Now, I'm not attempting to change your mind here, but there are caveat to running in compatibility mode in TS2010. This is actually a transition product to what we have today in TS12 and upward. Compatibility mode is nothing more than a band-aide to be able to get older content to load into the program without repairing the items. This sounds well and good, but the problem will be performance for one. What TRS2010 is doing is muscling past the errors in the content. These errors were always there, just as they were in previous versions. (More about this afterwards). This extra work comes at a price, causing stutters and disappearing content from the route in Driver, among other issues. Alpha-blended objects no longer render well, including splines. Even in compatibility mode, they look weird due to the rendering engine changes.
The reason for the so-called errors in the newer versions of Trainz has to do with better error reporting and handling. The earlier versions of Trainz did not have this capability, so errors would sneak by the program and the content would "work". It would work well enough that no one really cared even though there were performance issues, crashes and stutters. Auran didn't help matters by producing original content with errors. These errors were propagated by other content creators that used those models as a basis for their own creations. Sadly too as the product matured, the CCGs did not keep up with the content and which tags, scripts, etc. had changed. This added more errors to the mess, causing more crashes and stability issues. And to make matters worse, content creators were making their own tags, not even related to the CCG and put those in as well, but since the errors were unreported and unchecked, the program muscled along. The plows came out and pushed along like nothing was wrong.
Eventually the developers got some smarts and put the brakes on this. Today's versions of Trainz, starting really with TRS2006 and even Classics, the program's code has become more strict. Instead of unknown tags, poorly created config files, typographic errors, missing textures, etc. being ignored, they are now getting flagged with errors in Content Manager. With the errors reported, it's a lot easier now to know what items need fixing, and which ones do not. In many cases the errors are easily repaired. For the most part they are nothing more than typographic errors in the config.txt files. Missing textures are easily repaired as well, unless of course they're are an important one such as a window or something. In many cases I've actually cloned textures from similar objects and repurposed them. Other content requires shadow meshes, or other minor fixes. In the course of 3 months, I repaired 1,000s of items in my local directory. A lot of this extra work is no longer necessary because many people have updated older content up on the DLS as part of N3V's content clean-up initiative. This large group of volunteers cleaned up many 10s of 1000s of items, making them once again available for future generations of Trainz users.
So what tools do we use to clean-up the content?
PEVSoft's Trainz Utilities for one are a must.
http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/~villaump/pevsoft.htm
Peter V has done a commendable job creating these very, very helpful tools for repairing the content.
You also need an image editor. There's Gimp, Paint.net, PaintShop Pro, and even Photoshop for this.
A good text editor. Notepad does an excellent job.
Optionally, a search and replace utility. I use Text_crawler for this one.
Why a search and replace tool, you wonder. When there are 100's of items created by the same creator that all have the same error in a config.txt file in the same place, it's easy to replace that line with a space and delete that one line. This also works for Kuid replacement, or adding in other groups of text in exactly the same spot in a ton of config files.
And finally, there is the forums here. We'll all generously help you repair your content.
So why wouldn't you want to fix the content and use TS12 instead and be done with it?
If you were to repair your content, which you'd find to be a pretty easy process, by the way, the performance will be a ton better, contrary to what Mr. Captain is saying. TS12 renders far much better. The lighting is better, the performance is better, and the AI are "smarter". There are some glitches still but like any version of Trainz, you weather them through until the next patch comes along.
Something to think about if you're upgrading. To be honest I did the old compatibility mode on TS2010 for quite some time. Then one day I broke open the tool chest and the difference in the game's performance was like night and day. There is no longer any interpreting and ignoring errors, muscling through as I said before, in order to run the simulation. The content just loads quickly and everything plays like it should.
John
