trainz-simulator-world-tour
- Thread starter b9k9kiwi
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As several posters in these forums have said, it is not a product that would interest every user. But there are users who only want to drive trains, not build railways so I can see a market for it.
I have tried it and I did find some of its features and parts of its interface interesting. I hope that they will make it across to a future version of PC/Mac Trainz that comes with all the "bells and whistles" (pardon the pun).
There are implications for the future.
A very different product philosophy yet it is still called Trainz.
In recent years NV3 have been moving towards locking out end users (as opposed to content creators) from casual object and asset editing for their own use. The advent of Trainzmesh has made any form of content modification or alteration by users impossible, and reskinning difficult. PEV Attachment Maker no longer functions although, for now, there are ways around this.
It would seem to me that NV3 is moving towards a closed Trainz system with routes, sessions, rollingstock and assets integrated into custom routes rather than individually through the DLS.
My Trainz world is an imaginary world with my own custom stock and routes - not unusual I imagine.
World Tour does not meet my needs.
A very different product philosophy yet it is still called Trainz.
In recent years NV3 have been moving towards locking out end users (as opposed to content creators) from casual object and asset editing for their own use. The advent of Trainzmesh has made any form of content modification or alteration by users impossible, and reskinning difficult. PEV Attachment Maker no longer functions although, for now, there are ways around this.
It would seem to me that NV3 is moving towards a closed Trainz system with routes, sessions, rollingstock and assets integrated into custom routes rather than individually through the DLS.
My Trainz world is an imaginary world with my own custom stock and routes - not unusual I imagine.
World Tour does not meet my needs.
I can see a clear need for custom routes with included sessions, rolling stock and assets, etc for mobile and gaming platforms (XBox, Nintendo, etc) but where is your evidence for claiming that N3V seem to be moving towards this for desktop platforms and bypassing the DLS? Certainly the DLC routes and sessions for desktops are customised this way but they provide a particular product for users who do not want to spend the time/effort creating their own routes and sessions, or lack the necessary skills to do so.
Products evolve over time and that almost invariably means that they become more complex. You have to ask why have N3V introduced more complex meshes, PBR textures for object and ground surfaces, LODs, imposters (and the creation of imposters seems to be done automatically "in game"), etc? The answer is consumer demand for better graphics, more realism and improved performance. That usually means that many of the older simpler assets that worked well in the earlier Trainz versions are no longer suitable or acceptable.
If the latest versions of Trainz are demanding that assets must meet higher standards and are more difficult for the average hobbyist user to create then there is a solution - stay with the older less demanding Trainz versions.
My thoughts.
Products evolve over time and that almost invariably means that they become more complex. You have to ask why have N3V introduced more complex meshes, PBR textures for object and ground surfaces, LODs, imposters (and the creation of imposters seems to be done automatically "in game"), etc? The answer is consumer demand for better graphics, more realism and improved performance. That usually means that many of the older simpler assets that worked well in the earlier Trainz versions are no longer suitable or acceptable.
If the latest versions of Trainz are demanding that assets must meet higher standards and are more difficult for the average hobbyist user to create then there is a solution - stay with the older less demanding Trainz versions.
My thoughts.
This also means the older ways of creating simpler assets are no longer valid. The new ways are similar but are more complex requiring more sophisticated modeling, sometimes more expensive tools, and a lot more experience.
AI, not the Trainz driver kind, may help in this regard but I'm not so sure. The number of iterations required by AI software to create something useful verges on the realm of it being easier to learn the software and create the model by hand, much faster, and with better results than it is to waste CPU power and time. In the end, what AI generates will still require a ton of clean up to produce something useful.
The word "apparently" is missing from my assertion.
Consider, however, maintaining and developing two iterations of Trainz - each with quite different approaches to game play and separate asset bases.
Even with outsourcing content and sub-contracting core coding rather than using in-house teams, this doesn't seem to be a good long term business model.
Providing and maintaining the DLS long term in its present form is a relatively costly enterprise compared to a discrete in-house database.
In any case, the initial presentation of three yawn inducing, seen it all before routes, from already overrepresented countries doesn't bode well for a real 'World Tour' of the Worlds railways. I won't be holding my breath in anticipation of routes form Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaya, Myanma for example - let alone whole continents like Africa and South America.
Not necessarily. I suspect that the market for this product is likely to be people who are new to railway simulators and/or those whose approach to gaming is simply "plug and play". Just because we, as seasoned Trainz users, have seen it all before does not mean that everyone else will find it yawn inducing. In any case I welcome N3V moving into new markets with Trainz, even if it is a cut down or even a "crippled" version, because it will almost certainly lead to some of those customers making the leap to the "Big Boys and Girls" version.
As I have posted before, the mobile and console gaming market is a bigger money earner than desktop gaming so any game developer would be mad to ignore it.
Apart from the numerous spam posts from Vietnam, those regions are underrepresented as well in these forums. There are also few routes available on the DLS, at least as far as I have been able to identify, which would indicate that few creators exist from those places. Most of the countries you listed and those in Africa and Sth America are classified as "third world" so economic factors (the cost of owning a PC, lack of time and opportunities, etc) may explain this. So a worthwhile market may not (yet) exist there.
World Tour is something I will pass on because you can't create routes. If this game is anything like steams PS game's, it's not that easy to run and operate. Hopefully N3V will produce the Xbox or PS versions that will enable people to create routes not just drive or do sessions.
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