Auran in trouble

[Euphod]

"As I have noted many times before here, the developement capital that we as hardcore Trainz fans generate is subsistence developement. In establishing it's foothold in the market, management wanted to act as much as possible on the feedback it received, and often tried to expand beyond what the revenues afforded."


Yeah, that and there's no "E" after "P" in "Development". Rob continues this mistake throughout his post, and I'm convinced even then he was trying to tell us something.....in code yet!

Just like Paul died ages ago and was replaced by a doppelganger so the Beatles could go on, Rob is trying to tell us the future of Trainz in his cryptic and often nonsensical missive. Notice he places the wayward "E" in "Development" a total of four times.

That's the clue; four "e"...foure....FURY! Get it? I've spent months pouring over all of Rob's, Alan's and Lance's posts (well....okay....maybe not so much Lance's)......and I inserted the information into a database, collated and cross referenced certain key words, and transcribed everything into Latin. You may be interested to know that when you combine the posts made here since June 6th of 2006, posted by members of the Auran Staff, if you transcribe them in reverse and translate them into the original Latin, you get a road map of sorts detailing the future of Trainz.

Or it's just complete gibberish and I've wasted untold hours.

More than likely....the latter.

Ed

 

[amigacooke]

"As I have noted many times before here, the developement capital that we as hardcore Trainz fans generate is subsistence developement. In establishing it's foothold in the market, management wanted to act as much as possible on the feedback it received, and often tried to expand beyond what the revenues afforded."


Yeah, that and there's no "E" after "P" in "Development". Rob continues this mistake throughout his post, and I'm convinced even then he was trying to tell us something.....in code yet!

Just like Paul died ages ago and was replaced by a doppelganger so the Beatles could go on, Rob is trying to tell us the future of Trainz in his cryptic and often nonsensical missive. Notice he places the wayward "E" in "Development" a total of four times.

That's the clue; four "e"...foure....FURY! Get it? I've spent months pouring over all of Rob's, Alan's and Lance's posts (well....okay....maybe not so much Lance's)......and I inserted the information into a database, collated and cross referenced certain key words, and transcribed everything into Latin. You may be interested to know that when you combine the posts made here since June 6th of 2006, posted by members of the Auran Staff, if you transcribe them in reverse and translate them into the original Latin, you get a road map of sorts detailing the future of Trainz.

Or it's just complete gibberish and I've wasted untold hours.

More than likely....the latter.

Ed

Well I wouldn't doubt your expertise on complete gibberish.

 

[Shortline2]

Thanks Ed, love your last post.

Made a big big smile on my face, and made the whole day way better.

Glad to see I'm not alone in possible waste lot of hours on something - but hey, it is fun, so maybe it is not a total waste after all. LOL

Whatever it is, I have Trainz, in many versions, and if time let me have more versions, great - if not, well I still have lot of fun with what I have.

So, for each day I can spend playing & working with what I have, I have countless hours of fun wasted time I could have done more productive works on - not!
If I didn't spend time with Trainz stuff, I would spend it with other just as wasted in some sense stuff.

So, let us all enjoy life, it is short enough, and Ed, I still love you as always - it is so great to meet you from time to time.

Best wishes from a crazy Viking, I mean, Norwegian... LOL

Linda

 

[Mr.Jingles]

I've been away from the forums for a while, but allow me to throw in my opinion .

I could say "I told you that would happen", but I don't want to put too much salt in auran's wounds (Fury averaging a 3 out of 10 score on almost all major game review sites, with an average user score of 2 out of 10).

Don't get me wrong but that just was 15 wasted million dollars and 3 wasted years.
Think about which awesome Trainz we could have by now if that amount of time and money would have been spent into auran's leading franchise (Trainz).

Sure a developer has to try something new from time to time but failing so badly in doing so, that's just .. I'm lost for the correct words here, but I hope you get my point.

Anyways, back to real work now, development gurus !
We want to see a brand new, vastly improved Trainz by the end of 2008 / 2009 .

EDIT : Just saw that fury is now offered completely for free.
I've never seen a "pay 10 $ per month to play online" game drop to "it's free forever" that fast.
Gave me a damn good laugh, even if that may sound macabre to you.
I can't imagine how the beta testers or those who bought it might feel :hehe:.
Still I have absolutely no intentions of even considering a download.

All the best,
Mr.Jingles

 

[Lo_Poly]

We want to see a brand new, vastly improved Trainz by the end of 2008 / 2009 .

As much as I hate to say this, it will more than likely be the same thing, just with a new GUI, some new content, a few new features, a few broken features, and nothing else.

I say this because I believe it to be the trend. The last several releases of Trainz have been like that. I am not sure whether it's from a lack of resources, just plain laziness, or the saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it", but look at all the stuff that got broken in Classics!

 

[Mr.Jingles]

As much as I hate to say this, it will more than likely be the same thing, just with a new GUI, some new content, a few new features, a few broken features, and nothing else.

I say this because I believe it to be the trend. The last several releases of Trainz have been like that. I am not sure whether it's from a lack of resources, just plain laziness, or the saying "If it ain't broke don't fix it", but look at all the stuff that got broken in Classics!

Classics ? Hmm .. classics .. *shrugs* .. classics .. That should ring a bell ..
Aah, the bugged so called "map packs" :hehe: well, that's another story.

Classics didn't interest me AT ALL either, that's just a few maps and even more bugs that are being sold as some kind of "revolutionary new product line", announced as "being improved over time with new features".
Marketing, all marketing.
I'm waiting for a real succeeder to TRS2006, not some map packs, but a whole new game engine with features taken into account that are being (and have been) requested by us long time community members who always stood behind auran (until a certain point).

That's what I meant with "We want to see a brand new, vastly improved Trainz by the end of 2008 / 2009".

Best Regards
Mr.Jingles

 

[aardvark1]

To Mr.Jingles and Lo_Poly

What bugs are in Classics?

Out of the box, it (Classics) works well, and does exactly what it was designed to do.

The fact that people are trying to make Classics into TRS2006 Plus by importing broken content should not be viewed as .."bugs".

With the limited human resources available to the Trainz Team at Auran...please try not to hold your breath too long waiting for the revolutionary changes that you seem to need.

With respect to the comment by Mr.Jingles about the $15 million wasted...it's called "business"...some make it...some do not.

If Auran were to use the $15 million on Trainz.... for the 3000+ active users shown at the bottom of the forum opening page, that would be about $5000 investment per active user...now that would be viewed as corporate insanity.

Yes, I understand that there are more people using Trainz than the 3000+ active forum members...I just used that number as a point of reference.

***sigh***

 

[Lo_Poly]

What bugs are in Classics?

Out of the box, it (Classics) works well, and does exactly what it was designed to do.

The fact that people are trying to make Classics into TRS2006 Plus by importing broken content should not be viewed as .."bugs".

With the limited human resources available to the Trainz Team at Auran...please try not to hold your breath too long waiting for the revolutionary changes that you seem to need.

With respect to the comment by Mr.Jingles about the $15 million wasted...it's called "business"...some make it...some do not.

If Auran were to use the $15 million on Trainz.... for the 3000+ active users shown at the bottom of the forum opening page, that would be about $5000 investment per active user...now that would be viewed as corporate insanity.

Yes, I understand that there are more people using Trainz than the 3000+ active forum members...I just used that number as a point of reference.

***sigh***

Well let me get started.

Classics isn't that bad. A lot of nonsense has been fixed with CMP, that's a given, but it's still very, very far from perfect.

As for Trainz itself, the sky being broken is one, unlike previous TRS releases, if it tries to load a faulty asset while caching a large area it is likely to crash (but not all the time). I remember in TRS2006, while there would likely be some unwanted behavior, it wouldn't die on me if it loaded a faulty asset. I'm not sure if this is present in other versions but in OpenGL, everything flickers like Christmas lights at night. But, this is not a thread to list every bug known!

I really would like Auran to try and make a truly good release in 2008, because MSTS2 is coming out. No one can say what MSTS2 will be like, but you usually want to be prepared (?). Auran did nothing about the Kuju Rail Sim release (?), but Trainz still trumped it.

"Ignoring" new releases... either the Trainz dev team is very smart, or they like to gamble.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[sura]

This topic shot well over the target.

1. I think business inside Auran is NOT our business. We may not influence reasonable economic decisions.
2. FURY and Trainz are 2 different games. As far i know from news circulating in the Trainz-Community, TrainzClassic development is running after schedule.
3. Do not be that proud to announce bad news as first person. You do not have the possibility for control and maybe the news you want to share in express-mode causes financial losses to the subject of the news. Are you ready to pay the bill of those financial losses? If not, stay silent.

Cheers:
Sura

 

[Mike10]

Auran did nothing about the Kuju Rail Sim release (?), but Trainz still trumped it.

"Ignoring" new releases... either the Trainz dev team is very smart, or they like to gamble.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

With respect, you have no idea what they did or did not do. None of us have really. OK, they didn't release a super-duper KRS killer version but maybe they evaluated KRS and decided they didn't need to do anything.

Mike.

 

[Mike10]

1. I think business inside Auran is NOT our business. We may not influence reasonable economic decisions.

Exactly! (and I said as much elsewhere already).

We are customers, we can tell them if we like it or not, and they may or may not take that into account. What we can't do is directly influence every single decision Auran take.

Mike.

 

[JCitron]

Exactly! (and I said as much elsewhere already).

We are customers, we can tell them if we like it or not, and they may or may not take that into account. What we can't do is directly influence every single decision Auran take.

Mike.

I agree too, Mike.

We should go about our business as usual, and let Auran sort out the mess they're in right now. I've been through the rough times they're in, and it's extremely stressful and heartbreaking on the employees. My company went from 150 people to around 12 over the past 8 years, and working in IT made it worse because I had to revisit the user accounts afterwards to clean-up mail and data. Anyway, we managed to survive without going belly-up, but it was a tough road to follow.

John

 

[paulhobbs]

As for Trainz itself, the sky being broken is one, unlike previous TRS releases, if it tries to load a faulty asset while caching a large area it is likely to crash (but not all the time). I remember in TRS2006, while there would likely be some unwanted behavior, it wouldn't die on me if it loaded a faulty asset. I'm not sure if this is present in other versions but in OpenGL, everything flickers like Christmas lights at night. But, this is not a thread to list every bug known!

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

You are wrong (not about the sky being broken, but that's hardly a show stopper). Loading faulty assets into TC is asking for trouble - all of the work arounds for faulty assets that were put into TRS2006 were removed in TC. This had the result of dramatically improving the frame rates which (judging by quite a few posts here and probably some from you but I can't be bothered to look) was something that the customers wanted to see.

You can hardly complain that faulty assets fail to work correctly in TC when you have CMP and CCP to help you correct them. Also Auran didn't make the faulty assets, we did.

Paul

 

[Mike10]

unlike previous TRS releases, if it tries to load a faulty asset while caching a large area it is likely to crash (but not all the time).

The simple answer is to not use faulty assets then isn't it

Really, I'm trying hard not to swear but a lot of the posts on here today are somewhat trying to say the least.

Mike.

 

[sura]

Good evening,

Really, I'm trying hard not to swear but a lot of the posts on here today are somewhat trying to say the least.

Mike, you are right i feel the same.

There are some economic evidences and rules which are adviceable to keep, like do not feel yourself being main stakeholder of the presidency if you buy a single game. if you do not believe me, test this behaviour on the Royal Dutch Shell after buying petrol regularly at the petrol station. Give them advices, which part of the company should be sold or which oilfield should be bought. I wonder if you get an urged answer...

Cheers

 

[amigacooke]

It does seem that there are those who are just simply not paying attention.

To develop a new code rail simulator takes resources that Auran clearly do not have.

 

[Magicland]

You are wrong (not about the sky being broken, but that's hardly a show stopper).

I guess that's really an individual point of view. I happen to like to have my skies working properly in products I pay for.

You can hardly complain that faulty assets fail to work correctly in TC when you have CMP and CCP to help you correct them. Also Auran didn't make the faulty assets, we did.
Paul

Umm, not really. Auran made a LOT of the faulty assets, and then coded TRS2006 so that it would show them as not faulty. Granted, many, many more were created by 3rd parties, and then the Trainz code was changed to make them faulty.

 

[Lo_Poly]

I guess that's really an individual point of view. I happen to like to have my skies working properly in products I pay for.

Me too. And as Rob said, every release of Trainz has broken something from the previous. That's just.... no.

Umm, not really. Auran made a LOT of the faulty assets, and then coded TRS2006 so that it would show them as not faulty. Granted, many, many more were created by 3rd parties, and then the Trainz code was changed to make them faulty.

Conspiracy??

And it's the same in Classics. If you commit all the built-in assets you'll find they're filled with errors.