johnrossetti wrote:I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but I guess, working backwards, they have two target slots in 2016, September or December.
Which means if UE4TS is going to have routes with it and a route takes 3 to 6 months "someone" is working on routes now.
I can't though see how that is possible unless the simulator itself is finished, in which case simple teaser routes would have been made to prove the software. The problem DTS has is that with so many forums (read opinions) ANY picture/video released will generate a torrent of comments, good & bad, so I think they are right to leave everyone guessing and no judgements made and MUCH anticipation.
The simulator doesn't yet have to be FINISHED. Just sufficiently finished for someone to be able to kind of use the route-editor, and make some sort of test-drives.
But there can still be lots of bugs in the route editor. Incomplete support for signals and signal scripts. Saving of routes obviously needs to be done, but saving of scenarios doesn't yet need to work until later, when they start doing scenarios for the routes, and then the first internal working version can still be bugged out of hell and back.
Physics doesn't need to be done yet (although I would expect that to be quite well along the way earlier rather than later
) - you can build a route if you don't yet have working train physics.
The driver UI and cab doesn't need to work yet either.
Also, a world editor that they use internally doesn't have to be of the same level of quality and usability as one that will be released for the wider public.
And so I could go on and on with parts of the sim that do not yet need to be there, while route building can be well underway already.
Still for a release somewhere later in this year, I would expect that most parts are starting to come together now and they'd be in the stages of bug hunting, performance tuning, implementing minor requirements, etc.
And if they're not yet in those stages, a release would more likely be some time next year.
I bet that some people are getting a lot of fun out of reading threads like these, with all our blind speculations, while they already know more and better because they are either working on the sim or (beta)testing it!
Cheers,
--Tim