TSC Beta is Live

[jlms48]

We have a joke in New Zealand. How do you know when you have a plane load of poms? You can still hear the whine when you turn the engines off.

That quip about the £10 poms has been around for at least 40 years to my knowledge.I expect those Boeing 707 passengers and their children and grandchildren are mostly fully-fledged Kiwis and Aussies by now.

[AmericanSteam]

We have a joke in New Zealand. How do you know when you have a plane load of poms? You can still hear the whine when you turn the engines off.

That quip about the £10 poms has been around for at least 40 years to my knowledge.I expect those Boeing 707 passengers and their children and grandchildren are mostly fully-fledged Kiwis and Aussies by now.

Pomegranates I had to look that up.

[latimers]

I always thought the term "Pom" came from POME - Prisoners Of Mother England - i.e. the original convicts that were shipped to Australia.

[trev123]

We have a joke in New Zealand. How do you know when you have a plane load of poms? You can still hear the whine when you turn the engines off.

That quip about the £10 poms has been around for at least 40 years to my knowledge.I expect those Boeing 707 passengers and their children and grandchildren are mostly fully-fledged Kiwis and Aussies by now.

From the 1970s.

[mindenjohn]

Its good to see you colonial chappies enjoying yourself, you don't get many opportunities don't ya know.

[buzz456]

And delicious it is.

[Wellington]

...deleted

[buzz456]

I am just grateful that they are working on all of this. I believe it shows a commitment to the future for TSC.

[mindenjohn]

I am just grateful that they are working on all of this. I believe it shows a commitment to the future for TSC.

Me too and to the third party developers for their efforts.

[Chacal]

I've been gaming for more than 40 years. I've seen a lot of favourite games grow old and fall into disuse, and played only by a small group of enthusiasts. My dream scenario was always that the developer would suddenly share the nostalgia and revisit the game, correcting the flaws and modernizing it.

This year this happened twice: Cyan re-made Myst and is remaking Riven, and DTG is remaking TSC.

Can't complain.

DICE, if you're reading this, we need to talk about Battlefield 1942.

[Cardinal51]

The rumor has it there will be a fresh BETA today !

[Cardinal51]

Public Beta Build 76.2c

Source - https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/public-beta-build-76-2b.76989/

-quote-

Hello everyone, I'm posting this early so you have a chance to read this before the update rolls out at around 1pm UTC/GMT today. Please post your feedback relating only to the build version 76.2b here. If you wish to discuss things not relating to this beta, please use the other forums. Please ensure you specifically read the Important Note highlighted below.

What's Included/Changed

We've fundamentally fixed the last remaining issues relating to how TS allocates memory. The specifics of our latest work are:

- Support for 64-bit addressing in all custom heaps in the x64 build.
- Fix for assert in STL when decrementing an iterator at the beginning of a list.
- More reliable releasing of landscape textures.
- New launcher app to fix launching the same build (x32/x64/Dx12) on graphical or resolution change.
- Workaround for screen resolution drop down in settings dialogue running off screen - added an offset to move dropdown vertically to remain on screen.
- Mitigation for serialisation crash during texture load. The most common crash in build v75.6a.x64
- Code to prevent crash from the dispatcher upon freeing up the same node twice on routing failure.
- Added check for -1 pointer in ScriptGetConsistSpeed.
- Fix for crash in headlight destructor (5th most common crash in v75.8a.x64).
- Potential fix for a crash caused by a ray cast calculation going off the end of a vertex buffer, this was more common in scenario editing mode than drive.
- Mitigation for various crashes due to null pointers or use of uninitialized variables in Delta serialisation, Scenario Editor consist placement, loft building.
-Initialisation of the "Current Consist" to zero/null on startup so as to mitigate crash during signal script initialisation accessing current consist when it is undefined.
- Additional logging to aid debugging D3D error.

With this update, fundamentally, crashes pertaining to memory addressing and allocation are no longer likely, and crashes experienced from this point forward will either be those caused by your own hardware or software (i.e., Windows, Drivers, etc.) or are content related (i.e., corrupted assets, improperly compiled assets, etc.) and would be highly unlikely to be caused by TS itself. We’ll be looking into where we can improve crash prevention in the future for crashes relating to common content-related issues.

Restarting and Setting Resolution

Also, you'll note a couple of additional things we've implemented such as when you choose to restart the game when changing settings in game, you will now correctly be restarted into the same version you were in prior to the restart. So, if you were in 64-bit before requesting the restart, it will now correctly put you back in 64-bit on restart. Also, we've fixed the issue pertaining to the display resolutions supported by your GPU in that some cards would produce such a long list that it would be impossible to select the higher resolutions due to the list running off the bottom of the screen.

D3D Vertex Buffer Error

We've put in some additional logging to help us debug the common D3D "Vertex Buffer" error which is typically seen when task switching (AKA Alt-Tabbing) in full screen mode. This is a complex issue that has not been so easy to address.

Fundamentally, there are a number of situations that can result in the D3D error, but in general, these are all due to the D3D device being "lost" (basically your GPU disappears), and a failure in TSC to recover from this loss. In theory, the procedure to handle this situation is quite straightforward, the application receives a lost device error, frees up any D3D objects, then calls a device reset. Unfortunately, the device reset is failing, and the most common reason for this is that one or more D3D objects are not being released.

We have spent a significant amount of time debugging the creation and releasing of D3D objects within TSC, and yet have not been able to determine the cause of the device reset failure, and hence implement a fix. There is a chance that some objects within third party plugins are not be being freed up correctly, which is slowing down the debugging further since we don't have source code for those. We are continuing to investigate this as a matter of priority.

Important Note

You will need to have dotNet 6 or higher installed for this build. Steam should ask you to install this before you run the beta but, just in case it doesn't, you can find the download for the latest dotNet version on Microsoft's site at https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download

You can check which version you have installed by opening Windows Explorer and navigating to 'C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework'. Each version installed should have its own folder.

Alpha Testers Wanted

We’re looking to bring onboard some more testers to help with future alpha builds, particularly as we’re now moving on to the most exciting part of this phase which is all to do with improving the overall performance.

If you’d like to apply to become a tester, please contact me directly by Direct Message and provide the following:

What your current play time in Train Simulator is (you can find this in Steam).
Why you feel you would make a good tester.
Your current PC spec.
A contact email address.

We’d love to take everyone but, places are limited and we cannot accept applications from anyone under the age of 18 for legal reasons as you’ll be required to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (which will require you to provide your full name and home address - we'll request this if you're successful).

Ideally, we’d like a good cross section of players to join us so whether you’re new to Train Simulator or have been around for a while, have an old PC or a state-of-the-art one – if you think you can spare a few hours every now and then to help us test cutting edge builds of the software, and can generally get on well with others who may have differing viewpoints to your own, please get in touch.

You’ll be required to set up a testing environment which will require some free disk space (around 10 GB + space for whatever content you want to copy over from your main install) as the test environment is kept completely separate from your existing install. No experience is necessary as guidance will be given as you participate. Familiarity with Discord and/or live conversation methods would be preferred since all our communication is done via an internal Discord channel.

For your participation, you’ll not only have the chance to play with the latest Train Simulator builds before anyone else does but there are also additional perks to enjoy ;)

Look forward to hearing from you. Final selections will be made in the New Year and, if successful, you'll be notified directly.

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[AmericanSteam]

Installed and ran the new beta version 76.2c and updated to Microsoft .net8 this morning. Reset frame rate limits from 30 to 60 and noticed much better frame rates. Noticed better utilization of my discrete GPU. Scenarios that were in the teens went to 30-60. Did not notice any stuttering, Ran smooth and no crashes.
One issue that shows up and will be corrected soon is the workshop published tab is not populated, however the workshop subscribed is.
I would suggest that one read the release notes first before installing. An updated .net6 or higher is required to be installed to use this version.
Read through all of the posts in this thread to review all the noted issues and to help provide context.

[Cardinal51]

Public Beta Build 76.3a

Source - https://forums.dovetailgames.com/threads/public-beta-build-76-3a.76989/#post-765970

-quote-

Additional changes noted below:

- dotNet runtime version targetted at 4.7.2 to support app launcher which handles the restart issue when restarting from in-game.
- Steam pipe redistributables updated to auto-install the correct version of dotNet runtime.
- Fixed issue relating to missing UI file responsible for handling display resolutions.

Additional download size is approx 5 MB.

-end quote-