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(Image: DOVETAIL GAMES)

Trains, what are they good for? Absolutely nothing, most of the time. I'm not going to lie, as someone who jumps on a packed locomotive five days a week, the idea that I might spend my free time attempting to drive. Wait, do you 'drive' trains? We'll return to that later.

Anyway, the idea I might use what precious little time I do have to effectively jump back into a world of trains and the various systems involved to run them, to me, seems bonkers.

But, importantly, I'm not everyone. I'm also not a Harry Potter fan, and as I noted while leaving Kings Cross Station in London one evening - where I had been to see Train Sim World ahead of launch - there was a HUGE line of people at 9pm waiting patiently to get a picture of the famous 9 and three-quarters wall.

The point is, everyone has their interests and for some people, that is trains.

Now as someone with little knowledge of trains or train games, I'm not going to even begin to try and act like some all-knowing seer.

Chances are, if you're googling and stumbled on this story and have even the faintest whiff of an interest in trains, you already know more than me.

So what I am going to say is this. I've seen a LOT of Train Sim World and my initial impression was, by god, doesn't this look so much more pretty when you've not got your face squished against the doors.

But equally, it would seem as though a huge amount of work has gone into creating something remarkably lifelike.

If I wanted, I could buy a track day in a supercar, but the only way I'm getting behind a train anytime soon is with a game like this. And if you're one of those people, maybe someone who already loves model trains, but has always secretly wanted to get behind the controls of a train, this couldn't be more perfect.

Fascinated by trains, chances are you'll love this game and probably pay significantly less - even with DLC - than owning a huge model railway set.

And that's where I'm going to leave my impressions because as mentioned, I'm not a train guy. However, for those of you die-hard train fans, keep reading as we've got a great Q&A with Matt Peddlesden, Senior Producer for Train Sim World at Dovetail Games.

In our short time, we cover everything from the work that goes into making a game like Train Sim World, how they choose which real-life tracks to release as DLC and the status of some features that fans have been requesting for quite a few months; namely, creation tools and multiplayer.

Can players hypothetically use Train Sim World to learn how to become a real conductor?

Train Sim World is designed first and foremost as an entertainment simulation - so while a great deal of aspects of trains and their operations are simulated very realistically, it hasn't been built with the kind of absolute testing and other factors that would be crucial for training real drivers. Simulations that power the real driver training simulations undergo a massive amount of testing and cost in the order of millions to ensure that a driver coming out of a training programme is going to be in the best place to be a safe and efficient driver.

For the uninitiated, can you underpin what the difference is between Train Simulator and Train Sim World?

There are a number of key areas that distinguish between the two simulations:

1. First Person Simulation

In TSW you can now get out of your seat and walk around, get off the train or walk around it. You can interact with controls on and off the train and even walk up to things in the map and interact with those such as point levers. This provides a new way to explore the world and to enjoy trains, whether you're driving them, riding on them as a passenger or simply watching them go by from your favourite trainspotting locations. We have also added a series of collectable objects on each route which encourage players to explore on foot and find them all. Walking around on a platform and even using stairs and bridges, or underpasses in some cases, to get between platforms provides quite an interesting and new experience for the player and can also provide some new vantage points to see the trains going about their business.

2. SimuGraph - Train Physics

TSW has an entirely new simulation system internally that we have called SimuGraph. This controls all the power and braking physics in the trains at a great level of detail, we model down to individual components such as diesel engines, fuel tanks, various types of valves and many more components, which are then wired together in a visual system (image of the Class 66 attached for an example). We can then measure the performance of trains by attaching watch points and see exactly what air pressure is at a particular point in the system, or what voltage is going in to a traction motor, and then match that up to how we'd expect the real world counterparts to work. We can also attach sounds and other visual cues to what is going on within SimuGraph which overall provides a much more realistic experience across the board.

3. Service Mode

While TSW still continues to provide "mission" style gameplay via its Scenarios, we have added a new mode which recreates an entire 24 hour timetable of train movements. The player is able to pick any of those services to drive or simply spawn in to the world on foot at one of the selectable locations and at any time of day they like and the world will simply jump to where it should be at that time and move on around them. Once in the world, whether driving or walking, the player can still choose what they want to do - for example, I'll drive to a location and then decide I'd rather drive that train sitting in another platform, so I get out, release this train to the computer to drive and then I'll go take over that other train. Another example, I could opt to be a passenger to get from one station to another where I decide to then pick up a train and drive it. It's a really open environment where trains will go about their business and as a player I know I can watch any of it or drive any of it, or even just go along for the ride.

Train Sim World (PS4)

Train Sim World (PS4)

Will all efforts now be put into TSW over Train Simulator so work isn¹t split over two titles?

We are very much still creating add-ons for Train Simulator with a completely separate internal team, as well as working with 3rd parties to produce and publish content for it as well, Train Simulator is still very widely used by the community and they continue to request a wide range of new content for it while we build out the range on Train Sim World as well.

Is the plan to release all existing DLC for Train Sim World that's currently available on PC onto the PS4 and Xbox release? Or will PC still be the ultimate place to play for train enthusiasts?

The overall plan is to deliver all of our add-on content for TSW to all platforms though it's likely there will be some delay from the PC launch to console releases. We have recently launched West Somerset Railway for TSW and have also announced the upcoming Ruhr Sieg Nord route and both of these will be making their way to the Xbox One and PS4 console platforms at some point.

Is there anything from this console launch that's going to benefit your existing and passionate PC player base? If not necessarily cross-platform support, but a way in which this might help with future development, bug fixes etc.

The most significant improvement for PC players is that getting the game working on the console platforms has required us to dig really deep in to the underlying performance of the game and optimise it significantly. We have gone through all parts of the game and made some quite big changes to improve multi-threading and other changes so that the same content that runs on PC should run on the consoles. The big benefit there is that our framerates on PC have gone up substantially as we've been making these improvements.

Does a renewed focus in console also mean that you'll be splitting development for PC? Will we see a significantly better product on PC with better graphics/lighting/textures and a more simplified release for PS4/Xbox?

Our fundamental goal is to keep one team focused on one Train Sim World and then optimise for each platform. By getting the Level of Detail settings right and tuning dynamically via settings we can ensure that those who have low end PC's are also able to benefit from some of the optimisations that let Xbox and PS4 players run the game at a good framerate while still aiming to deliver a better visual experience on the PC. We do want to keep the overall gameplay experience identical on all platforms however and have spent considerable time ensuring that the controller is able to drive all the trains that are in the game and those which are coming in the future.

Could you give us an idea into how much work goes into a single piece of DLC or one line. I heard you had a guy who had to walk a line in the game to test something and that took 9 hours.

Creating a route is a large process! We send one or two people out to the route to do a photo survey, which usually results in a few thousand photographs being taken - not just the normal shots you might expect but lots of detail shots such as pointing directly down at platforms or just showing brickwork used in walls for example. We then use a variety of reference sources such as anything that we can get from the operator, any reference which is publicly available on the Internet, satellite imagery such as Google Earth and so forth in order to map out what tracks go where, where signals are and what types they are and what the scenery looks like down the route. We then identify where the really important key buildings and areas are that people will want to connect directly with and the overall architecture and styling of the route. Our 3D art team then begin creating all the 3D buildings and other assets needed, while the route builders start putting down foliage, ground texturing and placing the 3D assets around the route. We have another team specifically working on creating the track for the trains run on and placing and configuring all the signals. There's a mammoth amount of work required to get the right level of detail and then to ensure it all works when you run a train over it.

The guy walking the line for 9 hours wasn't actually a test, that was a player who was trying to find all the collectables on one of our routes, it took him 9 hours and he walked the route 3 times carefully trying to hunt down 100 collectables!

And how do you decide which routes to select for DLC? What considerations are made on where to focus new content?

There are a wide range of factors considered when we look at routes to make.

What are customers asking for? We always want to see what people are asking for and even if we can't deliver the specific routes they want, if there are general themes of "high speed" for example then we can factor that into our considerations.

We look at what the technology of the sim is good at vs what it is currently not so good at, there's little point making a route that won't give a good experience - so where we find things like that we mark up other tasks for our core engineering team to improve those areas of the sim so that we can come back to those routes later.

What route styles have we done and what haven't we done? We want to create a range for our players to enjoy so it's important we don't release just a long string of commuter lines without considering freight or shunting for example.

What are the trains that players want to drive? We can look at the routes that would allow them to enjoy those trains.

What do we have licenses for, what could we get licenses for? A route without trains isn't much fun, so we need to ensure that whatever routes we pick we can fill with a good range of licensed trains to run on it. For example, a route may be a good option in principal but we could only deliver a one type of train then the overall experience isn't going to be as good. Again, as with tech, as we identify these options we engage our licensing team to start trying to negotiate for these missing licenses so that at a later date we can reconsider these route options.

What routes would work even better with the new tech like Service Mode and First Person? - routes that allow people more variety of what they can do are going to be really popular so we try to consider this in the process as well.

Have the team ever considered adding VR support? Given what we've seen it would appear the perfect setup based on what we¹ve seen of the gameplay. If not, whats standing in the way of a VR release.

Virtual Reality is a really cool technology and it's absolutely perfectly suited to the seated experience of driving a train. We've done some prototyping in the past and confirmed that overall it works really well however at this point in time we're focusing on the traditional experience and making sure we deliver that really well for players. We're a relatively small team so we need to be quite focused on making sure we're delivering content and features that the majority of our players are so keenly seeking from the sim, VR is definitely on our wish list but it's not actually made it to a road map yet.

A question for long-term fans: What¹s the plan currently with regards to content creation tools for TSW. Is the plan to still release a route editor and will we see any of these tools come to the console release eventually?

Content editing tools are definitely coming for TSW - we don't have a release date planned for them yet as we have some technical issues to work through to make sure that they will be able to do the things that we know our creator community want to be doing with them. We are planning on talking to the community as soon as possible to tell them more about the plans and what they can expect. The tools are based on the Unreal Engine 4 Editor and anyone wanting to get a head start should really go ahead and download the UE4 editor from unrealengine.com and start learning how it works so that when our tools come you'll already have a head start. The UE4 Editor doesn't work on consoles, so the full content creation experience will be for the PC community, but we are keeping console owners in mind as well and working out what we can do there perhaps for the future.

As above, but any news on multiplayer? We noticed fans have been requesting it for some time...

Not yet, the overwhelming feedback from our players is about broadening the range of routes and trains available to engage more peoples interests and to advance and improve the feature and game modes of the single player experience that provides the core of the game. We are still really keen to get Multiplayer in the game though and have put a lot of thought into how it will work ready for when we think it's the right time.

Dare I ask, but would you ever consider releasing on Switch? In a years time could I be playing Train Sim World on the train to work?

It's not on our plans at the moment, but never say never, it's a fantastic platform that would also really suit the gameplay style of TSW.