This is a very old topic, but I guess the powers that be are probably still mooting the idea of a subscription service. If so, my two cents:
With a "Subscription Only Service", if I had to let it lapse, I imagine I would be "bombed out" of the game and that is why I would like those that sit around the "round table", and kick the commercial ideas around, to consider the impact on the entire customer base and not just those with good careers and healthy finances. As we know from this forum, we have people from all walks of life among us - as well as wealthy professionals, we have schoolchildren, retired people, people with long-term sickness issues, people "between jobs" etc. so keeping our hobby both affordable and enjoyable is essential.
Thank you.
The idea of the Subscription-Only-Service is for multi-player/multi-user access for Surveyor and will not affect the main program, which according to the powers to be say will work just as we have grown to love and hate with Trainz as it's been around since its beginnings.
During the testing, as a member of the Trainz Dev group, I had the opportunity to "test" the multiuser aspect of Surveyor. This was quite interesting and worked well for a test, though it did crash due to various technical issues which still need to be worked out. In some ways this is like those early airplane tests where a wing design goes together only to find the plane on the ground way too fast! The ability to work on a route and then let someone else work on an area was quite interesting, though we were limited to a small content set of built-in assets.
The potential here for such a program is obvious, especially for those that are involved in large collaborative projects where a route in its multitude of versions gets passed back and forth between users before coming to fruition. Having been involved in a couple of such projects, I can see this kind of addition to be more than welcome. With the multiple versions existing on various PCs, among various users, there's that bigger chance that a wrong version gets passed along, or something gets lost along the way. With everything in one place, the difference is obvious.
As far as being a permanent way of doing things, we were told no that's not the case. We can use T:Next, or whatever it'll be called, just as we use T:ANE now and have used Trainz in all other previous iterations. When anyone wants to work on a bigger project, they can subscribe to the multiuser Surveyor option. When the route is completed, it's downloaded and used locally just as we do today. The subscription only is active as long as the service is used or needed. With that in mind, I can only barely fathom the infrastructure needed on the server side to support the operations of something like this, thus, the necessity of a subscription to subsidize the cost.
With this in mind, I see this as a VR model railroad club which fits right in the sub-product TMR2017 in that vein.
As Tony mentioned recently in the newsletter a few weeks ago, the data changes made in the latest T:ANE version with all those data chunks takes this type of operation into account so that the route data can be handled both locally as well as online, and to allow us to handle huge Trainz routes well beyond what our own PCs, generically speaking can handle.
