Can Auran Make Trainz for XBOX 360?

[overkill650]

I was playing xbox before, and i downloaded an indie game, which was "Model Railroad builder 1.0" or something. it was ok, but had like PS2 graphics.

from playing games i have, like forza 4, battlefield 3, and gta iv, its understood that the xbox's system can handle alot. so why not make Trainz 12 or the next for xbox?

its guaranteed that auran will make a crapload on this one, as about 40 million people have xbox 360.

please consider this auran. it would be sooo much more simpler and convenient to play trainz on xbox. plus, the multiplayer would work great

 

[BLACKWATCH]

The xbox is a console, not a computer, I doubt very much that it would be capable of using 'Surveyor' & building a virtual world.
The only thing the xbox would be able to do, is play predefined scenarios.

 

[aardvark1]

Posted from the old peoples home....

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showpost.php?p=649468&postcount=10

We evaluated this a long time ago (back in the early XBOX days) and decided against it. I'm not entirely sure of the final reasoning, but the two obvious ones that spring to mind now are:

* The XBOX didn't have much RAM. The 360 is better in this regard, although still very limited compared to a PC. The result is that we could probably do some very nice looking content, but not much of it at once.

* It would be an expensive task. For a small company like N3V, we'd come close to betting the farm on the success of a console version. If the console version wasn't successful, or if the success of the console version came at the expense of the PC version, the company might fail.

kind regards,

chris

Hope this helps.

Regards,

 

[NikkiA]

The rules for Xbox live content pretty much preclude anything like the DLS, so if they were to make a Xbox 360 version, it'd end up being very very similar to the iPad/Android versions - very limited, but a fun little diversion for 30 minutes. It'd be a little better in graphics perhaps, but not as much better as you think (the Xbox 360 is roughly equivalent to a 2006 era ATI graphics card, BUT is far less accepting of unoptimised graphics).

And while the REALLY big developers can get MS to relax the rules for them, bear in mind that Valve couldn't get them to - which is why the '360 version of TF2 is years behind the PC version.

Besides all that, it'd be really and truly awful on a 360 controller, the iPad/Android version get away with a touch interface, but kinect wouldn't be even remotely accurate enough for trainz, and the controller would be awful for it.

 

[overkill650]

The xbox is a console, not a computer, I doubt very much that it would be capable of using 'Surveyor' & building a virtual world.
The only thing the xbox would be able to do, is play predefined scenarios.

well, actually they xbox is yes a console, but which is a computer, only optimized for gaming.

i see what you guys are saying. is there a way we can use the xbox 360 controller on the pc for trainz. i just fell i can go soo much quicker with a controller (certain buttons could be shortcuts, you wouldnt have to hold down the control key to rotate the camera, etc.).

as for aardvark1, hey man im sorry for what i said. i apoligise. i was very "down in the dumps" that day, and was getting angry on here and xbox.

id appreciate if you could accept my apology, and i hope we can move on from here with positive relations. hope you're doing good and have a good day.

 

[NikkiA]

well, actually they xbox is yes a console, but which is a computer, only optimized for gaming.

It is a computer in a broad sense, but it is a very different programming environment to an average PC - yes, XNA makes it a lot more like PC development, but there are still huge differences, and XNA does not allow you to produce high quality games, just the smallish xbox live stuff.

The processor in the xbox 360 is a triple core PPC, that has NO support for out-of-order execution, which means that unless you're an experienced developer, you have no chance of getting performance equivalent to same-speed PCs.

The graphics chip is ATI based, but has some major differences to PC video cards - most notably that a good chunk of the video ram (10MB) is dedicated to anti-aliasing and shader programming.

At the end of the day, it still only has 512MB that has to be shared between the CPU and the GPU, does trainz 2006 even run on a 512MB PC with on-board graphics? Anything newer certainly won't. There won't be enough 'graphics' memory to handle high-resolution textured assets, 2048x2048 textures that occupy a dozen MB or more each is fine on PC graphics cards, but not in a tiny environment like the xbox.

Again, it would be a very very limited product if they were to make it, you'd be looking at trainz 2006 level graphics - without any hi-res 3rd party locomotives - and no way to have a DLS, so you'd be stuck with 'Trainz iPad' like built-in content. And while that is 'ok' on a small handheld device, it wouldn't do well on a 40" TV.

 

[aardvark1]

well, actually they xbox is yes a console, but which is a computer, only optimized for gaming.

i see what you guys are saying. is there a way we can use the xbox 360 controller on the pc for trainz. i just fell i can go soo much quicker with a controller (certain buttons could be shortcuts, you wouldnt have to hold down the control key to rotate the camera, etc.).

as for aardvark1, hey man im sorry for what i said. i apoligise. i was very "down in the dumps" that day, and was getting angry on here and xbox.

id appreciate if you could accept my apology, and i hope we can move on from here with positive relations. hope you're doing good and have a good day.

No need to apologize.... I get cranky too.
Doing good.... woke up this morning, saw the sun, so it is a good day.:hehe:

Thanks,
Ron

 

[overkill650]

hey nikkia, is there a way to use the controller on the pc for trainz. i kn ow u can use the controller for other games, but could there be a way to set it up for trainz?

 

[NikkiA]

hey nikkia, is there a way to use the controller on the pc for trainz. i kn ow u can use the controller for other games, but could there be a way to set it up for trainz?

You can probably use JoyToKey to present keypresses to trainz from the controller, it'd need manually setting up of course. I'm not sure how you'd want to map the throttle - if you wanted to map the joystick to throttle then trainz recognises a set of keyboard shortcuts for direct setting of throttle levels 0-8, BUT not all locomotives recognise them (and you'd need to configure trainz to use some keyboard code for them, as they're unmapped by default)

On the other hand, mapping a button to throttle up/down would work just fine.

You'd probably want to map the right joytick to control the view, by making movements on that joystick send right mouse button + mouse movement.

All in all, it won't be as slick as the way the iPad version of trainz offers a virtual double joystick for control, maybe auran could put that control scheme into the main PC version at some point in the future, and then we could map joysticks to it.

 

[Pencil42]

..., saw the sun, ...

Oh, rub it in, why don't you?


From overcast Portland,
Curtis

Back on topic, I suspect if you could come up with a good control scheme using a controller on the PC, you'd have a better chance of getting N3V to support it. The Logitech controller I have sitting beside me has 10 buttons, 2 joysticks, and a thumbpad. That might be enough; I don't know.