While we all look back with rosy glasses, I can say once we start remembering what the programs were like to operate, our glasses become very scratched and cloudy. Not one version of Trainz ever ran 100% well. There was always some annoyance to bugger up the installation in one way or another. To make matters worse, some of these same bugaboos are still there. We still have the same AI driving issues, glitches, and things that the developers seem to ignore when a new shiny version or update comes out. They act as though the wires burning in the wiring closet are of no concern while they put in a brand-new lighting system.
I started with TRS2004 SP1 in December 2003. I was excited and it worked more or less out of the box on my potato of a PC most of the time. TRS2004 also crashed and crashed a lot due to faulty assets and lack of error checking in addition to program bugs.
Driving a route and then receiving a blue screen or an "error occurred" message was disheartening to say the least. This was worse when editing a route and having it CTD before the save. Oh wait, saving was hit or miss. Clicking on Save meant there was an error message and a CTD, therefore we had to use Save As to save any work. This worked most of the time. Exiting was fun too. There was usually a GPF error and sometimes a blue screen.
TRS2006 was fun. Prior to SP1, it was extremely unstable to a point where just looking at it the wrong way would cause it to crash. Installing SP1 meant installing everything from scratch because if your ran TRS2006 prior to SP1 being installed, that would corrupt the program completely. The added error checking threw a lot of people into a tizzy but that did get us started toward fewer crashes and into the direction where content is today.
TS2009 was an awesome upgrade. To this day, this was one of my favorites because it still handled all the old stuff fine, had the upgrades for engine scripts, and had better graphics. There were some odd bugs but nothing as bad as those in TRS2004 or TRS2006.
TS2010 was another good version. They introduced Speed Trees and a compatibility layer to allow older billboard trees to load up and not look like invisible ghosts. The performance was pretty good, but there were some really weird bugs.
Splines in space! After placing a mo-crossing asset or fixed-track assets such as an interactive industry and connecting tracks, everything was fine until the route was reopened the next day. The splines would fly out of these objects an go off into the sky in large arcs to connect to objects placed elsewhere on a route. I became pretty adept at disconnecting and reconnecting track until the SPs came out to fix it.
The other nifty bug was all the track objects would fly down the tracks to another spline point located somewhere down the line when another spline point was inserted. After inserting a switch or a spline point, we had to look for all the speed limits, whistle posts, bridge abutments and signals, delete them and place them back where they should be. One day, I found about 20 speed limit signs stacked against a bridge along with 15 signals and bridge abutments that didn't belong to that bridge.
Once these bugs were fixed, TS2010 proved to be a good workhorse and then TS12 arrived.
Initially, TS12 was quite nice and offered some nice improvements. The weird things in TS2010 were gone and the program was stable. I can't say anything bad about the original release other than I had to repair a bunch-o-content again after doing this multiple times from TS2009 and TS2010 after each update.
Then they updated to SP1 to lockdown DLC and to add in TADDaemon content validation off of the DLS server and some graphics improvements. The Jet Engine by this point was old and what N3V was attempting with it was like trying to update and add modern electronics and features to a '66 Dodge Dart. These modern features, such as load behind the camera, etc., caused TS12 to become a slow clumsy program. Add to that the hours of asset validating by TADDaemon, and many users were ready to walk. It took four hotfixes to bring TS12 to where it ended and even still the system hog of a validation made the program a horror show. Yet, when the program worked, it worked well and routes loaded up and ran for many hours.
T:ANE was the new kid on the block with all kinds of new features. Many of these features are finally appearing 14 years later, but they were excitedly demo'd and shown around to entice us. The initial release came out way too soon in a rush probably to meet a contractual agreement with their publisher. Sadly, this put T:ANE into the same bad light as Colossal Order's City Skylines 2 with the crashes, bugs, and unfinished features. It took five service packs before T:ANE became useful and even still it's not quite there. By the time SP5 came out, I had moved on to TS19.
The initial release TS19 was nice. The lighting is awful but with a bit of fiddling it was doable and routes ran quite well including old ones. Then N3V started adding "features" which mucked up that one too. Sometimes, leaving something alone is a good thing.
Like TRS19, TRS22's initial release was a good one. They had fixed the bugs in TRS19 and again, things should've been left alone. The "improvements" in TRS22, TRS22PE, and Plus, have taken a good product and brought it down to a frustrating mess. There are constant problems for everyone, unexpected crashes and unexplainable issues. N3V spends more time now adding in features instead of repairing the problems that plague the product. This makes me wonder where we will stand when the new TRS2026 comes out sometime in the future.
Well, that's my take and experience with Trainz products. Would I go back to the early days? Probably not. I have older versions installed including TS2009. I've used this to convert routes to bring them into TRS-Plus and for testing purposes. While I use them, I have a bit of nostalgia as I think about the time when I first installed the programs. They're fun to use at first before the glaring bugs show their heads again.
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