1I don’t know if there are others out there with similar experiences, or whether I’m just expecting too much. Quite aside from the problems I had initially getting Trainz to work, it has so far been one frustration after another.
2
- How do I lay parallel tracks accurately, a known distance apart, especially when running diagonally across the grid?
- How do I lay out an accurate curve of a known radius?
- How do I fix tracks so they don’t move out of alignment when adding new junctions or spline points?
- How do I create a yard, and join several closely spaced tracks with a simple ladder?
- How do I group a set of tracks together and drag them around the map to get them in the right place?
- How do I place two tracks close together without them joining up? This one was particularly annoying! Last night, I laid track in a small junction station and yard with about 20 turnouts, yet I had to undo so much that I have junctions numbered in the 300+ range.
- How do Iadd platforms, bridges, and other things that need to be precisely located relative to track that seems to be impossible to locate accurately?
- Where can I find a turn-table?
3
Most of the controls available are not explained. Of these, some don’t do what their name would imply, and others do not appear to do anything at all. Surely, they all have a purpose, but many are not intuitive in their operation, and need to be described in detail in the documentation.
4
Despite these problems, I have some track laid. The alignment is not perfect, but I suppose it’s passable for a first attempt. Now comes the need for buildings, bridges and station platforms. Platforms..., that’s a laugh. Station platforms are such an integral part of building a railway that I’d expect a button to do it automatically, or at least a range of track components that include platforms. owever this task is supposed to be done, it needs to be described in the manual or other documentation, along with such other vital topics as building tunnels, cuttings and embankments. I do remember reading something on the forum about digging tunnels, but how I’m going to find that again, I don’t know (see below for notes on the forum).
5
About three years ago, I purchased a CAD package of similar complexity, which had a manual consisting of 174 large pages of small type and a gazillion diagrams! I was producing very complex high-quality drawings within a few days, but I digress.
Since the manual is incomplete,
6 lets use the online help instead.
7
Now that it looks as though this will take far longer to learn than I expected, let’s go to the download station. I still have three days remaining on my first-class ticket, so it would be a good idea to download everything I want now.
8 There are over 140,000 assets available in the DLS, so I should be able to get anything I need for my railroad designs, right? Wrong!
Obviously, most of the 140,000 assets are not appropriate for my areas of interest. With such a diverse subject as railways world-wide, it could not be any other way.
9 The problem here is that there is no index. The entire collection is divided into a few sections (which don’t necessarily contain what they are supposed to), but that is as far as it is broken down.
10 At the very least, each category needs to be searchable by era and region. Also, incorrectly tagged items should be rejected – or placed in a ‘trash’ file and not counted in the total until they are corrected.
11 The search algorithm is badly flawed, appearing to lack the capability to search for whole words. Eg; attempting to find locomotives and rolling stock suitable for “British Rail”; typing BR in the search comes up with tens of thousands of superfluous items like broomsticks, abrasives and candelabras.
12 Even after fighting through all these shortcomings to download assets, I have so far yet to obtain one that does not have a broken or missing dependency.
13Thus it looks as though I might have to use only the content supplied with the program. While I cannot speak for all eras and regions, those areas that I have looked at simply do not have enough appropriate content to create a believable route.
14 Eg; I found a beautiful 1930’s CN passenger train, but there is nothing else appropriate for the same layout. While it is not reasonable to expect everything to be available, I’d go so far as to say that if a region/era is going to be represented at all, there should be enough different locomotives to cover all traffic classes, and a representative selection of both freight and passenger cars.
15 For the three region/era combinations that I am particularly interested in, I’ve yet to find ANY suitable locomotives within the supplied content! There are some listed on the DLS, but as I’ve already pointed out,
16 the DLS seems to be totally hopeless! I refuse to even think about paying for additional locomotives etc until I’ve got some value out of what I’ve already purchased.
17 There are already far too many objects in the database, with no apparent way of organizing them.
18 Of course, when it comes to the millions of different items under the ‘buildings’ menu, there isn’t even the capability to eliminate ‘non-favorites’ from the list.
19 I sincerely hope that someone from Auran reads this, and that they take it into consideration for their next release.
