I am running TRS22PE (as well as Trainz Plus). Both have the imposter system and PF trees.
Tainz Railroad Simulator 2026
- Thread starter amigacooke
- Start date
I see, thank you! The list sounds great!
I have both too. My TRS22PE can use the PF trees, but thankfully it does not use imposters.
I think that before launching a new game they should fix the track-lod-tree spline issues among other things. I know that they've been partially fixed in TRS19 SP3/4 (I can't remember right now the Service Pack), but there are times in which the splines aren't properly rendered. It's disappointing how can we talk about a new Trainz game while TRS22 is still unfinished.
You are correct, I had forgotten that SP6 added them.
Key Features:
- New Imposter system for foliage assets
- 400+ Premium Foliage Assets - now available on the DLS
Unfortunately that is the new reality of software development. If you stand still while trying to fix every issue in your current product to everyone's satisfaction, your competitors will overtake and bury you.
Unless there is a quantum leap in computing power, things such as LOD are always going to be a compromise. One way to eliminate the problem is to add more LODs to each asset. Each added LOD adds to the memory requirement, processing and development time for that asset. No LODs in an asset is even worse. A few asset creators refuse to use LODs because of the extra development time needed.
In my soon(TM) to be released route I was experimenting with adding water effect layers. I was planning on providing a few different ones - clean water, dirty water (for farm dams), etc - but the route is already so big (460MB in CM) that each new water effect layer added 40MB (about 10%) to the route size. So I had to compromise with just a single water effect layer.
No, Trainz is not perfect and there is a long list of improvements that could be made. It is certainly a long way from matching the dream of some users, reality. Time, available resources, money and providing a final product that is affordable (whatever that means) are the constraints. As someone remarked in these forums, with software development you can produce a product that is on time, within budget and working - choose two of those options.
Well... after the dismal failure of Project Motor Racing, as the developers released an unfinished product, developers should take note about what happens when they release an unfinished game... And unfortunately there are a lot of cases of unfinished games which have been released during the years. And unfortunately, many gamers will still fall in the trap, even though they're sold a complete lie.
You have discovered the secret of modern marketing techniques (well at least some of the marketeers anyway).
I don't like the subscription model because if you create a route in it and then decide that you don't want to pay anymore you can't export the route to regular 22 because it's a higher build and won't work. It is stuck in Plus and you will have to perpetually pay every year to continue gaining access to the route. I'll just stick with 22PE for now until the next retail version comes out.
skittlekicks
Active member
All I truly care about in a new edition is realistic lighting the reflects at night off objects.
Right now all light assets look like crap and don't give off a real illumination. That's why night driving looks horrible, and why I never bother a midnight run. Personally I care more about this than anything N3V asks us, and hell to the no do I want that feature to be exclusive to Plus.
Right now all light assets look like crap and don't give off a real illumination. That's why night driving looks horrible, and why I never bother a midnight run. Personally I care more about this than anything N3V asks us, and hell to the no do I want that feature to be exclusive to Plus.
Yes, it seems that Trainz isn't perfect, and compromises have to be made to keep file sizes reasonable. But, why are there so many bugs like the pbr texture jelly effect, and we still have billboard trees. There was a sequel released a year ago called Planet Coaster 2 where you build a fully functional amusement park and the sequel was rushed out and had bugs and felt incomplete. But the dev team released more updates over the next year to now to address complaints and now the game is a lot better than when it launched and there are probably further free updates and fixes next year as well as paid content packs. Are assets with encrypted texture files unable to be reskinned because you can't access the textures?
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TRS22 / TRS22 Platinum and TrainzPlus both use the same trainz-build number, if you are at the same update level. This has been the case for most of the Trainz Plus releases.
I've sent plenty of routes from my fully updated TrainzPlus install to mates with TRS22 PE, and they have no issues...
Where did you get that idea from? I have both Trainz Plus and TRS22PE and regularly export routes (and sessions) between Plus and 22PE, in both directions, without any problems. Both Plus and 22PE use the same build number (currently 5.6) for all routes and sessions.
Provided that the route and session do not use HD terrain, TLR, MPS or other Plus only features then there will be no problems. Even HD terrain can be handled, but not edited, by 22PE without converting to a lower resolution.
If I was going to cancel my Plus subscription I would simply export all my Plus routes to .cdp files before the subscription expires then load them into 22PE.
Perhaps ray tracing may be the upgrade you require but everyone would have to upgrade their systems to an RTX (or equivalent) GPU if they have not already done so.
When this was last discussed in these forums there were very few games that used ray tracing and many/most/all of those that did only used it in some segments, not everywhere.
I had to buy a new, well used computer last year in order to play a new sequel called Planet Coaster 2 which requires Win 10 minimum and an RTX card for ray tracing. So that $70 game cost me over $500 because of the computer. My other computer with Trainz on it has Win 8.1 and a 3GB GTX card. If a new Trainz comes out that requires Win 10 and a GTX 6 or 8GB card then I will have to install that new Trainz on my other computer which I got from an ebay person.
skittlekicks
Active member
Why would I spend more money on a $1000 GPU? The issue is not my GPU, it's the way light emmision is handled in the 3D software that's used. Either people do not understand how light emmision works, how to render light itself, how to work with normals or etc. How can a modern game like Trainz be decades behind the times with lighting?
Ray tracing is a fad like 3D TVs were. Ray tracing will not remove blobs of light below the source nor will it shine off objects.
Trainz ahould have been remade in Unity or Unreal
You are kidding of course!
Both those (and other) "Universal Game Engines" are not suited for a sim as complex as Trainz. This point has been raised before by (to use your words) "people who do not understand" how game engines work. The overall consensus was that the amount of extra coding that would be needed to make the sim work within the limitations of those "universal game engines" would be the equivalent of creating a new specific purpose game engine. Adding that coding to the supplied Unity or Unreal engine would add enormously to the program size and complexity.
Plus you would be at the mercy of the platform developers as to how new features were implemented. Take the current, often criticized, 16 ground texture limitation per baseboard in Trainz Plus for HD terrain. The Unreal engine has an equivalent HD terrain and, in their system, you are limited to 8 textures per baseboard (they call them "layers" but are equivalent). Yes, they advertise that individual game developers can exceed this limit but they, not Unreal, would have to deal with the fallout from users when things don't work correctly.
Now, of course, all this could change in an instant when an AI system comes up with a better alternative for game engines but I am not holding my breath.
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PBR is not a product of N3V. It is a third party texture system that is widely used in many games and sims and, yes, they also have the same "jelly effect". For ways of overcoming this affect see the Trainz Wiki at Using_PBR_Textures.
We still have billboard trees because not everyone has the latest version of Trainz running on the latest hardware that can support SpeedTrees or its replacement, PlantFactory.
How would you respond if N3V suddenly decided that the DLS will no longer provide assets for versions of Trainz below the current latest release (Trainz Plus and TRS22)? That to use the DLS or DLC you had to upgrade to Plus or 22 - that would certainly solve some problems by getting rid of many memory and processing time hogging assets that do not use LODs, for example.
I don't know where you got that explanation but it does not tally with reality. A simple Google search revealed the following definition of ray tracing.
"a rendering technique in computer graphics that simulates real-world light behavior by tracing the path of light rays as they bounce, reflect, refract, and absorb off objects in a 3D scene" (emphasis in the passage is mine).
The "blobs" that you refer to are most likely coloured textures resembling a lighted area that has been added by the asset creator and are not created by the light source, which is usually directly above. The use of ray tracing will eliminate the need for creators to add that artificial area. Not all asset creators bother with adding that artificial lighted area anyway.
