Train Simulator 2013 - Railsim.

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I just took a ride on my new Reading and Northern route I downloaded today. Now I am paying attention to utilizing the throttle control on the SD50 Loco that comes with the route. So I start shifting the throttle with my Raildriver as I am riding along. 1---2---3---4---3---2---3---4---5---6----5---4---3---4---6---8--7---6--- What the heck, I am having no problem doing this. I can move from notch to notch with no problem at all. There must be something wrong with my Raildriver. I will have to get out my crowbar, 300 watt soldering iron, and impact wrench tomorrow morning and see if I can fix it...... :udrool:

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I've had both Trainz and Railworks. Trainz outstrips Railworks by a huge margin. Railworks is bad on framerates. Good scenery, but that's it. The fact that everything is payware is another disadvantage. Trainz's operational potential is miles over Railworks. That combined with the awesome freeware available and selection of payware items that are reasonably priced makes Trainz the better choice. Say what you want about Railworks, but Trainz wins hands down all the way.

Yeah but the decade old game engine and rubber band physics kill it.
 
I just took a ride on my new Reading and Northern route I downloaded today. Now I am paying attention to utilizing the throttle control on the SD50 Loco that comes with the route. So I start shifting the throttle with my Raildriver as I am riding along. 1---2---3---4---3---2---3---4---5---6----5---4---3---4---6---8--7---6--- What the heck, I am having no problem doing this. I can move from notch to notch with no problem at all. There must be something wrong with my Raildriver. I will have to get out my crowbar, 300 watt soldering iron, and impact wrench tomorrow morning and see if I can fix it...... :udrool:


Try to teach train handling on simulated North American equipment with it, lol. It gets worse with age so it eventually needs constant recalibration, been there done that.
 
It’s not obsolete? You’re kidding right, lol.

If the rendering/gaming engine can’t even handle the old junk content that’s out there now what’s the difference?
Junk content! JUNK CONTENT!? Not all old content is 'junk', in fact about 90% of it is all right. Take landrvr1's Sharks or all the buildings that are still being used today. None of that is junk. As for it being 'obselete' have you ever tried building a route in Railworks?
 
Junk content! JUNK CONTENT!? Not all old content is 'junk', in fact about 90% of it is all right. Take landrvr1's Sharks or all the buildings that are still being used today. None of that is junk. As for it being 'obselete' have you ever tried building a route in Railworks?


Compared to what? How does it compare to what rest of the gaming world has enjoyed over last 5 years or so?

What good is the content if the game engine can’t handle it?
 
But Im ready for a bar fight, I even brought the beer!

But yea, avoid asking about Railworks (what ever the hell its calling it self) any where near Trainz...or me for that matter. The past few months I have been trying to write an unbiased review of three sims, and RW has given me the biggest head ache.

Truth be known, I played around with Railworks recently. A friend of mine bought it for me for Christmas. It didn't take me long to come up with a review. Here it is:

Railsim is nothing more than an updated version of MSTS...but with more bugs.

(Having said that, the zombies activities are a bit fun.)
 
Other than Railworks, Kuju, MSTS, and Trainmaster: http://www.raildriver.com/products/software/trainmaster.php how many train simulators are there ?

Other than the original Trainmaster program (which you listed) train handling physics wise, none of the others (MSTS, RailWorks) can really be considered a train simulator.

There is an attempt being made by the volunteers working on OpenRails though. It is free and out of the above mentioned train-games including Trainz it is the only one that is a true multi-threaded program. It’s got a long way to go in the graphics department but if you already have decent looking content for MSTS it can look as good as Trainz anyway and performs better than anything else out there.


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TS2013 can look good as far as the rest of the train-games go but it suffers from the usual out dated or poorly written rendering/game engine that plagues the rest of them.


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Yeah but the decade old game engine and rubber band physics kill it.
Rubber band physics is the feature of RailWorks & MSTS, not Trainz. In Trainz upper 1.3 a "solid band" is used during motion without changing direction. But when the train starts moving, a "gap plus rubber" band physics used. So in compearation, Trainz UTC (1.3) is better than MSTS and RW in band physics area, but Trainz 2004 and others are worse (when a regular ride is considered, not shunting).
 
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Try to teach train handling on simulated North American equipment with it, lol. It gets worse with age so it eventually needs constant recalibration, been there done that.

Well if it gets that bad , (which I seriously doubt since it is 6 months old, used daily, and has only been calibrated once) replacing the pot(s) can easily be done which will fix it. With the thousands of dollars I save, by not buying the other sim, I can afford to buy a dozen Raildrivers if necessary......;)

Looking at the forum that is dedicated to the Raildriver, it would appear that this calibration problem you have with your raildriver is non-existent, going back at least a couple of years in posts. Maybe yours in an antique? http://www.trainsim.com/vbts/forumdisplay.php?94-RailDriver
 
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Other than the original Trainmaster program (which you listed) train handling physics wise, none of the others (MSTS, RailWorks) can really be considered a train simulator.
Ha. You call TS2012 'outdated' and then say a program that was updated in 2001 isn't. Pathetic. Oh yeah, and Railroad Tycoon simulates steam loco physics perfectly.
 
Ha. You call TS2012 'outdated' and then say a program that was updated in 2001 isn't. Pathetic. Oh yeah, and Railroad Tycoon simulates steam loco physics perfectly.

What I can never figure out is the motive that people have for criticizing a program , it's features, and almost everything about it, and then joining a forum dedicated to that program. What is the point? :confused:
 
Other than the original Trainmaster program (which you listed) train handling physics wise, none of the others (MSTS, RailWorks) can really be considered a train simulator.

There is an attempt being made by the volunteers working on OpenRails though. It is free and out of the above mentioned train-games including Trainz it is the only one that is a true multi-threaded program. It’s got a long way to go in the graphics department but if you already have decent looking content for MSTS it can look as good as Trainz anyway and performs better than anything else out there.


Looks like at this rate, Open Rails will be ready for prime time by the next millennium http://www.elvastower.com/forums/index.php?/forum/244-maybe-its-a-bug/
 
To answer your question yes you can do all the same things, just may have to relearn how to do it using the Metro stuff or you can have Win8 without the touch screen interface with this simple registry hack http://techmell.com/how-to/disable-metro-ui-windows-8/ and carry on as normal. Personally I'm sticking to Win7 for now, it works well for what I use it for and having played with the preview, I don't need any of the new stuff none of which is actually any use to me. It may well be to others though, each to thier own.

Watch This.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WTYet-qf1jo#!
 
Ha. You call TS2012 'outdated' and then say a program that was updated in 2001 isn't. Pathetic. Oh yeah, and Railroad Tycoon simulates steam loco physics perfectly.

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?



What I can never figure out is the motive that people have for criticizing a program , it's features, and almost everything about it, and then joining a forum dedicated to that program. What is the point?
C:\Users\Dan\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.gif

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.



Looks like at this rate, Open Rails will be ready for prime time by the next millennium

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.
 
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
 
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