My Opinions on the Future of Trainz "Not necessarily yours"

[masterowner]

This thread is to just throw out what I think is needed in Trainz for future releases... Feel free to put your suggestions below.

1. Improved road traffic- The vehicles driving on roads in Trainz look fake, they don't behave like real road cars, and they are of low quality.

2. More built in content- There is no way that the Auran/NV3 team spends all their time improving the game, "satellite mode" really is that all you can do it is just a transition between two things that already existed. It is time that the creators of Trainz make their OWN content and not just use 3rd parties that where already going to release their content to the community. On a side note the quality of built in Trainz quality is strange not bad, I shouldn't be able to see my reflection in the grill of a battered SD40-2.

3. Better weather effects- The rain, snow, ETC. in Trainz looks terrible and fake. Compared to the recently released video of the rain effects in Rail Simulator 2012 "Railworks 3 I like how they stole that title" Trainz's weather effects are cartoonish.

4. What the "Speed Tree"- In TS2010 you added Speed Tree's good job on that, but you didn't give access to the Trainz community to make their own. Secondly the trees shouldn't constantly be in gale force winds.

As I said at the begging feel free to add your own suggestions or wishes.

 

[tyard]

I agree with all of those, though to be honest none of them are really high on things I'd care about. Exception being that I don't think Auran could give us the SpeedTree creation stuff-I believe you must buy that software from SpeedTree and it isn't cheap!

My main point in posting is that you should edit your other post saying it was a double-post... no need for dual threads starting

 

[Deano5]

You do not have a copy of 12, have you actually ever used your copy of 2010?
I was going to answer all your questions, but, I'm just so fed up with all the negativo's lately that I thought I'd better just go get a drink and chill instead.

 

[Dermmy]

1. Improved road traffic- The vehicles driving on roads in Trainz look fake, they don't behave like real road cars, and they are of low quality.

You are correct, they do look fake, but I (and many other users) have road traffic turned off not because of the quality of the traffic but because of the polys. If the road traffic was better quality it would also use more computer resources, so far form saying 'Yippee' I would actually turn it off-er. Somebody recently wanted animated wheels on road traffic. Good Grief! Road traffic is a background eye-candy thing, it is not the focus of the sim. Lo-poly is just fine thanks!

2. More built in content- There is no way that the Auran/NV3 team spends all their time improving the game, "satellite mode" really is that all you can do it is just a transition between two things that already existed. It is time that the creators of Trainz make their OWN content and not just use 3rd parties that where already going to release their content to the community. On a side note the quality of built in Trainz quality is strange not bad, I shouldn't be able to see my reflection in the grill of a battered SD40-2.

Yep, they do spend all the time they are working on Trainz improving the game. N3V are a very small company producing the best rail sim on the market on a shoestring budget. Have you any idea what quality content creation costs if you budgeted it out on an hourly basis? I'd need about a quarter of a million dollars to fund EK3 if you allow for its development out of earlier lo-quality routes. Years between releases is too long, if N3V produced the content it would be decades!

3. Better weather effects- The rain, snow, ETC. in Trainz looks terrible and fake. Compared to the recently released video of the rain effects in Rail Simulator 2012 "Railworks 3 I like how they stole that title" Trainz's weather effects are cartoonish.

Gotta agree with that, but of all the things that need 'fixed' rain and snow effects gotta be way down the list.

4. What the "Speed Tree"- In TS2010 you added Speed Tree's good job on that, but you didn't give access to the Trainz community to make their own. Secondly the trees shouldn't constantly be in gale force winds.

Yep - they dead certain right should have included some kind of tree creation module no matter how tight the budget. And if the budget wouldn't stretch that far they shoulda left STs alone...

Andy

 

[JCitron]

Speed Trees are developed from a licensed development kit, and the kit is very expensive. There are some content creators that have purchased the developer kit and have created some trees on their own. Look at Mcguirel's UltraTreez series for example.

I agree that the traffic is weird, but it serves its purpose of background additions. I'd rather see the development team work on better draw distance, overall improved program performance, and AI driver issues, which have gotten better by the way, but still could be improved.

John

 

[Forest_Runner]

Heavy agreement on road traffic and weather.

As a subset of road traffic... prototypical level crossings, where the road that snaps to them is not visibly of a different height... and/or cars going "underground" through them.

My other gripe is shadows... on two fronts.
1. The block shadow meshes in TS12 are hideous. Typically with an update (from 09/10) something has to break. Looks like shadows was it this time around. This has also got to suck for creators who go to the effort of creating shadow meshes.
2. Buildings and splines. Ever seen how ridiculous it looks when a train crosses a bridge, and the consist casts a shadow... and the bridge doesn't?? ... this is as ugly as rain/snow inside tunnels.

 

[Dermmy]

...Ever seen how ridiculous it looks when a train crosses a bridge, and the consist casts a shadow... and the bridge doesn't??

That would be right near the top of my 'Must Fix Before Next Release' list, provided of course that truss bridges don't cast block shadows!

Andy