into the platform at Waverly pickup and then get as far as 1/4 accross the Forth Road bridge before crash to desktop. Tested same scenario twice yesterday and I cant even get to Haymarket now. That is my first impressions of TS2015.

May I ask what your system specs are and what settings you are running the game on?

Regards,

Hi all,
I'm sure that the moderators are getting a bit sick on the posts about TS 2015, but the more info we have the better we can make a decision whether to update or stay with TS 2014. After reading all the comments made so far I think I may stay with TS 2014 because there seems to be more negatives than positives. I think DTG have just tried to make TS 2015 look different instead of rectifying all the bugs and making more of an effort to increase the performance of the game.
Having spent quite a bit of money on upgrading my system and at last all my routes/scenario's run at an acceptable level I don't want to risk going back to square one. But the only drawback if I stay with TS 2014 is I will no longer be able to obtain any new DLC because the base game will update as well.

I would like to see Steam give users the option to update or not, then users who stay with TS 2014 can still obtain further DLC when required.
I have made a complete backup of my Steam folder if I need it but I still would like (me) to make the decision regarding upgrading and not Steam for the reasons stated above.

Regards.
Pete.

msmith4000 wrote:So we have our annual Kuju engine dress-up event where Dovetail tinker with an antiquated engine that should have been retired a decade ago. This continues despite the fact that almost all of their download content packs have silly non game stopping but highly "annoying-to-customer" bugs, in addition to their own inhouse contents pack generally being percieved as of being lower quality than content released by third party developers.

Rather than pampering to their marketing department requests to implement essentially trivial upgrades to the simulation so they can re-market the game every year to keep attracting new customers, what about your existing customers who have and continue to spend a good deal of their hard earned cash on the download content which must be your main revenue income stream??? Some said something about common sense and wrong priorities? I agree! A free update to TS2015 does not make up for hundreds of pounds many on this forum have spent on DLC for this simulator on Steam with almost everyone of the content packages having issues such as woeful sound and/or bugs. It simply is not good enough Dovetail. It points to miss-placed management priorites and a non functioning testing department (no track joint sounds in donner pass how was this missed???) Perhapes we expect too much of the simulation however Dovetail need to understand when a customer has spent £300 / £400 on software we demand the very best quality that can be achieved and 3rd party content has shown us that Dovetail consistantly fall short in this regard.

It really is no mystery as to why critisim of Dovetail can become quite heated on not just this forum but everywhere else you go be it another forum or social media.

The old kuju engine reached the limit of what can be done with it a long time ago - Dovetail need to leave it well alone now and use the time more constructively. Customers are aware of the limitations of the game engine and are prepared to live with it. It looks OK, good enough to last until the next generation is released. We do need the DLC content bug fixed and brought up to the latest standards though as it is not the game engine thats spoils the simulator. We dont need a new version of TS every year - you have no real competitiors. What else is a new customer going to buy? The huge amount of availble content for TS2014 almost guarantees new customers will purchase it regardless whether or not is is TS2013, 2014 or 2022. However when they start buying more DLC packs on Steam this is when they may begin to regret their original purchase choice.

With the announcement of the next gen TS this even more the case, I suspect Dovetail would like all current customers to move over to the next gen when it is released? Well they need to concentrate more on looking after current customers and not trying to attract new ones. Customers do not want a new menu system when the old one sufficied and especially so when there are numerous DLC content packs they have purchased requiring attention to resolve things like woeful sound, levers and controls that do not work properly (if at all) or not as they do in the prototype.

It is only the fact that there is no real competitor to challange Dovetail at the moment that they are surviving and we put up with the poor quality control. There must be others out their looking for a slice of Train Sim revenue pie so I think Dovetail need to change their priorities if they are to survive becuase customer service I am told is the key to an organisations survival (so I have been told by all my past and current employers.)

I do think Dovetail are trying up to a certain point but I dont think it is enough. They need to get this frankly embarressing issues with the DLC sorted out.

As for my first impression of 2015. I loaded up a scenario I have been working on for some time on SECML route. Due to the variety of stock and number of services I have running I appeared to have reached an upper memory limit. I can only guess as I do not get a memory warning in the game, just a crash to desktop and un unhelpful generic error. In TS2014 I could reliably drive my loco into the platform at Waverly pickup and then get as far as 1/4 accross the Forth Road bridge before crash to desktop. Tested same scenario twice yesterday and I cant even get to Haymarket now. That is my first impressions of TS2015.

I agree with the above comments and believe they are mostly correct. I do not post on here very often and have given up my Route Building and even using the game. This is mostly because I have loads of DLC with faults that have never been fixed and with no real defaults anymore Route Building is virtually impossible for me at my age. I am unable to take in new stuff and constant changes. Also being retired and on a limited income I will not pay for a DLC with only one livery. I have remained loyal to RSC DTG since the very first incarnation of the game as Rail Simulator but not anymore. From what I have read in this topic I will not be moving on to TS-2015.
Kind regards James

msmith4000 wrote:So we have our annual Kuju engine dress-up event where Dovetail tinker with an antiquated engine that should have been retired a decade ago. This continues despite the fact that almost all of their download content packs have silly non game stopping but highly "annoying-to-customer" bugs, in addition to their own inhouse contents pack generally being percieved as of being lower quality than content released by third party developers.

Rather than pampering to their marketing department requests to implement essentially trivial upgrades to the simulation so they can re-market the game every year to keep attracting new customers, what about your existing customers who have and continue to spend a good deal of their hard earned cash on the download content which must be your main revenue income stream??? Some said something about common sense and wrong priorities? I agree! A free update to TS2015 does not make up for hundreds of pounds many on this forum have spent on DLC for this simulator on Steam with almost everyone of the content packages having issues such as woeful sound and/or bugs. It simply is not good enough Dovetail. It points to miss-placed management priorites and a non functioning testing department (no track joint sounds in donner pass how was this missed???) Perhapes we expect too much of the simulation however Dovetail need to understand when a customer has spent £300 / £400 on software we demand the very best quality that can be achieved and 3rd party content has shown us that Dovetail consistantly fall short in this regard.

It really is no mystery as to why critisim of Dovetail can become quite heated on not just this forum but everywhere else you go be it another forum or social media.

The old kuju engine reached the limit of what can be done with it a long time ago - Dovetail need to leave it well alone now and use the time more constructively. Customers are aware of the limitations of the game engine and are prepared to live with it. It looks OK, good enough to last until the next generation is released. We do need the DLC content bug fixed and brought up to the latest standards though as it is not the game engine thats spoils the simulator. We dont need a new version of TS every year - you have no real competitiors. What else is a new customer going to buy? The huge amount of availble content for TS2014 almost guarantees new customers will purchase it regardless whether or not is is TS2013, 2014 or 2022. However when they start buying more DLC packs on Steam this is when they may begin to regret their original purchase choice.

With the announcement of the next gen TS this even more the case, I suspect Dovetail would like all current customers to move over to the next gen when it is released? Well they need to concentrate more on looking after current customers and not trying to attract new ones. Customers do not want a new menu system when the old one sufficied and especially so when there are numerous DLC content packs they have purchased requiring attention to resolve things like woeful sound, levers and controls that do not work properly (if at all) or not as they do in the prototype.

It is only the fact that there is no real competitor to challange Dovetail at the moment that they are surviving and we put up with the poor quality control. There must be others out their looking for a slice of Train Sim revenue pie so I think Dovetail need to change their priorities if they are to survive becuase customer service I am told is the key to an organisations survival (so I have been told by all my past and current employers.)

I do think Dovetail are trying up to a certain point but I dont think it is enough. They need to get this frankly embarressing issues with the DLC sorted out.

As for my first impression of 2015. I loaded up a scenario I have been working on for some time on SECML route. Due to the variety of stock and number of services I have running I appeared to have reached an upper memory limit. I can only guess as I do not get a memory warning in the game, just a crash to desktop and un unhelpful generic error. In TS2014 I could reliably drive my loco into the platform at Waverly pickup and then get as far as 1/4 accross the Forth Road bridge before crash to desktop. Tested same scenario twice yesterday and I cant even get to Haymarket now. That is my first impressions of TS2015.

Very well said. Bravo!

Agree also. Unreal Engine TS won't change anything either. It will be horse blinder business as usual with more eye candy and buzzwords.

I don't know how many on here look in the Steam Community forums, but Matt has posted a fix for the update seeming to hang indefinitely. I had this issue last night and today, followed his instructions and now have a fully working install again.

Hi,

I've experienced this problem on my personal laptop at home and i've been able to resolve the issue - but I still have no idea what causes it. Hopefully it will help some of you.

This solution applies to those of you that have Steam stuck saying the download is at some percent complete downloading but refuses to go any further no matter what you do. If this does not describe your problem then I doubt these steps will help you.

Please note that these are not official steps for Steam and it requires you to know how to use Windows Explorer (the file browser, not the web browser) and a text editor such as Notepad, if you are not confident with such things then please do not attempt these steps.

----

It appears that some how Steam is getting to where it fails to validate one or two depots and this aborts the whole download process.

1. Shut down the steam client.
2. Look in your steam log files, find content_log.txt and review it. See if you find one or two specific depot id's that report something along the lines of not being able to get a validation on.

For example, a line like this:

[2014-09-17 01:48:31] HTTP (CS,100) - valve18.cs.steampowered.com (valve18.cs.steampowered.com): AuthenticateDepotID (24012) - ERROR: Failed to get AppOwnershipTicket from Steam

Means that it's failing to validate 24012.

Once you've worked out what the failing depot id's are (email them to support@dovetailgames.com please!) you can tell Steam not to bother with them.

3. In your SteamApps folder, you'll find "appmanifest_24010.acf" - open this in notepad and be careful what you do in this file just to make sure it stays "good".

You're looking for a line similar to this:

"24021" "6558406753873641691"

(where in my example "24021" is replaced with the depot id you're searching for - ignore the big number on the right.

4. When you find that line, REMOVE IT entirely (including the big number) so that the list has no gaps or formatting differences etc.
5. Save the file, restart Steam.

----

This cured it on my laptop and once steam was restarted it resumed download and finished quickly.

I hope to have a better (and more easy to understand) answer from Steam soon, but in the mean time hopefully this will get some of you experiencing this problem back up and running.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Matt.
Dovetail Games.

I had to work through this a couple of times to knock out the ID's that were causing the hang, but it did work for me.

Martin

Is it possible to not go onto TS2015 and cling onto TS2014? I've been Steam 'offline' since release day. From all the hassle it sounds, I do not want the so called improvements thank you very much. I simply don't think my computer will be able to cope with more RAM, memory requirements as it often crashes in TS2014. Any advice would be much appreciated.

I think this about version 2015 and any version here after. When msts came out it was wow then one began to see what and where things did match up to real life, but it was a game or a sim but still just that. Then rail simulator and all the RW and then back to rail sim and all the different people in control etc.

Where I think it’s gone all wrong is changing basic routes for a start, this meant at least if a free route came out and the person said you need only the standard routes for it to work the yippie it did.

Now we need to check this and that and then you find out that a scenario won’t load because of a certain wagon type you don’t have grrrrrrr. Still that’s small compared to real life things like the terrain maybe that would be the jaw dropping thing better cuttings and embankments, signals as an ex train driver having worked at OOC, Hither Green, Orpington, I can say there are many simple things that won’t affect how fast the sim runs or what frame rate etc but they are the things that every school girl and boy know, yes those little things are the key, yes I know people and business don’t mix to good but I think if you acted on those thing the small ones then those big changes like having to upgrade your hardware etc or maybe forking a few extra quid for a bit of DLC would seem worth it. Railways have a huge interest nowadays as they always have, so those small things do not go unnoticed; by the way I’m not a rivet counter either.

An example then I’ve said my five pence (pennys) worth as a ex driver I wonder if those of you who never been up the front going through a real tunnel like the seven tunnel, just how annoying it is having the cab light on, and by the way its black in that tunnel, I expect something like Totley tunnel is just as bad or how close the walls get or bridges. It’s the mix of realism and what a sim can do.

So for me it has become a game and not a sim with the game aspect added

It's O.T. but: TrainZ: A New Era is "coming soon".
Could be a chock and open some eyes

...and when I wrote on Sunday or Monday that I feared the worst everyone was laughing and saying that they "had never encountered any problem during any of the TS upgrades".

I am not surprised, but still have to wonder... how can someone build a menu system that vast majority of people don't like at first sight? You can argue about this and that, but at least the font used on the scenario listing page is terrible. It is terrible and I can imagine it may be very hard to read for people with bad eye sight. How can they release it like that? (((( And why do we have trouble listing all the 3rd party routes using filters? They are not yours, DTG, so I understand you don't care, but still - is this how you fight your competition?

Another thing is the clouds, they kill performance a lot. I am now on my laptop only, but I think that even my rig won't be able to handle them or at least the performance will simply be a lot worse so I'll end up turning it off. They don't look very good anyway and they flicker at times when they touch mountains.

I also notice increased level of micro stuttering when using MSAA (4x or 8x) compared to TS2014. Looks to be OK with FXAA or SSAA, hopefully my main PC will be OK (I use SSAA there). They also changed the color of the blue haze: the more distant horizon's blue is brighter than before and it does not look very natural (BTW no-one has been complaining about that yet, do you get this too?)

On the other hand, the simulation looks more fluid and if I don't choose MSAA where I get the micro stutters, I get less stuttering due to HDD loading tiles. But I need to drive on more routes first to be sure if I am not just imagining things.

The menu is driving me batty. When I go into the Drive menu and go to Career or Standard, if I click on the route tile and select one it only shows the DTG scenarios. The third-party ones only show up if I click on the loco tile and select one of them. I'd like to find the designers, testers and manager who signed this off and shake them all warmly by the throat!

Grrr! Bunch of numpties.

Keith

Let me say straightaway that I , in no way, intend to criticise in any shape or form DTG. I am sure that they have worked hard to improve the game and we should all be very grateful for that and for the free upgrade.

I'm sure that many people really appreciate the the new cloud effects. They probably come into their own on the "big sky" US routes like Sherman Hill etc. I am sure that many people enjoy looking at the new clouds, although I prefer to drive from the cab or from close up outside view , where I can admire the scenery, but I rarely look up at the sky.

I am intrigued by reports that, in the world editor , you are now able to resize scenery objects. This should be great for that station canopy etc , that doesn't quite fit your track layout on a route.

I have found that the colour shading seems more vivid than TS2014 and actually more vivid than in real life in my view. To me it also appears to now have a blue tinge. I have read that turning off the dynamic clouds cures this, but I did not notice any difference.

However the real problem for me is the menu. The scenario listings are printed in light grey on a lighter gray background, which seems designed to be difficult to read. The search facility seems erratic. You have to scroll through the scenario listings to find anything ( that is once you have figured out how to achieve this).

I appreciate that DTG are aware of the menu problem from their answer to complaints on the Steam forums. Perhaps they will fix it ?

However, I have just gone back to my full backed up copy of TS2014 (offline) and what a refreshing change ! You can actually see, search and navigate through the menu with ease. When playing the same scenario just recently played in TS15, I see no detriment in the graphics and a more realistic colour rendering.

I'm sure that many people see TS15 as a great improvement. That's fine for them, but for now I'll be doing most of my driving on TS2014.

Well the scenarios I have loaded all look and run fine, but the menu is a pig's ear, which seems to do it's own thing. I still have not found my Creative rail ECML and most of my standard scenarios for all routes are missing. I would really like DTG to accept they have made a boo boo and put the old menu back and the access to all rolling stock and scenarios. I know this is unlikely, but I can wish.

All the best, Richard.