Railworks heads into Muti Player by Next year

Hi Everybody.
I think the threats against posters over on UKTS just make me feel that I would not wish to post anything over there again. The threats are also a great shame as there are some decent forum members over there that helped me enormously when I asked for advice on track laying with Railworks 2.

However, it does make you wonder whether the same threats could not be made Against members of this forum when criticizing payware authors or even freeware authors in their postings.

I would think that the one thing anyone contemplating legal action should consider is the difficulty they may have in pressing their litigation across international borders as the libel laws are undoubtedly a very different from one country to another.

Just a couple of thoughts

Bill
 
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In my opinion it looks to me like a convenient way of stopping critisism of RW on UKTS.

Infer that the site is under threat of legal action and use it as an excuse to delete all and sundry posts.

IKB.
 
The greed factor is now kicking in , protection of income source by ensuring that that your content is always painted in a good light .

It was only a matter of time before this happened , you add money into any equation and eventually greed will make an appearance .

It will be interesting to see if other payware creators follow suit or whether he/she becomes an isolated individual . This could have the potential to do more harm to their sales than any review written on the net .
 
IsambardKingdomBrunel said:
In my opinion it looks to me like a convenient way of stopping critisism of RW on UKTS.

Infer that the site is under threat of legal action and use it as an excuse to delete all and sundry posts.

IKB.
Click to expand...

I agree - it's a smokescreen. UKTS has always been a strange over-moderated place, even more so now.

I doubt somehow that the self-same payware creators will be threatening to sue Steam for their forums.
 
After reading all this about libel and defamation, I have to wonder in what legal system all this dubious information is based upon because that poster knows little of defamation law, at least in the U.S. Having been on both sides of libel and defamation suits, it's an absolute load of .... well, you know what I mean. They are pretty near impossible to prove, especially once one makes themselves, their companies or their products public figures.
 
Sites like Amazon or Play post plenty of one and two star reviews (I've added a few in my time) and you don't see the company or individuals getting taken to court over it. Often the low ratings are for some spurious reason - in the case of a game perhaps the DRM or when the Lord Of the Rings Blu-Ray boxset came out, mauled because it wasn't the Director's cut version. However you don't see the publishers sueing for any loss of revenue which, coming back to a train sim DLC, is going to be hard to quantify and probably negligible.

I do wonder if a bluff has succeeded here...
 
RRSignal said:
After reading all this about libel and defamation, I have to wonder in what legal system all this dubious information is based upon because that poster knows little of defamation law, at least in the U.S.
Click to expand...
As the site is called UKTrainSim, I'd take a wild guess it refers to UK law.
 
amigacooke said:
As the site is called UKTrainSim, I'd take a wild guess it refers to UK law.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, that's only a wild guess because that's where the site presumably is based, not necessarily where the actions occurred. I was going to suggest U.S. posters need not worry.
 
Hi Everybody.
IsambardKingdomBrunel said:
In my opinion it looks to me like a convenient way of stopping critisism of RW on UKTS.

Infer that the site is under threat of legal action and use it as an excuse to delete all and sundry posts.

IKB.
Click to expand...

I am not sure that UKTS sees its future tied up in Railworks that closely. Undoubtedly the high point for the site was much earlier in the decade when MST was the first and sole train simulator and when content was being created by whole army of new enthusiasts to that simulator.

I could be wrong but I do not think that any hosting for Trainz content was offered to users of this simulator and therefore when rail simulator came along UKTS had little choice but to go “full throttle” with that as it looked to be the final demise of the Microsoft simulator.

The lack of free content for Railworks has seen a decline in the site's popularity (I believe) and subscriptions to the site. From what is posted by the site's owner it would seem he is now pinning its hopes on the success of “open rails” to revive subscriptions to the content on the site as open rails will be able to use all content made for the Microsoft rail simulator if it's creators succeed in their ambitions.

We shall see if that hope succeeds, as open rails could turn the whole rail simulation scene on its head. At least it makes the future and outlook very interesting I feel

Bill:D
 
UKTS has always had an insiduous anti Trainz core.

Which was never discouraged by the site owners or moderators.

One of the reasons i was banned.

Regardless of the fact i was also an MSTS user from before it was even released in the UK ( i have the USA version ).

OpenRails i would like to see succeed and grow into a decent simulator.

But knowing the names of some of the people involved with it, i don't hold out much hope.

IKB.
 
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IsambardKingdomBrunel said:
UKTS has always had an insiduous anti Trainz core. Which was never discouraged by the site owners or moderators.

One of the reasons i was banned.

OpenRails i would like to see succeed and grow into a decent simulator. But knowing the names of some of the people involved with it, i don't hold out much hope.

IKB.
Click to expand...



Remember Mike the current mentality is, “beware of those who have more experience/knowledge than you with the subject”, lol.
 
branchline said:
A question - DO you think Auran will ever move things forward as far as the graphics side of Trainz is concerned? I know many people feel that to do so would require a new engine and in doing that would mean all the content to date would be rendered useless for such a version, but in my own personal opinion, and it is just my opinion, I find that a hell of a lot of stuff on the download station is outdated anyway so would it really matter that much ?
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well, to be honest, I don't think it would actually do anything to the content very much, it's only if they introduce a new way of coding script and mesh type that would make a difference.

If that would happen, that would make a significant change on the trainz user's faces.

If that would happen, auran themselves would have to release a mod to convert the assets to the new mesh and script.

It just depends on how far auran would go to achieve more "realistic" looks to the new version of trainz.
 
A new engine, a fresh start, a clean slate.
Build it up again from the bottom with up to date, state of the art software. ;)
 
RRSignal said:
Unfortunately, that's only a wild guess because that's where the site presumably is based, not necessarily where the actions occurred. I was going to suggest U.S. posters need not worry.
Click to expand...

Sadly, that's not how worldwide legal systems work.

The UK is notorious for 'libel shopping' cases, basically, as long as you can prove that *one* person in the UK viewed the site, you can bring a case of libel in the UK, and the UK has one of the most retarded libel laws in the world at present (something that the government has promised to fix).

So regardless of where the site is based, where the poster is based, or even where the 'victim' is based, they could bring a suit against the poster in the UK. This is true even for Auran's site, or any other site, btw, as long as there is at least one UK viewer.

Now, what tarnishes the whole deal is some of the claims made in the UKTS post, since they claim 'make sure that what you're saying is true', but that is actually not a defence in the UK libel statute, you can sue someone for libel here even if what they are saying is 100% truth, we do not have a 'truth is an absolute defence' rule like the US has.

I really don't think the UKTS post is about libel, as much of what they say is untrue, and even if someone brought a case, it would be incredibly difficult to hold a intermediary such as a forum, as responsible. However, we know that a certain RW developer in the US has been tossing about claims that 'I'll sue your site if you don't shut down all the people bad mouthing my product' at UKTS and trainsim.com, so I suppose it's possible.

Of course, there are a couple of other developers of RW content that I could imagine getting shirty like that, and some that before yesterday I wouldn't have imagined doing something like that, but now can easily imagine it. I suspect 2011 is the end of the gravy train for RW content producers, and we're going to see a lot of very desperate measures.
 
amigacooke said:
Wild guess no longer:

UKTRAINSIM.COM SITE INFORMATION

IP: 87.237.69.231
IP Location: Bristol, United Kingdom

The following article may be useful:

10 things webmaster should know about ... libel
Click to expand...

Yep, read all that, seems clear. Makes me wonder how other websites and forums manage to host reviews and opinions without being sued.

The UKTS response is not unexpected, there are rules plastered all over that site, what is one more?
 
That 10 things... link is very interesting reading.

I suspect the getout for reviewers is that what we say about a train sim or subsidiary product could be classed under "fair comment" but would that necessarily hold water in front of a jury sympathetic to the misty eyed plaintiff?

Guess this is actually something useful now come out of this thread (perhaps the mods should retitle it, as the conversation has progressed?) in that you do indeed need to be careful what is said even in constructive criticism.

Anyhow for the avoidance of doubt...
Trainz is great.
Auran/N3V are software gods.
The DLS/CMP never messes up.
All hail the Trainz team!

:)
 
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