HELP - Multiple issues...(and mini-vent)

[exVKG]

G'day All,

Hoping that someone can help me here. First I want to say how disappointed I am... This product (TS2009 WBE), out of the box, should be working a hell of a lot better than it is at the moment, in my opinion. I have applied SP1, with no appreciable improvements.

My two major issues are: framerate, and language.

Firstly, the only way I could get the game to run at all was to use compatibility settings for Win XP, and run as administrator.

Approximately half of the (included) scenarios have their instructions written in German... how the hell that can happen I have no idea. I'm using a computer that has only ever had English settings, and I don't speak/read German, so that locks me out of a lot of the scenarios.

Framerate: I'm (trying to) run this game on a Dell XPS M1730 laptop, with Vista 32bit, 4GB RAM, Twin 512MB Nvidia Video Cards in SLI configuration. The best framerate I been able to achieve is 14fps, and thats running windowed, in 1280x1024. I tried all the graphics options available to me in game, with no significant performance improvements. Running full screen is even worse.

I've tried searching these forums for help but haven't come up with anything so far. Is there anyone that can help me? I'm so close to chucking it all in and demanding a refund...

Al

 

[narrowgauge]

exVKG

Are you trying to run with view distance set to the full 5000 metres, and what settings are you running. There appears to be some evidence that OGL is faster than Directx and if all the option settings are set to full, that will bring many machines to a staggering halt. I don't believe that TS2009 is set up to use SLI. Vista is also causing a few problems and running in XP compatible mode could be one reason for low frame rates. Make sure that you are using the Compatability setting in Trainz, that will help considerably.

The language problem is not good, but TS2009 World Builder Edition (WBE) was made as a 'toolbox' to enable creators to get used to and to use the new concepts, probably no-one considered that people would want to run sessions. The content supplied seems to have been taken from TRS2006 and the builtin profiles got mixed up.

The edition to look for is TS2009 Engineers Edition which is intended to contain content made specifically for the new functionalities. It does not contain Surveyor and is a stand-alone Drivers edition, but will integrate with WBE to work as a combination.

Narrowgauge

 

[JCitron]

G'day All,

Hoping that someone can help me here. First I want to say how disappointed I am... This product, out of the box, should be working a hell of a lot better than it is at the moment, in my opinion. I have applied SP1, with no appreciable improvements.

My two major issues are: framerate, and language.

Firstly, the only way I could get the game to run at all was to use compatibility settings for Win XP, and run as administrator.

Approximately half of the (included) scenarios have their instructions written in German... how the hell that can happen I have no idea. I'm using a computer that has only ever had English settings, and I don't speak/read German, so that locks me out of a lot of the scenarios.

Framerate: I'm (trying to) run this game on a Dell XPS M1730 laptop, with Vista 32bit, 4GB RAM, Twin 512MB Nvidia Video Cards in SLI configuration. The best framerate I been able to achieve is 14fps, and thats running windowed, in 1280x1024. I tried all the graphics options available to me in game, with no significant performance improvements. Running full screen is even worse.

I've tried searching these forums for help but haven't come up with anything so far. Is there anyone that can help me? I'm so close to chucking it all in and demanding a refund...

Al

Welcome to Trainz and the Forums, Al.

There are a lot of issues that can cause poor performance and range from applets running in the background to overworked hardware, disk space, low memory, or even disk fragmentation.

Since you are using a laptop, I would check to see if your system is set to run at the highest performance possible. Dell like Toshiba and Compaq have speed vs power settings for their machines. The systems are set for portability instead of performance even though they're sold for performance. Where this setting is on your particular machine is out of my hands because each manufacturer is different. This could easily be a BIOS setting or even something in the Control Panel.

The other thing too is Intel processors in general will throttle back (run slower) if they get too warm rather than crash the systemm by quitting. This is unlike the old days with the Pentium 3's that would crash completely. So if your machine is getting warm from running Trainz, it will slow down and cause performance issues.

If your hardware and system in general has checked out and you don't have anything unusual running in the background, you may need to lower the distance and other performance settings for the program. This is done under the control panel in the launch screen.

These are sliders that you can adjust with the right-most settings being the most system intensive vs the left most being the lowest. You may want to try the default settings first then adjust them up and down to achieve what you find to be the best balance for performance on your machine. If you still find that there are performance problems, try switching from DirectX to OpenGL mode or vice versa. Sometimes video cards and computers have their preferences.

Regarding Vista...Right now I'm running TRS2006 (TS2009 is still importing my content since last night) on a Vista 64-bit machinie with Vista SP2 Beta. I have no problems with it so you shouldn't [Keyword is shouldn't...] have any Vista problems either if you install and run the program as Administrator. This will get around running in Windows XP mode, which can cause performance problems as well.

Good luck and let us know how you faire out with these issues.

John