Ray actually sums it up perfectly. There's something for everyone with this hobby.
I've always looked at Trainz as a hobby and a time away from the drudgeries of life. Trainz in my opinion has never been about the prototype, though I do prefer realistic operations and realistic-looking assets, and I have always thought of it as a model railroad which can outsmart the pants off of any physical model railroad out there with its ability to build something that would never even fit inside of a football stadium all without the mess and expense. I once said in a post somewhere, a few years ago now, (no I'm not searching 18,000-plus posts!), that the various parts can be equated to the different aspects of model railroad with Surveyor being the bench work, and the scripting and programming like the wiring. The model building and creation is like scratch building, and so on. And like a model railroad, we can get as complex as we can without impacting anything in any great fashion, and even more so like a model railroad routes are never a finished entity.
The thing is as a computer program, Trainz rivals Windows in its longevity or business suites such as Office. Nowhere, other than business applications, that I can recall a computer program, a game no less, that has this longtime use. In business terms, the return on investment (ROI) is extremely high. For a mere $30 in 2003 to about $50-70 today, which is comparable to most games today, this cost is quite small given the number of years of enjoyment we have. In terms of other programs that have come and gone from my hard drives over the years, every time Trainz in some version has remained while the others disappear either due to incompatibility, or lack of interest beyond it's initial honeymoon period. Now keep in mind that I'm not saying there isn't a lot of frustrations too due to various things. As with any product, tangible or virtual, there are limitations and there are things which require improvement. As much as we'd like to think Trainz is perfect, it is not, and like a lot of things nothing is never perfect in the imperfect world. Perhaps because we are so intimately involved with the product, in some cases since its inception, that we expect that honeymoon to always be there - that perfection we saw in it when it first landed on our hard drives!
As far as the honeymoon, well, that has waned as with many things, but the fact that there is still a dedicated group of enthusiasts who are taking their precious time to ensure we will still have our asset libraries intact, by repairing and testing the older content, is a testament to the interest in the product. Like that shiny new car, with that new car smell, after a few McDonald's hamburgers, farts, and scratches, our shiny new car is nothing more than transportation to and from work, the supermarket, or the computer store. And like that new shiny car, a newer one will come along in a few years or more which will make our shiny new car look drab and dirty no matter how much we try to spruce it up. Then that new car, or Trainz version to keep on topic, comes along and the honeymoon starts again, but being more of the same the honeymoon is much shorter as we are now aware of the imperfections we once saw before and we are now on guard for these and newer ones.
But anyway, I know for myself that as long as Trainz works in some version or another, I'll still have it on my hard drive. I haven't given up on it yet, though I did come pretty close to it a couple of years ago with the constant issues that TS12 had with the performance and database validations, but outside of that I have used it nearly every day since I purchased my first copy in December 2003.
John
