Over the past month we have taken the opportunity to look at what has worked and what hasn't with the Train Sim World 2 Roadmap.

Its primary purpose is to help give players insight into what the various teams at Dovetail Games are working on. The benefit in providing this insight is that it gives answers to many player questions that come up, while also giving as clear an indication of what's not being worked on. The oft-used phrase "if it's not on the Roadmap, we're not working on it" may be a little frustrating to experience but it also leaves no room for ambiguity. Clearly listing what is and is not being developed allows us to have more speculative discussions about our future aims without inferring that they're in active development.

This approach covers upcoming core feature changes, new routes and locos, improvements to Add-Ons we have already released, and bug fixes. Fundamentally, it's everything a player wants to know - except the expected release dates.

For the past two months however this approach has become increasingly unreliable, and the last Roadmap update was more inaccurate than we're comfortable with in regard to what was scheduled for the next release. The list of items we were expecting in that list (you can read it for yourself here) was significantly different to the update that was released (here are the patch notes).

The Roadmap itself was accurate with regard to what was in development, but the listing of the different stages each item should have been in was wrong. To avoid this happening again we've taken the decision to design Roadmap 2.0 (which possibly sounds a little too grand.) This new version of the Roadmap will cover the routes and Add-Ons that are currently in development, the work of the Preservation Team, and major projects underway on the simulation. Individual fixes and improvements will only be listed when they are included within a patch. We'll discuss this in more depth in the Roadmap livestream today on Railfan TV.

Since we're reworking the Roadmap we won't provide the full list today. Everything that was on the list last time is still present, but we want to make doubly certain that we're presenting an accurate, reliable picture. We don't want to leave you with nothing new however, so to illustrate the approach we'll be taking here is around half the list of items the Preservation Crew are tackling for the Long Island Railroad.

Everything on this list runs through the process of being investigated, entering development, testing and release. We start by attempting to reproduce and identify the cause of a reported problem. If this is achieved is there a fix that can be applied? If so, the fix or improvement is then developed before being tested. The test does not only check that the problem has been solved, but that it doesn't then cause a problem elsewhere. Assuming there is no issue here we'll then schedule the fix for inclusion in a patch. To ensure that our patch sizes don't become massive we aim to target a few routes at a time since any change, no matter how small, to a route requires a multi-gigabyte file download. This is then multiplied by each route included in a patch.

Under future Roadmap updates the list above, which is not everything under investigation by the Preserved Crew for LIRR, would be grouped where appropriate. For example we might list [Improvement] Update to passenger spawning and behaviour on the roadmap itself, then provide the granular details when changes are released. We'll also include larger improvement projects such as Passenger Information Screens or platform access that have a larger impact overall.

We're changing the level of detail in the Roadmap in order to make it easier to read and remember. We're also reducing the number of items that are less certain. As always we want to be accurate as much as possible, so we want to limit the items that have a lower level of guarantee about them. This doesn't mean the work isn't taking place, rather that we'd sooner talk about granular fixes when we have greater confidence that they'll be completed.

Join us today, Tuesday 9th February at 20:00 UTC, on Twitch or YouTube where Adam and Sam will be discussing this update and answering your questions.