Well, it might be a mute point since I went ahead and ordered the disk anyway, but my graphics card is a Nvidia GeForce 7600 GT.
I have to say, I feel much better poking about the TS2009 youtube videos vs. reading the issues here. I love a good steam engine represention and it seems it comes with a few good ones right out of the box.
However, while looking around at the DLS, it seems most ofthe good stuf is asking for a TS2006 S/n. Will I fnd most of these creations compatible?
I am particularly interested (at this moment :hehe: ) with the versions of the V&T 4-4-0 on the DLS. Its one of those locos I imprinted on as a kid. Should I expect a problem?
Here's a fair warning, and I'm being honest here because I don't want you to be disappointed with your purchase. I can say that I really enjoy TS2009 more than any other version of Trainz out there even with it's share of quirks. The AI are artificially more intelligent, the overall performance is smoother in comparision to other versions of Trainz. As a fair note, my machine is a bit hefty, but it never ran Trainz as smoothly as it does TS2009. My personal route is jam packed with objects in particular trees because I am modelling the Northeast where there are tons of green, and it runs quite nicely with TS2009 in comparison to TRS2006 and TRS2004, which both stuttered really badly in heavily built up areas.
As a TS2009 user, and one that came along with lots of "baggage" from previous versions of Trainz, I can say that the program handles the older content pretty well. You'll be lucky in this respect. Many of the now older downloaded items, are built into TS2009, and many of the TRS2006 items are now updated and standard fare as well.
About 99% of the newer downloadable items made for TRS2006 will work in TS2009 directly. There may or may not be errors. You may have to set the program to compatibily mode in order to use this content. In most cases there's nothing "wrong" with the content; the errors are due to stricter error checking in the configuration and files, and changes in the parameters that were either ignored in previous versions, or were okay back then and have changed in TS2009. With stuff made for TRS2004, the rate is about 90%, and older stuff is a bit scetchy, although I have quite a few items that load and look fine.
You will notice that in Native Mode, that older trees, telephone poles, fences, nd other objects that use alpha channel masking will have an invisible area around them. These objects are slowly being replaced by the content creators, and there are more and more items available every day. Since there's a search and replace function built into TS2009, it is easy to replace the older content with the newer compatibile items as they become available. Over the past months, I have been replacing, track, trees and textures with TS2009 "compliant" items as they have been uploaded to the Download Station. The DLS will list what's 100% TS2009 compatible through a filter. The switch to Compatibility mode fixes this problem so that older objects will load okay. There's a bit of a performance hit, which can or can not be noticable. For me it still runs nicely, and still smoother than the older versions ever were.
The V&T items are very nice. I've run a couple of the locomotives. If there are any missing dependencies, or some that come up broken, post the list up here in the forums and the people here will gladly help you fix the content, and even provide links to where you can get the missing items.
I hope I answered your questions. Remember it's a program to escape into and have fun. (Warning: Tt's never called a game here
).
John
