Thinking of making a free route to be released on the UK train sim website.

[Trainsim]

Based on GWR in the days of steam. Wondering if anyone can offer me any help in making the route. It will probably be fictional but undecided. Would most likely need assets made to include in the route etc. All those who do help will of course be acknowledged when it is released.
Thanks in advance

[Warwick Rail]

You cannot do that. If you release a route on the Steam Workshop it must only use existing assets available via Steam in the Train Simulator Steam Store. You would be wasting your time creating any special assets, as you would be unable to publish the route.

[Trainsim]

but i could publish the route on the uk train sim website

[Warwick Rail]

Correct

[Glenn]

Here is a copy of an e-mail that I got some time ago, from Matt Peddlesden:

Hi

Sorry to hear about the challenges you're having distributing your route.

We have provided the full developer suite with tools so that everyone has the same tool set we use, to do everything that we can do. It's clear that you've worked hard to understand these tools and produce custom content, which is really great to hear.

Our Steam Workshop integration only stores the content of the "Content" folder on the Steam servers, it won't save the Assets folder. There are a number of reasons for this but the primary one is that if we permitted the Assets folder to be saved to Steam then there would be nothing stopping anyone from taking externally produced routes from other publishers and illegally publishing them on Steam. By limiting the routes to only those that use assets contained on Steam-published routes, this problem is eliminated. We absolutely would not create an environment that allows for piracy and as Workshop is effectively community coordinated (through voting and reporting) it has no pre-approval.

Our Workshop integration was intended for the majority of users who are not familiar with (perhaps not even aware of the possibility) creating their own assets - indeed there are relatively few people with the skills to do this. It allows distributing routes that are created using only the in-game tools and is therefore an "easy" environment for creators and players of all levels.

For those creators who take it to the next level and start creating their own assets, there are a couple of options.

If the assets you're creating are relatively generic and re-usable, you could look at publishing them as a scenery asset pack product on our Marketplace for a low price such as 50p or £1 - we can discuss pricing. Your route would then no longer have custom assets and would be suitable for Marketplace, and indeed others would be able to use your assets in their routes on Workshop also.

Another option might be to look at publishing the whole route on Marketplace again for a very low price (again, we can discuss pricing) - people would still need to own the other required dlc packs but you would then be able to produce any custom assets you wish.

The final option is to consider publishing the route as a third party developer through our partner programme as full DLC. In this case we'd need to work with you to eliminate the dependencies on other products so that your route has no dependencies at all (we'd be able to share source for all those assets you've used as part of the partner programme so you wouldn't have to make them all yourself!).

Drop me an email, [e-mail], and we can discuss the options for distributing your work to the widest community.

Matt Peddlesden
Head of Third Party