1. It’s true that some people had issues with TANE. It is far from true that everyone did.
2. Yes we have learned from our mistakes. We have learned that developing a brand new engine from scratch while porting an enormous code base results in lots of incompatibilities (the cause of most of the above issues).
3. We have learned that 100 people testing isn’t enough. 200 isn’t enough. You need 1000 people to get the breadth of content/routes/behaviours/operating procedures to get a reasonable cross section of our audience.
4. We’ve spent 3 years stabilising, improving, tweaking, and hardening the code. The introduction of “assertions” to provide detailed information to the programmers gas resulted in 100’s of edge case bug fixes.
5. We’ve lengthened the development cycle to 3 years to give us sufficient time to ensure a polished release.
6. We’ve improved our communication with our beta testers and been persistent in ensuring we get their content installed on our systems to replicate and resolve these edge cases.
7. We’ve learned not to bite off more than we can chew. We’re not trying to add 100 features at once.
8. We’ve reduced our overheads and enlisted more 3rd party content creators than ever before to assist our cashflow to develop the next version.
9. We’ve focused our entire team on Trainz. Nothing else.
10. I have personally been involved in every Trainz release since Trainz CE in 2002. This release has a different feel. It is at least 12 months (closer to two years) since our original release date planned. Why have we delayed release? So that it becomes the release known as “this is the Trainz I have always wanted”.
Have we reached that goal? Early feedback (long before release day) suggests we are well on track. We’re not there yet, but we’re heading very much in the right direction.
This is very encouraging. Thank you for your time taken to reply.
Without mentioning names, and without marketing spin, I can tell you that one of our harshest critics in the past posted "Wow! I'm impressed" on his first look into TRS2019.
You can look at it this way: It's everything TANE SP3 is + a bunch of new stuff. So in that regard, it's hard to see people who like TANE SP3 not to be impressed by TRS2019.
The naysayers expecting loads of bugs will be disappointed. The people with low spec hardware will also be disappointed that they don't get ALL of the new features, but they will get to take advantage of some of them.
The other good thing for those people is that the GPU is an easily upgraded component in most systems (not so for laptops).
Can I make a personal request this early to all readers, and that is to drop using words like "naysayers", "haters", etc because it is usually people who have shelled out dollars for a product that isnt functioning to their expectation and have genuine grievances - whether those grievances are due to their own limited hardware, a corrupt installation, lack of understanding, a crappy product, their higher expectations than others or whatever, they are not haters, naysayers or anything else, they have a genuine issue which should be listened to and dealt with with respect and understanding.
No one buys TRAINZ just to hate it!
I hope those with problems are able to voice themselves without being abused by those who are not having the same issues as happened last time
That also goes for the other side as well using words like "fanboys" and similar.
3 years ago it drove a wedge in this board and got pretty nasty at times. Getting all defensive or insulting others doesnt solve any of the problems people are experiencing and at the end of the day, everyone wants the same thing. It HAS to play well and do everything it is designed to do.
Finally, if the N3V teams have really learned and listened and have embedded their points quoted above into their next product, then the product will sell itself without all the BS and spin similar to that which preceded the release of TANE.
I genuinely hope this will be a successful product for N3V and those who purchase it.
Thats all I have to say (for now), Thanks and good luck.