ZecMurphy
Community Assistant
maybe people at Auran should go to bed at night with a recording on and continuely listen to the complaints of the people who are buying your product keeping you in a job and your families feed and just maybe it might sink in ?
This one actually made me laugh... Sorry, but it does.
Being the helpdesk, you wouldn't believe how BAD it can make you feel knowing that you will have trouble with sorting an issue out for a customer. In fact, just having to leave it a day whilst awaiting the Trainz team to investigate is bad enough to me, let alone having to leave it longer to focus on 'faster' tickets (yes, this does happen, so as to be able to spend more time on it eventually).
Believe me, if we were forced to do this, it's likely that there would be no Trainz team. Generally, putting negative in, gives negative results (seen this in friends many times). On the other hand, providing constructive comments (such as telling is the specific issues you see) is a positive method, which will generally give a positive result.
In regards to service packs... I think 90% of the games I own have at least one patch/service pack. The reason? Games have to be released eventually, so as to bring in some income to pay for the work to create said game (remember, the Trainz team are paid, they aren't volunteers!). After this, we work to fix bugs that we either couldn't fix before release (especially if it's a bug that is discovered after release), or that we didn't feel was important as another bug that was fixed.
Granted, this does mean you need to update. However, this also means that we can make improvements as we go (for example, in some updates, we improved the code for maps, to help improve performance; we also added a new material for models in TS2009 SP1; etc). They aren't all about fixing 'bugs'. If I remember right, the patches for the add-on packs (S&C, Murchison 2, Classic Cabon City, and Treez) added new items for some of the packs, as well as fixing some conflicts. At the same time, the traffic was updated to function under TS2010 (not actually a bug, since they were designed for TS2009, but an upgrade to allow them to function in a newer software).
Of course, we could just not provide service packs, and save all fixes for the next edition of Trainz. However, I don't think there would be very many that would be happy with this...
As to faulty assets out of the box, there was a known bug (note, was found after release of SP2) that caused this after patching to service pack 2. There's also a sticky in the TS2010 forum outlining how to fix this. SP3 also made improvements to prevent this. TS2010 itself should not show any faulty assets in Content Manager if you haven't attempted to modify any built-in items, except in the above situation.