Okay, got a peek at Rail Simulator today. Some nice things, some not. First, don't base your opinion on the "review" of people who're running it without benefit of things like an instruction manual, as many things they say are just plain wrong. Switching junctions from the cab (or any other view mode) is as simple as hitting the "G" key. Likewise, many other "cons" are because the person posting either doesn't have a manual, or didn't bother to read it. Heck, they could have found most keyboard commands simply by clicking on the "Driving Instructions" icon at the bottom of the screen.
As I mentioned, some things are good. Wheels turn. I remember one particular Australian train simulator that was released without animated bogies throughout several incarnations of the product, spanning several years.
Passengers are visible inside cars (though for some reason, they're not the same passengers that appear on the platforms). None of the passengers look like hookers (of course, I've only noticed 3 different female platform passengers, and the guys didn't look like there were many more variations of them). Again, I recall a certain Australian train simulator that released a "passenger edition" that didn't even include passengers for over 6 months after it went on sale, so while not amazing, it's a start. They wander onto the platforms, and even stagger slightly once in position. I'm not sure if this is good or bad, so I'll list it as "different".
Cabs seem very much like the 3D cabs we're used to in Trainz. Wipers can be turned on or off, but like in Trainz, there's no real point to it. On the Intercity, the sunscreen can be flipped down into position, but I didn't notice any sun glare so fierce that you'd need it. The weather (and clouds in general) seemed to streak by awfully fast, I didn't run into any rain on my short sojurn, so I can't say how it behaved, but let's not forget Trainz own "acid rain" that cuts through everything, whose behavior hasn't changed at all in the entire history of the franchise.
Water (ie., streams) looked nice, BUT... from what I saw and in their demo, it looks like streams can be placed as a spline, however I haven't seen any way to vary the width of the water, and I've never seen any waterway other than a canal where the width doesn't vary. Nice looking, but not awfully realistic. I haven't played with the editor, so I don't know if more than one type of water can exist on a route at once (or even if they give you more than one type of water).
Trees and brush, lots of it, but it wasn't really impressive (I guess they don't have David Drake making the stuff for them). Ground textures seemed about on par with those on Auran's routes. Draw distances seemed very good (at least on my machine using their default settings), much better than Trainz early "fog of war", and probably on a par or better than with current Trainz versions.
Things did seem to have a lot of jaggies. I don't know if it wasn't using AA settings from the video card, or if it was because I've gotten used to a higher resolution on Trainz, and I was running RS at 1024x768. I'll have to try it again with the resolution pumped up.
Load times were horrible. Even after using the "free play" mode, reloading the same map to start again (say, after a derailment) took at least a minute, and that's on a fairly high end machine with 2 GB ram and fast drives. Of course, early Trainz load times weren't any better, and didn't get really good until TRS2006. Obviously these folks haven't had as much experience in this area, and it shows.
Obviously, there were a lot of things I haven't looked at yet, and those that I did were no more than cursory glances. Counting bugs is rather pointless, especially when our own motto seems to be "but just wait until the service pack comes out". Seeing how fast any bugs are addressed is the real issue. At this point, it's no reason to run out and dump Trainz. There obviously isn't thousands of 3rd party items available (or even the link promised in the documentation on the Rail Simulator website to get info about it). Let's remember, most of the really neat stuff you can do with Trainz wasn't written by Auran, but by 3rd parties. It's a lot more user friendly and useable than MSTS was when it came out (heck, just running without crashing pretty much earned it accolades on that score). Would someone interested in trains be interested in it? Sure, it doesn't flat-out suck, and you probably get more for your money than you do with Trainz Classic. Would I recommend it over TRS2006? Not a chance. Is it something to keep an eye on? You bet. Nothing groundbreaking, but a nice reminder to Auran that they can't sit on their duffs forever dishing out the same old soup in fancy new cans...
