Swiss Railways

Preface:

Hey everyone, today I would like to present you the work me and my team have done in the past few years. The project started in 2024 and our goal is to recreate a visually pleasing simulator based on Swiss Railways. However, during those two years of development we had to restart several times from the ground up until we reached satisfying looks.

First of all, even though I live in the french-speaking part of Switzerland, everyone must know that our german is usually terrible here so I will break the Röstigraben barrier by talking in English here. I know this is a german-speaking forum but I believe that the fact that the simulator is based in Switzerland could concern and interest a lot of people in this forum.

I must also say that the project is being built on the Roblox engine, and most people still have that vision of the childish platform with visually displeasing games, however I can assure you that it is in fact not the platform limiting us but is instead because too few developers try to take advantage of the engine to its full capabilities. Some people might also be scared of the blocky-looking avatars, we already have plans to replace them with semi-realistic human rigs.

The project:

As of now, the project is going steady and we can already show you progress on the first train we have been working on: the RBDe 560 Domino.

As for what's currently being worked on behind the scenes, we are finalising the motor/gearbox sounds and the physics logics are still being worked. I will send updates on this thread over time if this post gets attraction.

Zitat von Stelvio

...but why Roblox? There must have been way better options than that...

Historically, I learned how game development works from this platform. Programming is the same, we use luau and changing to another engine would mean a different programming language and thus having to completely change your working methods for every aspects. And the goal is also to prove people that they have a completely wrong view of the platform.

Of course there are better options, I might have forgotten to explain it in the first post but the goal of the project is also to make it multiplayer-friendly, this engine makes the game costless because you don't have to spend money on hosting servers and it simply remove all of the syncing issues you could face on Unity or another engine. Roblox is just more friendly for the small team that we are (3 developers in total) and moving to UE for better realism wouldn't be optimal for our team size.

Zitat von Stelvio

Not necessarily, Train Simulator uses Lua

Yep, you're right. But the Swiss scene is already quite present and Zinnia is already doing a great job at bringing new rolling stock to it. However what I dislike about TSC is that you're always limited in terms of movement and there's no multiplayer support.

The engine we're going for is just the most optimal choice for us, "enough" realism and multiplayer support being already implemented is ++