Atomic Systems

I started this post as a reply to the “DTG Woodhead BR Blue Era” thread but realised it’s a more “general purpose” kind of post…

If you’re a person who is familiar with a route, then you’re more sensitive to inaccuracies. When the route I’ve commuted on was available in TS, I noticed stuff that disappointed me. That’s not to say it’s a bad route at all, but I noticed stuff that’s not quite right.

Consider people employed on railways or pilots and racing car drivers.
You have a group of people acutely sensitive to the inaccuracies present in the route/train, aeroplane or car being simulated.

So, yes anything wrong is going to stick out like a sore thumb to people in that kind of group.

On the flip side, you have cost.

DTG charged £18 for the “DTG Woodhead BR Blue Era” route and three locos, I won’t include wagons or carriages because they tend to be copies of existing stock.

Now think about flight sims.

Lockheed Martin produce Prepar3d - MS Flight Sim updated.
A bargain at $60 for academic or $200 for a “Pro” license.
PMDG produce “study sim” quality aeroplanes for Prepard3d. The “base” version of a 747-400 is $135.
So far, I haven’t added on scenery.

My point is that accuracy costs, and the more complex a system, the more it costs.
£18 for a route and 3 locos isn’t bad and some inaccuracies should be expected.

Where I think there should be better improvements in the DTG TS ecosystem is fixing routes.
Take the original Woodhead route. A great route but missing Glossop. A small thing, but annoying as it’s a mile or so long section that would not have been a huge amount of effort to do.

What I’d love to see is a way to submit changes/additions to DTG for routes, up to and including custom assets that could then get approved and deployed to everyone as an update via Steam. With at least a credit and a key for the author to choose the DTG product of their choice.

That way, the TS ecosystem benefits and the inaccuracies are reduced over time. Rivet counters love it because they have input to correct inaccuracies.
DTG benefit by being able to proclaim that their routes are the mutts nuts.
Everyone else benefits from a better TS experience.

What do you think?

J0hnG wrote:What I’d love to see is a way to submit changes/additions to DTG for routes

The Workshop would be a good starting point; OK I believe you can't include any custom assets with such an offering but there's nothing to prevent those being hosted elsewhere--doesn't the Suburban Glasgow route work that way?
Granted that's not an official upgrade and wouldn't be an automatic one, but there's a case to be made for keeping such (mainly) cosmetic changes optional.

To get official recognition of an *improvement* to any route, any item of DLC, you'd need to enter a dialogue with DTG through their support channel--probably not an easy experience but there have been instances of users working with DTG to improve things (I'm sure the door fix for the class 156 came via that route)

There is however a flip side, scenery fixes are all well and good, they likely have no real impact upon the scenarios. However track/signals changes are more significant problems, any change of those two could well cripple various workshop scenarios, or worse break those included with the route. Therefore any such changes would need to undergo extensive testing to make sure non of that happens. I'm sure someone who has spent many hours working on a scenario, or worse another developer working on loco expansion to a route, or perhaps one who has one already released, wakes up one morning to find an update has broken their scenarios and they are going to have to spend a significant time to redo them all, would probably be pretty angry. I know I would be truly livid if that happened. So a lot of time (and money) would have to be expended in testing any update to make sure nothing has broken, and potentially fix what has broken.

A sort of work around is to duplicate and include both the original route to preserve existing content, and then include the fixed one, but that would increase the size of the download and likely just cause massive confusion for all involved.

kindest regards

Edward

metrobus wrote:I'm sure someone who has spent many hours working on a scenario, or worse another developer working on loco expansion to a route, or perhaps one who has one already released, wakes up one morning to find an update has broken their scenarios and they are going to have to spend a significant time to redo them all,

Granted, but surely DTG can't guarantee that any 3rd party additions (route or stock) will work after any official change to an item of DLC? I take your point that any proposed upgrade to a route offered by such a system John has outlined would need extensively testing, but only so far as to ensure that officially supplied stock/scenarios worked just as intended.

Depends on the definition of 3rd party, sure workshop stuff would take lower priority but it is still kind of important since for some people, workshop stuff gives them a fair portion of the enjoyment to a route or loco for example. But official third party stuff released on steam, that is another matter and I'm fairly certain that DTG would not do anything which could potentially disrupt their products.

regards

Edward

I think it's a good idea, but the community created improvements would have to be vetted, tested and released by DTG. Whether they would want to do that is anybody's guess. They would have to exist as an optional extension to the product so that if anybody didn't want to upgrade they weren't forced to, but yes, an annual (say) update using community provided improvements could be to everyone's benefit.

IronBidder wrote:They would have to exist as an optional extension to the product so that if anybody didn't want to upgrade they weren't forced to,

Once again...Steam Workshop

From the 2017 User Guide

Once a Workshop Route is made publicly available, it cannot be modified: should the author
wish to extend or change it, they must issue it as a new version. This means that scenario
authors have a known stable base on which to create their content.

Nicely ensuring that not only is the original *improvement* to a route optional, so are any subsequent improvements to the improvement.

IronBidder wrote:community created improvements would have to be vetted, tested and released by DTG

Definitely, but they shouldn't be marketed as a "community" *fix* but as official, DTG, releases. That then brings the issue of whether any such improvements should be subject to any NDA stipulation during development.

gptech wrote:

Once a Workshop Route is made publicly available, it cannot be modified: should the author
wish to extend or change it, they must issue it as a new version. This means that scenario
authors have a known stable base on which to create their content.

Nicely ensuring that not only is the original *improvement* to a route optional, so are any subsequent improvements to the improvement.

That one should be once a workshop route has been made *final* - I have a few routes that I can still update that have been made publicly available

danny3 wrote:That one should be once a workshop route has been made *final*

Yeah, it doesn't help that the word "publish" has two different meanings...

Click Publish to begin upload to the Steam Workshop.
There is a delay between the route being published and it appearing on the Workshop. This is
Steam making the content available world-wide. Once it available, it enters a 'preliminary' state,
where it can be seen in Workshop but scenarios based on it cannot be published. This is to
enable final modifications based on initial feedback from subscribers.

and then ....

To fully publish the route, return to the Workshop screen, select the route, and click on Make
Final. This will do two things:
 Enable scenarios based on the route to be published.
 Disable any further changes to the route.

So....there's "publish", and there's *publish*....