I understand that but why was it put out with so many silly small problems? See my reply to John Citron
It's called meeting pre-existing publishing contracts and obligations, plus setting a too optimistic release date. It happens all the time with software and not just games. Sadly, the end result for us was a poor product that needs more than a few bandages and wire to work better. To be honest I would have delayed the release a bit more, but then who knows what terms N3V had to meet, and also the additional cost of the extra workers N3V had to incur in the process as well. In other words, there's a lot more going on here than we see from a far.
That said, I have discovered a lot of things while bringing in my own content, and tons of older content I have in TS12 into T:ANE. Badly created content really can cause awful performance and crashes. A good example is some of the scripts. These can come in without obvious errors reported in Content Manager, however, they have internal errors which cause odd behaviours and random crashes to the desktop. This happens because T:ANE is following the written standard, based on what the content creators are supposed to follow. TS12 was a bit more forgiving with these errors, and probably introduced some of these holes, as they are called, which the content-creator used. The problem is once a new version of software comes along, these holes are closed as they are considered bugs in the code so now the content doesn't work as intended. This happens all the time in software and was explained to me many years ago by my retired MIT graduate uncle.
These kinds of errors are called semantical errors, which means the words are spelled correctly and make sense, however, their actual intention is not working properly. This type of error is quite common while making older things work in a new version of software, whether this is Trainz or not.
By badly created content, I don't mean stuff that's simple and has older textures. I mean stuff that was created with the intention of cheating the error reporting in TS12. Yes, there are some assets, I came across 2000-plus of them, where the author cheated the LOD or Level of Detail requirements by using the same base mesh for each level. T:ANE didn't ignore this and rejected all 2.000-plus of the assets in one lot. TS12 was a bit kinder and ignored the error, however, this meant a big performance hit in that version.
Let me explain LOD or Level Of Detail a bit so you'll understand what I mean here. LOD means that each object has a smaller less detailed mesh associated with it that is displayed out at a certain distance from the main (parent) object. Take a locomotive for example. If a locomotive has 150,000 polygons with high detailed textures, it will be chopped down to 80% of that level of detail and fewer textures 500 meters away, then at 1Km it's now 50%, and so on until at the furthest distance, the locomotive is nothing more than a few textures on a flat surface.
Without this decimation of the locomotive, the game would stutter along, and possibly crash while attempting to load in the full locomotive all the time. In TS12 and even in T:ANE where the LOD is there, but not optimized, models will suddenly pop up. This sudden popping up causes awful performance as the simulator has to stop and load the fully detailed object at every turn, move, and camera change.
While I'm not blaming the content creators for this, it is their content that causes many of the problems we are seeing. Unfortunately, it's going to take time to bring assets up to better performing standards. The LOD issue I mentioned is only one of the many things that can occur. In addition to this, there are problems with assets being just too complex and overly built. Those Sketch-up buildings are good example. They sure look pretty, but with all their gazillion parts and high mesh polygons (wire frame bits), they can drag the system down. With too many of these, and the program really performs poorly.
Outside of the content, we also do have some internal bugs. They are not always the cause of the crashing, but don't help matters much either. From what I was told, these are very difficult to find because it's not always what you are doing that causes the error. As I mentioned to others, it's like coming in the door from work or the pub only to be blamed by the spouse or mother-in-law for something you didn't know you did! The good news on this front is the N3V guys have an idea what's going on at least with the crashes to the desktop. Sure we may have these crashes in many areas, but being how everything is intertwined together, they can fix the problem in one place, and let's keep our fingers crossed, this will also fix the same problem elsewhere.
That said, finding out what's going on and improving the performance takes time, and sadly lots of it. What we don't want is a rushed patch as I mentioned before. We've lived through this not only with TRS2004, but later on with TS12, going from SP1 to HF4 as the hot fixes "fixed" things that the service pack broke, but it took 4 additional patches to do just that.
John