Ha, read again I said train handling physics wise, but hey, choo-choo Trainz users should probably know better about that right? So what do think about Railroad Tycoon, lol?
Just as Clancy mentioned earlier in this thread when he referenced the level ignorance here it goes back to actually knowing what else is out there and actually having real experience with the subject. Let’s face it most here obviously don’t get out much, from the looks of things you could blind fold them with dental floss.
You can’t fault someone for trying to take the bag off of someone else’s head in hopes that they’ll see.
I guess you could say that about Trainz also, it might be the next millennium before they move into the 21[SUP]st[/SUP] century also.
Does it really matter? It's not a multi-million Dollar train simulator. It's a computer game running on a personal computer. The fact that it runs at all on a home system, as well as it does, is something to be marveled at. Imagine where we've come from over the past decades in the personal computer world. I came from a world of Z-80 based computers running CP/M-Plus. These machines were running at 2.5 Mhz max! Wow! They were fast in their day. The computer systems also cost close to $3,000 back then, and came with 2 floppy drives and maybe 128K of bankswitched RAM. And even better... There was very little off-the-shelf software to boot. Heck I actually learned some programming back then.
So fast forward to today. We have a different world where the machines are what? 1000 times faster now? We have machines on our desktops that only the generations before dreamt about. What we do on our desktops today is far greater and faster than the biggest computer systems used by the universities and government labs back then. Our graphics capabilities too are a farcry from 30 years ago. Imagine my world coming from green-screen video terminals where the biggest graphics were pictures made from letters. Oh the Visual V-1050 which I had was a bit better because came with a 6502 cpu that was dedicated for graphics. This portion of the system had a whopping 32K of dedicated RAM. The V-1050 could also draw primatives too such as circles, squares, and piechart pieces. Wow! that was something back then. Here today we have Gigabytes of RAM, dedicated to GPU's running in the Ghz range and faster capable of immersive 3d-graphics, lighting effects, etc.
Granted the physics aren't quite there yet. Over time this area will get better and better as more and more companies write software for it. Just remember too that the graphics and cpu development is something that has been ongoing for the past 30-plus years. The physics emulation is only what 5 years old at the max. We have to remember that physics capabilities is also expensive, and there are a lot of trade-offs while implementing it into a program. By expense, I don't mean monetarily, I mean CPU cycles. There are a lot of calculations that go into physics, much more than the lighting effects and other things that the CPU does with the programs. Companies such as NVidia have made strides with the hardware, which takes the load off of the CPU, but the programs have to be written for it.
The physics being real? Who cares. As I said, it's not necessary to enjoy the program for what it is.
As far as the Jet-engine goes. It's paid for and being leveraged for what it does. Game developers do not go out and purchase the latest and greatest game engine every year. They're very, very expensive, and many of the them have royalty payments on top of that plus support costs. We're talking about a developer environment where the company may pay $200,000 just for the product, plus the licensing fees, plus support costs. I know this because my brother worked with Berl systems on a flight simulator. N3V is lucky. They already have the game engine. It's bought, paid for, and in use. I agree Jet could use a little tweaking under the hood here and there, but that's not my area of expertise, and it's up to N3V/Auran to do. Remember too that it's usually the newest of the game engines that make use of the latest graphics and physics. These additional add-ons too are also expensive and many companies will not implement them anyway unless they're coming out with a new product. RW does make use of the newer lighting engines, but this comes at a cost somewhere else. Again this has to do with CPU and GPU capabilities. This may, however, have something to do with what can be implemeneted int he code space too, which can cause trade-offs. This again is an area which is totally unknown to many of us here unless we're in the industry.
"Just as Clancy mentioned earlier in this thread when he referenced the level ignorance here it goes back to actually knowing what else is out there and actually having real experience with the subject. Let’s face it most here obviously don’t get out much, from the looks of things you could blind fold them with dental floss."
This is downright rude. Many of us know what's out there, and choose not to bother with it. We've made up our mind what we want to drive. For you, or he to say this, is like someone coming in with a Nissan into a Toyota dealership and then saying look what I've got. It's better. You're not going to get the empathy, or the throngs of people going to the other product, because you're in the homebase of the competitor. The people in the Toyota dealership are going to point out the faults, shortcomings, and other not-so-nice things the other product has. They're in many ways similar, but in many ways not.
In reality there really isn't any alternative train simulator that has everything going for it that Trainz TS12 does. This may not be perfect, it may not have the physics as you seem to be all about and all over and under, but it's still playable. It's easy to use, to create in, to modify, and do whatever we want with. This is quite unlike the other products you mention because they're locked down and everything is a deep dark difficult nut to crack when it comes to devlopment. I came from the MSTS world. This was the most frustrating thing to create in. The world creator was difficult, awkward, and would crash. The Activity editor was better, but it would crash randomly. Who wants that crap? I've used Trainz, most versions, for hours, upon hours, and never had a crash unless I installed something crappy. But to have this out of the box, this is pure garbage! I remember TrainMaster. I tried the demo and almost bought it 12 years ago. It was great in its day and was the seed, in my opinion, that grew what we have today. The other sims, well, they'll get here eventually, maybe. I looked at RW. It's just like MSTS, and worse it requires Steam to use it and like everything else MSTS it's all about the payware model.
I've been pretty quiet on this thread. I felt now was the time to throw in my 1/2 pence into the bucket.
John
