Congratulations, Peter!
That's quite an anniversary. It's truly amazing how fast time goes by when involved in projects. What is truly amazing is the continuous interest in the same product, which is unlike many, many other programs on a computer system today. The fact that this program has remained, in its various iterations, for as long as it has on the systems is amazing as well. The only other programs which do that are Office like programs, or the operating system its self.
I've been with Trainz not quite as long, at a full 13 years on December 28th when I got my first copy of TRS2004 at the long gone CompUSA store. It cost $29.95 which was about average for most games in those days. The same games at that price are would be $50.00 US and up.
I too had MSTS at that time and tried as I could to make routes. It would crash randomly when I tried route building, and setting up activities as they're called, which made it very frustrating to use. During that time I picked up the Paint Shed product for MSTS but found it awkward to use, however, more importantly was the
www.auran.com web address on the package which I promptly took a look at. I was amazed at the models and the vibrant community. I remember the early discussions about the program being modular with and the idea of the now famous Puzzle pieces. Though not a member of the early forums, I watched from afar and read the various posts. I remember Greg Lane, John Banks, and many others at the time bantering back and forth about the early Trainz version. There was a lot of silly bantering back and forth as well as the serious talk, however, it was a warm and welcoming forum at the time.
Then the demo was released... I downloaded it immediately and gave it a whirl around. I found the simple British Rail loop track to be somewhat boring, but the graphics were "cool" and better compared to MSTS. The fact that I could easily modify that route and play around with it made it better, and the fact that I could take over any train and move around made things so much better than MSTS. And even better - I could create my own route easily, though my tests were really, really crude. The problem though was my machine which would crash quite often due to my old ATI Radeon 8500 video card. I kept following Auran at the time and kept my fingers on the forum as a lurker. When TRS2004 was announced, I went for it and by then I had a new NVidia video card then which worked perfectly. The rest is history...
John
