I guess we are all supposed to sit around the campfire and sing Kumbaya and wait for the bright new sunrise that is TANE.... that what has happened up to this point is ok and people are just over reacting and will fall in line..I have dibs on one of the drums for the drum circle.
So very true.
There's a simple way that could keep trainzers happy and generate revenue for N3V, but why share it when they don't give a darn what the community thinks.
Well time for more thoughts on this... and for those not interested, you can skip as it might be a book or two.
We've all heard the phrase to cut off our noses in spite of our face. This is a case of nose cutting wile putting eggs in one basket and hoping to make it big at the same time.
They seem to forget that the community is also some of their biggest sales people as well. Word of mouth sales are sometimes a lot larger than what the web can produce alone. Let's face it, we have Trainz and tell a fellow rail enthusiast about it. The next thing we know, he's now on their website here buying a copy plus add-ons and even a FCT. This might not sound like much but add that up over many, many users and this is a good chunk of revenue for N3V. I can say that even I have done that myself while out chasing storms a few years ago. As usual I ran into more than a few railfans on my long van rides. It's funny how many storm chasers are also rail fans. I suppose this is because we sit so long in a van and pass so many railroads and trains, it's got to rub off.
Anyway, there were two fellow chasers from Ireland that I remember well. One ordered a boxed copy of TRS2009 and had it shipped to his home address that night after we talked about Trainz in the van. As we traveled, I found out that John's dad worked for the GWR as a fireman, and his grand dad had some other position with the railroad. This gentleman is not young by any means, and when he saw the website and screen shots I showed him, his eyes lit up. It's this joy that the product can bring to people is what makes it so great. This has happened more than once in the many years since I've purchased the program back in December 2003.
Now this also brings up another thing. Why does the program have to become so Geeky? I mean seriously, folks at N3V. Not everyone is technically inclined here. Trainz used to be a fun program for train enthusiasts to use. Many people are older, or very much younger. Not all can afford the latest and greatest hardware, or have the capabilities to write scripts, and fiddle with config.txt files, or fix content and search for dependencies. All they want to do is play with their trains in Trainz just like they did when they once had the space for their model railroads, or once were railway engineers and could drive a real train. Even then, I'm sure even with the checking and complexity that involves, it wasn't the constant fiddling we see today. With every build increase, the amount of fiddling seems to increase exponentially. This is one area where I feel things definitely need improving and subject of another book...
To be honest, no other program is like this that I use. Even Microsoft Windows doesn't need this kind of attention, and Windows 10 has even made its attention less than it was under Windows 7 and Windows 8. Even their worst OS, Vista wasn't like this, and neither was Windows NT 4.0 which had a reputation of crashing if you looked at it wrong. Things just work because they can. There's not fuzting and poking to manipulate things into place.
The problem too is people get tired of this fixing and fiddling. I know I sure am. I look at TANE coming out and I feel myself getting tired mentally and physically. I like many here went through this before as we moved from TRS2004 to TRS2006, then to TS2009 on up the line. Needing to fix content and fiddling gets old. As I'm typing this, I wonder how many longtimers here are going to feel its time to walk away as they too are tired of fixing stuff. With this sudden shift in version jumps without notice, the angst meter went from a flicker to a full peg in the red zone well beyond the measured values!
We need to revisit this and perhaps put the brakes on the constant versioning by letting the older versions remain active a bit longer. I don't think it will hurt sales any because new people will be purchasing the new versions, however, there will still be the older user-base that can't afford to upgrade or don't have the machines to run the latest version, still in the loop until that someday comes that they can. It's a win-win for all, and it's not putting everything in one basket and hoping that all the sales come in for that while forgetting who helped grow and keep the product active for this length of time.
Anyway, enough of this for now. We all have better stuff to do and hopefully the word from management will be to leave things as they are for now.
John
