New version for PC?

Obirek-Your idea sounds somewhat inspired by OpenBVE. You have a good point, but who will host the DLS and the Forums? And where does payware come in to this? You say it shouldn't be for profit, so would payware be banned? And lastly, I don't think making Trainz solely for Linux is a good idea at all. Linux is currently a very small operating system with a small (but dedicated) user base, and most people would much rather run Windows as it is far easier to use.

The best way to determine PC usage is to also take into account sales of computer hardware parts. The burgeoning Taiwanese tech industry is one good example. Virtually every component in my machines at home are from Taiwan. I've never touched a branded box in my life and have built a handful of custom rigs for my friends, advising them to stay away from branded stuff. So, Kamran has a good point.

I would agree with the above. Ive only ever owned one branded pc and that was the biggest mistake Ive ever made. Ive alwasy built my own and had the satisfaction of knowing it will do what I want it to.

nicky9499 said:

I doubt people will be rushing to throw $50 on a TS12 SP2.

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You know what, if it fixed the majority of issues, I'd be willing to pay for premium support to get these issues addressed. When I spend $100 bucks on Jointed Rail assets, which are worth it BTW, or $70 for a route etc. $50 to have a tracked issue with a timeline and resources dedicated to fixing the bugs would be great as long as there was a commitment to fixing the issues within a reasonable amount of time, i.e., next service pack with say service packs coming out once a quarter for example.

wkwood said:

$50 to have a tracked issue with a timeline and resources dedicated to fixing the bugs would be great as long as there was a commitment to fixing the issues within a reasonable amount of time, i.e., next service pack with say service packs coming out once a quarter for example.

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In a perfect world where all is ideal and optimistic, yes. However, look at N3V's track record since 09. Chances are TS14 is going to come with a few fixes that should rightly have been in SP1, a couple more speedtrees, maybe one of the JR routes like RN or MWG, and more stuff from the DLS. Fixing the majority of issues? I wouldn't bet on it. In fact even if they did, they'd have to do far more than that to convince many people to buy TS14; what with having to deal with all their newly-broken older content and DRM.

Nicholas

Hi everybody.
I believe rsignal is correct in his advice regarding the diversification within the computer manufacture and marketing industries. However, I also believe that there is also a diversification in the use of those computers between us Europeans and Americans users especially when it comes to the operation within businesses.

From all I have observed America and many other countries the car is still the premier source of middle-distance transport with airlines having a large role in long distance journeys. In Europe and especially Britain the distances are not so great and in that the railways have re-established themselves and are once again at the centre of personal commuter transport with business travel being at the heart of that.

The reason for the above as I have stated many times on the forum is that people can work on trains which is something you cannot do when driving a car. The train can become your temporary office while travelling which allows you to send and receive emails, preparing notes and briefings for meetings etc you are travelling to and talk to customers. On return journeys you can compile reports which can be in the office before you actually arrive back through the use of the trains on-board Wi-Fi or the 3G and 4G connection of their phone, tablet or less likely these days laptop.

Commercial organisations are no longer willing to accept that an employee will spend many hours in his car travelling to and from meetings or briefings which is total downtime to the company when he/she can use that time productively and increase the efficiency and competitiveness of the employer that they are working for.

The above said, when it comes down to what those business travellers and others will use for the above communications well, anyone who has ever travelled on Britain’s overcrowded railways would not wish to hump a heavy laptop around the network or through such places as the London Underground. Therefore tablets or smartphones such as the calibre of Samsung’s Galaxy note are the order of the day. As rsignal advised they are not perfect (nothing ever is) but they can be used even while standing on a train and with the amount of practice in those situations that we get you soon learn to achieve the next best thing to perfect results (lol).

Being fully productive while travelling means that people do not need to use their PCs at home or in their offices in the same way and at the same level as they have previously. Therefore those outlets for the PC manufacturers are closed off as they are not so often renewed. The widespread use of tablets especially while travelling has brought forward a new market for low-cost throwaway games that has become practically a new industry in itself.

High level gaming such as simulation has always benefited from manufacturers such as Intel continuous development of components for the PC mass-market. They now have been significantly hit by the catastrophic (for them) drop in PC sales. Therefore even for those who build their own PCs, you have to ask the question where are those chips and other components to come from if companies such as Intel and others walk away.

By the way, I still think that it will be the smart TV that will in the near future takeover or integrate with the PC as I feel they will have the power and graphic capability to run high-end gaming.

Bill

obirek said:

I believe the best future for Trainz would be to make it an open source, controlled and developed not by a profit-driven software company, but by world-wide community of virtual rail enthusiasts. Everyone could contribute, according to their abilities. With thousands of Trainz assets available for download for free, it is time to ask ourselves the question - What is more important, the canvas made by an artist or the wall on which to hang it?

As Microsoft puts more constraints on application developers with each new Windows release, the obvious choice of the operating system and working environment should be Linux. It could be possible to even optimize the kernel, just to allow best performance. Asset development could involve strict compilation and version control system, like git or similar, configuration file could be done in XML, etc.

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Yes! That is exactly what I was thinking. Open Source on a Linux platform. I am pretty much disgusted with Windows 7. I have shut down many of the services that it has running by default because I have no use for them, and they are just overhead that take up CPU cycles and memory. And when I went and installed a trial copy of Windows 8 (as 3rd boot) I uninstalled it a few hours later because I realized that Windows 8 is total garbage, unless all you are interested in doing is web surfing, and watching videos. It appeared to me during that brief test-drive of Windows 8 that it was designed for touch-screen "casual" users, and definitely not gamers.
I do not believe that we are going to see the demise of the PC all that soon, but I have to agree that Smart TV would be the next best thing. At least it has the display size and power, and plenty of upgrade options. I can't begin to imagine how (or why) anyone would want to play Trainz on a handheld device. I would never be happy with the lack of processing power and small screen size on a SmartPhone. My main interest in TS is large routes with lots of detail, and trains running simultaneously. Perhaps someday, when Quantum computing comes along and goes mainstream, we can have the power of today's PC in a handheld. But then we would need 3D headsets to view the games. Better yet, we could have the video output coupled directly into our brains!

I'm wondering whether the drop in PC sales is at least partly due to gamers building their own PC's from components. My guess is that the statistics are based on complete PC system sales, not the sale of MOBO's, memory, CPU's, etc.

FW

nicky9499 said:

In a perfect world where all is ideal and optimistic, yes. However, look at N3V's track record since 09. Chances are TS14 is going to come with a few fixes that should rightly have been in SP1, a couple more speedtrees, maybe one of the JR routes like RN or MWG, and more stuff from the DLS. Fixing the majority of issues? I wouldn't bet on it. In fact even if they did, they'd have to do far more than that to convince many people to buy TS14; what with having to deal with all their newly-broken older content and DRM.

Nicholas

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Well yes, backward compatibility is a good thing too.

At least give people a heads up before breaking features or functionality when fixing other things or making design decisions mid-stream that negatively affect the customers. That's how software organizations around the world do it unless they're 800lb gorillas like Microsoft, Google, IBM or Apple.

this topic is going kinda off topic, this is trainz, NOT computer class.

The next release will be more pretty content and error checking. Nothing more. Until they pop the hood, all they can do is institute new error checking routines to milk the old game engine out and sell DLS access. I feel N3V is becoming a content provider through DLS access.*
The had it right with TC.
2009 introduced the 5m grid. Good job.
Signaling was improved. Good job again.*
2010 and Speedtrees? Have you ever seen a real tree before?*
TS12, pretty JointedRail content and more error checking routines.*
Come on, man. You started out well with 2009. Give us real track tools like RailWorks. Its 2013, still those ugly turnouts? I would put Mezzoprezzo's TRS2004 routes up against any train simulator and twice on Sunday. (My apologies for misspelling his name) Stop this shift to content, DLS and error checking to milk the old program out. Trainz leads the pack in content available, AI and ease of route building. This error checking and version garbage is beyond old.
Get back to what made this program great and build on it.*

Was my latest post removed by admin, or did it never post?
does anyone recall having read a post by me dated August 26?

Referring to the Open Source suggestion, N3V are unlikely to divest their commercial interest to freeware or abandonware they would be more likely to sell the rights to an associate or other developer capable of carrying on the work. Also OpenBVE didn't fare too well. After a cracking few months, the person leading the project and doing the coding pulled the plug and it collapsed like a house of cards. There was talk of others taking over the work but I haven't seen much evidence of progress. A shame as it had great potential and I still use it to drive my collection of BVE routes and trains rather than original (Mackoy) BVE but I think history makes the point that Open Source is not the way to go if you want a professional, structured development cycle.

I don't see the PC going away for a long long time. There just isn't a substitute for it yet. I have an Android Tablet which sort of runs Trainz, but can't give a quarter of the functionality required to do route-building easily.

As regards earlier comments about there being dozens of other PC games with far greater demands on graphics resources than TS2010/12, and the issues about not enough testing for the patch releases, I want to point out how few of the other games allow the high degree of user-created content that we enjoy. When you're developing code, you have to be realistic about how much testing you can do. If you're offering the sort of add-to-the-pot ability that Trainz does, all you can do is test the interfaces that content-creators are going to use and stick to the guidelines that submitted content *should* adhere to.

I've spent years working on and with Linux as well as Windows. Linux always gives me the feeling of being in a bad dream where every time you try and do something, there's a twist or a gotcha that means it never quite works right.

I use lots of opensource code, and one thing strikes me about it, the very best of it always has some idea of a direction to go in that makes business sense, even if they're a not-for-profit organisation. N3V do at least have an idea of where their business is going, and if they want us to continue to be their customers, I'm sure they themselves will go in the best direction for the greatest number of us.

wholbr said:

Hi John and everybody.
I would agree with you that at present tablet and smartphone trainz version does not match up in any way to the PC version. Tablets are now matching up to laptops for general duties such as emails, office reports and not to mention easily finding where you are in a strange city. Anyone who has ever lugged a heavy laptop through the London Underground or any mainline terminal station in Britain will thank the powers that be for producing tablets. With cloud storage and all trains in Britain now equipped with Wi-Fi you no longer need large amounts of storage on the tablet you are carrying. Also developments in speech to text software are largely doing away with the need for any sort of keyboard on higher spec tablets.

However, as I stated in my earlier posting I do believe that smart TVs will take over from PCs when it comes to heavier duties such as gaming. Samsung, LG and Sony already produce apps that can control their smart TVs from your tablet or smart phone. These are available from such places as Google play free of charge. Therefore if a smart TV version of trainz or any other simulator game came about, I feel that smart TVs now (or certanly will have in the very near future) the graphic and memory capabilities to handle such an application along with the tablet and smartphone apps to control the simulator.

Arguably, that I feel will be the way forward for computing and gaming into the future. The price of smart TVs is rapidly falling although the highest spec versions can cost up to £6000 here in the UK. However, as long as you do not wish to have 3D etc, multicore versions are available at much lower cost and as stated that cost is falling.

It may be that in 10 years time we will be commiserating over the demise of Microsoft and the PC. But it is an ever-changing world and one that belongs to those who can embrace those changes and make them to their advantage.

Microsoft out, Samsung and LG in ?

Bill

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Smart TV's are very limited, because the technology changes so fast, nobody will think about replacing their smart TV with a more up to date version, when a TV can easily last 5 years or more. Boxes like Roku, Apple TV, the New Google Chromecast which can be purchased for $35 is the wave of the future. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2013/07/30/google-chromecast-review/2598153/

IlfaGoods said:

I've spent years working on and with Linux as well as Windows. Linux always gives me the feeling of being in a bad dream where every time you try and do something, there's a twist or a gotcha that means it never quite works right.

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I usually get the same feeling when working with Linux (Ubuntu 10.x). The simple task (simple in Windows) of installing an app becomes like a dream - slow, and convoluted. Of course there are plenty of exceptions if the developer has taken the time to code the install process into a nice little package, but sometimes it's just so painful.

You have an excellent point in that Trainz allows so much flexibility for user created objects and scripting. So I guess one can't have his cake and eat it too...
I still enjoy working in Surveyor more than just driving trains.

FW

Robert2d6 said:

Smart TV's are very limited, because the technology changes so fast, nobody will think about replacing their smart TV with a more up to date version, when a TV can easily last 5 years or more. Boxes like Roku, Apple TV, the New Google Chromecast which can be purchased for $35 is the wave of the future. http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/baig/2013/07/30/google-chromecast-review/2598153/

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Your future is already here. If you want to play games on your telly, hook it up to your PC with a HDMI cable. Have your cake and eat it too. Simple.

But the Big Apple is king in Oz so goodbye P.C.

(Just don't tell N3V that the big apple is not so hot in the rest of the world (except on the B.B.C. T.V. channel!)).

Regards.
CaptEngland.

What about 3D Trainz? I have a video card that supports something called Stereoscopic 3D. It's NVidia GeForce 9800 GTX. I haven't yet determined exactly what Stereoscopic 3D is, and i don't believe any of my apps are using it, but when I disabled the service in Win 7 some video would not display. I don't recall that Trainz TS12+SP1 was affected though.
I would like to research this a bit further. Maybe I could have TS rendered in 3D.

FW

Approach_Medium said:

What about 3D Trainz? I have a video card that supports something called Stereoscopic 3D. It's NVidia GeForce 9800 GTX. I haven't yet determined exactly what Stereoscopic 3D is, and i don't believe any of my apps are using it, but when I disabled the service in Win 7 some video would not display. I don't recall that Trainz TS12+SP1 was affected though.
I would like to research this a bit further. Maybe I could have TS rendered in 3D.

FW

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3D Trainz is done through a setting with your video card and a driver add-on as supplied by NVidia. What the stereoscopic mode does is superimpose two images that are offset slightly. They are two different colors such as blue and red and the images are viewed through special colored glasses. This is the same technology that is used for the old 3d-movies and similar to that used on some 3d capable televisions today.

Is it any better? I tried it once and it didn't work well for me because I can't see the images very well due to double-vision issues which split the images apart instead of bringing them together. Instead of seeing a 3d world, I see two separate colored images that jump together and pull apart!

John

Ive tried the 3d version. It was fun and kinda interesting to use but it did mean wearing the blue/red glasses.