Is Trainz Turning into the Next Railworks?

epa

Angry Trainz Nerd
We've all seen Railworks, right? Stunning graphics, but the game almost seems like it isn't worth the money. The reason why I say this is because Railworks is extremely buggy and every little bit of it costs money. The game itself is a great price ($9.99 at Wal-Mart) but you're dropping hundreds of dollars on content, updates, etc. I don't know if Railworks still has any affiliation with EA anymore, but it sounds like something our friends at EA would do, sell an unfinished game, and make people pay big bucks for everything, and the game only seems to run smoothly on high-end PC's.

Now onto the Trainz side of this rant/speech/discussion, T:ANE has been out for a few months now. I don't have T:ANE (as of the writing of this post), but I've heard stories. The graphics are absolutely amazing, but the game is full of bugs, glitches, and almost no older content works in it without some sort of modification to the content. Another known issue is, like Railworks, T:ANE only runs smoothly on High-End PC's. Recently, a member of this forum tried uploading something to the DLS for the latest version of TS12, but his assets were denied for no apparent reason. It almost seems like N3V is already trying to abandon TS12. Was this an attempt to phase out TS12, despite thousands of people still using it, or was it an attempt to draw more attention to N3V's ever-growing DLC shop, or was it simply a glitch on the DLS end?

What do you guys think?

Matt
 
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I have abandon Trainz and the content creating i don't care if it turns into railworks, goes to hell in a hand basket or ends up improving, just tired of all the natively built up.
 
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No it isn't............ Another totally pointless speculation thread. Have you people nothing better to do? This forum gets worse by the day.

It was either a DLS glitch or the creator made an error which is normally why things get rejected. I uploaded a lot of TS12 items last week no rejections.
 
Recently, a member of this forum tried uploading something to the DLS for the latest version of TS12, but his assets were denied for no apparent reason.

The only person with such an issue I know of has faulty scripts - or, more accurately, misreferenced ones - which I offered to take a look at.
 
Hi Matt --

" ... but the game is full of bugs, glitches, ... "

Yes, there are a few, but it's certainly not "full".

" ... and almost no older content works in it without some sort of modification to the content."

Absolute and complete nonsense. I've ported several of my TS12 routes acrioss into T:ANE and most of the older content will, in fact, work in T:ANE.

Go to youtube and search with "philskene". You will find videos of my routes in both T:ANE and earlier Trainz versions. You will see that most of the content is unchanged. But the graphics are considerably better.

"Another known issue is, like Railworks, T:ANE only runs smoothly on High-End PC's."

Yes, this is true. Unfortunately it's part of being a player in this game.

Phil
 
Another known issue is, like Railworks, T:ANE only runs smoothly on High-End PC's

The funny thing about "high end PCs" is that they become "low end" fairly quickly.

I bought a "high end" PC 5 years ago - all the right specs, enough RAM, a multicore Intel CPU and a "high end" GPU. It ran Trainz 2006, 2009, 2010 and TS12 beautifully. It came with XP which I upgraded, via Vista, to Win 7. Its CPU, however, was 32 bit and would not run Window 8.1 or 10. When its HDD finally gave up the ghost I decided to upgrade. It now lies on the floor acting as a support base for its replacement which is also a "high end" PC that has far more RAM, a top of the line (or very close to it) i7 CPU and an even better GPU (but not at the 970TI level) and it runs Win 8.1 and will run 10. It also runs T:ANE beautifully (better than its predecessor ran TS12) .

I have no doubt that in another 5 years (or even sooner) it too will become "low end" and have to be replaced.
 
The funny thing about "high end PCs" is that they become "low end" fairly quickly.

I bought a "high end" PC 5 years ago - all the right specs, enough RAM, a multicore Intel CPU and a "high end" GPU. It ran Trainz 2006, 2009, 2010 and TS12 beautifully. It came with XP which I upgraded, via Vista, to Win 7. Its CPU, however, was 32 bit and would not run Window 8.1 or 10. When its HDD finally gave up the ghost I decided to upgrade. It now lies on the floor acting as a support base for its replacement which is also a "high end" PC that has far more RAM, a top of the line (or very close to it) i7 CPU and an even better GPU (but not at the 970TI level) and it runs Win 8.1 and will run 10. It also runs T:ANE beautifully (better than its predecessor ran TS12) .

I have no doubt that in another 5 years (or even sooner) it too will become "low end" and have to be replaced.

A 5-year cycle is actually pretty good. Most people are moving to 3-years before upgrading. It sounds like you plan like I do to squeeze the biggest ROI out of the equipment before upgrading or doing the trickle down. You probably would be in shock to see my extensive collection of now obsolete machines in my basement. The good news is there are some processes which can't use a fast machine so we've had a chance to find homes for the perfectly working, though older equipment. My brother recently rebuilt an older P3 we still had on the shelf. The machine has now become a CNC controller for an engraving machine. His customer had tried to use a newer PC that had a PCI slot, but the buss speed was too fast for the controller cards. The old P3 came to the rescue.

John
 
Yes, this rings lot of bells to me. Either WE, the users are old hat (they tell us) or our machines are outdated. NEITHER IS TRUE, OR EVEN CLOSE TO BEING TRUE. As they say, everything is in the eye of the beholder ? and everyone wants us to buy the biggest and fastest PC we can afford, usually from them.

Old machines, and indeed OLD PROGRAMMERS, still have their place, and we know a few things these new generation Mickeysh....quailified developers have no clue about. They still believe that everything that come out of 1. Microsoft Way must be totally perfect, bug free and totally reliable. OH DEAR ME HOW MISGUIDED ARE THEY.

ALL SOFTWARE has bugs, it is inherent in the system, but whe "they" rely on xxx.NET or whatever to utterly foolproof the deceive themselves really badly. A classic example of that was Winfax, that was totally destroyed by Mickeys.....t changing the rules on the libraries he provided for all their support stuff, and as we all may remember if you can go that far back, XP SP3 was the COMPLETE DEATH of WINFAX.

I only know this because I released a new networked fax system called NetcFax at that same moment in time as SP3 was released, and happily, I made a real killling with it in the US markets, who rely on faxing a great deal. (The source code for NetCfax is still for sale with copyright and IPR if you are interested ?). Still work on latest versions of Windows, but it is a 32 bit version right now, written in straight "C" but at 70+ I am a bit too too old to follow it up with 64 bit version, but the US still needs a good fax system, and there is still not one out there.

End of advert................................................ :)
 
I guess the only thing about having a 5 year old PC, as I do, is the knowledge that, sooner or later, something's going to give because the components are quite old and they've experienced a lot of heating. And if it's the motherboard or CPU or whatever, then basically you're going to have to buy a whole new system. My PC has given exemplary service, and works great with TS12, but every time I switch it on these days I'm half expecting it to give up the ghost.

What's the longest, I wonder, that people have got good service from their PCs? And with Trainz?

Paul
 
I guess the only thing about having a 5 year old PC, as I do, is the knowledge that, sooner or later, something's going to give because the components are quite old and they've experienced a lot of heating. And if it's the motherboard or CPU or whatever, then basically you're going to have to buy a whole new system. My PC has given exemplary service, and works great with TS12, but every time I switch it on these days I'm half expecting it to give up the ghost.

What's the longest, I wonder, that people have got good service from their PCs? And with Trainz?

Paul
Same here. My main PC has seen it days since 2007 or 2009, and I've got a lot out of it. My XP computer is on it's last legs, and probably will give out in the next year or so.
 
No, Railworks is now Train Simulator, for their next outing they will use the Unreal Engine 4, which graphically, will blow anything else away, in another year or two's time they will most probably also release the Sandbox Editor, which in effect will make it more like Trainz.

TS is published by Dovetail Games, they also have another game called Fishing that is already using the Unreal engine, check it out on youtube.
 
Snip....
What's the longest, I wonder, that people have got good service from their PCs? .....
Paul

I still fire up every now and then my Commodore Amiga 4000 and play some of the games I still have, like Frontier, First Encounter or Elite. I also still have an Amiga 1000, the first one, Amiga 2500 with a 40 MB hard disk in it which at the time would have cost some $400.00 plus and an Amiga 500. Just for nostalgic reasons as I think, in the days these Amigas were build, with multitasking, recognition of new devices installed, sound/music chip on board, SCSI hard disks etc., they were so technically advanced compared to Big Blue (IBM) and were running rings performance wise around any other PC at that time.

My Amiga 1000 came out in 1985 when I bought it, my other Amiga 4000 in 1992 and the others in between. Can anyone top that? Ah, the good old days, before sadly Commodore went broke. The best game machine at the time.

Oh, I forgot, I still have an IBM PC 486 as well, I need to solder a BIOS battery into it to get it going again.

VinnyBarb
 
58472744.jpg
 
I have 6 Commodore computers that's still work (or did the last time I dug one out and powered it up).
Two C-64's
Two C-128's
Two C-128Ds (one of which has been bumped up to a C-256).
Two 1 Gb hard drives for them.
Two gadgets that convert them to 16-bit machines at a (whomping) 10 Mhz, lol.
A whole box full of this--n-that for them.

Ben
 
Yes, this rings lot of bells to me. Either WE, the users are old hat (they tell us) or our machines are outdated. NEITHER IS TRUE, OR EVEN CLOSE TO BEING TRUE. As they say, everything is in the eye of the beholder ? and everyone wants us to buy the biggest and fastest PC we can afford, usually from them.

Old machines, and indeed OLD PROGRAMMERS, still have their place, and we know a few things these new generation Mickeysh....quailified developers have no clue about. They still believe that everything that come out of 1. Microsoft Way must be totally perfect, bug free and totally reliable. OH DEAR ME HOW MISGUIDED ARE THEY.

ALL SOFTWARE has bugs, it is inherent in the system, but whe "they" rely on xxx.NET or whatever to utterly foolproof the deceive themselves really badly. A classic example of that was Winfax, that was totally destroyed by Mickeys.....t changing the rules on the libraries he provided for all their support stuff, and as we all may remember if you can go that far back, XP SP3 was the COMPLETE DEATH of WINFAX.

I only know this because I released a new networked fax system called NetcFax at that same moment in time as SP3 was released, and happily, I made a real killling with it in the US markets, who rely on faxing a great deal. (The source code for NetCfax is still for sale with copyright and IPR if you are interested ?). Still work on latest versions of Windows, but it is a 32 bit version right now, written in straight "C" but at 70+ I am a bit too too old to follow it up with 64 bit version, but the US still needs a good fax system, and there is still not one out there.

End of advert................................................ :)

Winfax, which I used for some time had other issues too. First they had serious security holes that were never patched, and they never updated to then current security standards. When XP SP3 came along, which was all about security hole plugging the people at WinFax didn't upgrade and fell on the wayside.

Back in the mid-1990s, I used WinFax Pro at two different companies. The first was a life insurance company and the company used this to send off annuity results to their stockbrokers. I spent time setting up and configuring the machine, only to have to reconfigure it again when the software died because we had to change a modem. Oh it only supported specific modem brands at the time, and of course not the one we had and the only one they supported was no longer manufactured or supported.

Some time later at the other company that bought the software, they had gotten better with the modems, but their other big bug was never resolved. The owner setup an automatic fax to send out press releases to his clients. We setup the machine, tested it, and went home as it had to send overseas, and being in the US on the east coast it meant everyone was asleep when we were awake, etc. So on at night, and off we went. We came in the next day to find the machine had crashed. Why? WinFax had eaten up every bit of remaining hard drive space and crashed the machine. Instead of deleting the sent faxes, it kept the image in the temp folder. Sure this was great for a single fax, but with multiple faxes, it did not work. That version, by the way, had no option to turn that feature off. So with them going out with XP SP3 coming out was no loss to me after what they put me through twice.

I agree no software is perfect. It may appear that way, but in many ways we are quite lucky things run as well as they do. Things have gotten better since the earlier days of PCs, but still I find a good reboot periodically during the day does make a lot of things run better, including T:ANE. That .Net stuff... It's different. The best thing in there is PowerShell that is developed using it. I highly recommend taking a look at it too. Now if DOS had that level of batch commands it would have rivaled DEC VMS.

John
 
I've been playing RailWorks for about the last ten years and for about twenty years I've been regularly installing Trainz and very quickly removing it due to the apparent complexity and incomprehensibility. RailWorks is just driving around and performing actions according to scenario and that's it. Recently, I got tired of it and decided to take Trainz seriously. As it turned out, Trainz is a completely different game and it has trains in common with RailWorks, and that's all and nothing else in common. Trainz is not only a simulator but a strategy where it is possible to participate in everything that is happening and not just follow what was written earlier. I have played many different simulators (Ship, Construction ... I spent the most time in almost all racing games) and it always has performance difficulties and there are small bugs because as a rule it is created by a small group of enthusiasts and not by a large corporation.
 
But Trainz still lacks the basic ability to easily set up a player timetable and have the game automatically route you, maybe even dynamically.

Great for making model railways where you can assign the AI quite complex instructions and have them carry it out, but the single player game is still largely stuck in the early days of UTC.

And for freight, doesn't even begin to compare with Run 8, which also now has an excellent AI despatcher, where you can drop off cars at industry spurs and in a persistent game have these actually take time to load before collecting with a local trip back to the yard and forming into outgoing manifests.

We also now have Railroader which apart from not being able to create your own routes (yet) is also far superior IMHO to Trainz gameplay experience.
 
Run 8? Dipped my toe into Steam to look at all my programmes and bit the card to get latest (?) version of Rail Tycoon. This got me thinking of my start in our hobby, curse, journey into frustration, nirvana. no postcards or votes please.

I began with taking part in a railway game through a dedicated person GMing by mail. Players would be allocated a colour for company. We then drew a line from our main station onwards, these were posted to the GM who completed the turn and returned vial mail. Snail mail was effective! Well remember going into a post office in Iran
to send my Diplomacy turn by cable. "EngSFra army - etc."

Then there was..... ;);)
 
Run 8 is an independent train sim made by the people who used to be 3D Train Stuff (of MSTS add on fame). It is primarily aimed at simulating North American heavy freight operations, one you buy all the component routes their SoCal network stretches from Fresno and Bakersfield to Los Angeles and Seligman. Plus they have a few other areas covered. It's a good sim but as the developers publish it themselves you haven't got the convenience of buying through Steam and the various routes and loco/car DLC mount up to some serious money if starting from scratch.
 
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