Hello again! Id just like to clarify some points. First, I said 'we' because I just put whatever words came to my head first. Secondly, I wouldn't mind fairly frequent products, but both TMR and TD2016 just seemed a little unneeded. Regardless, I have seen that I may be wrong. Nice to have a discussion though. Also, two minutes is obvious exaggeration.
Regards to all posters,
Lightningagent
It appears that you don't quite understand how businesses work, and in particular those that sell products or services. N3V basically has a single product called T:ANE. These other products are based on the same underlying technology with various parts enabled or disabled, or with other features not found in the other products. This is not unknown as it gives the company additional products to sell even though they use some of the underlying technology of the other. With technology being the same across multiple products, updating one can also mean updating the others too without needing to start from scratch.
N3V is not unique in this regard. Microsoft has done it for years. Think about their various Windows versions such as XP Home versus Professional, or Windows 2000 Server versus Windows 2000 Professional. The same with automobile manufacturers. You can get a Chevy Camaro with a blue body, big engine, smaller engine, silvery wheels, black wheels, and so many other components mixed and matched in packages. The same with red ones or silver ones with various optional packages. These too is based around a base product and have some features which are unique to that particular model, but for the most part include most of what's in the base product.
In the past I worked for a video terminal manufacturer which had a dozen different models. Each terminal product shared the same basic chassis, keyboard, and CRT, but had a different motherboard. Motherboards too had sub-models based on that particular model. Using their small terminal products as an example, the Visual V-50, V-55, and V-65 were all based around the same chassis, CRT, motherboard, and keyboard. The difference was the firmware which changed the features, for example. What's interesting is these used the same keyboard and CRT found on their CP/M-based V-1050 personal computer, and exactly the same keyboard found on the V-102-series products.
Using Chevy again as an example, if you wanted a red Camaro with silvery wheels, but they only sold blue ones with black wheels, they would lose that sale. Making variations and sub-products gives the manufacturer multiple products while using the same underlying core.
Back to T:ANE products before we get too far lost.
TD2016 is Driver only.
This product works well for those people that are not interested in building huge routes and fiddling with content. It works well too for children who are interested in driving only. Last year, in June actually, I was at a train show and demonstrated a route which is in progress. We had various visitors, who looked at the WIP route, which was for a specific project and future museum demonstration. On my laptop I also had the full version of T:ANE with all my content as well as the route which was being worked on.
People would see the demonstration videos, and then of course ask how "We did it". I would then segue to T:ANE, start it up (it was already minimized), and poke around various routes, and let people see how we build them. There were quite a number of young children there including some who are quite familiar with Trainz. One young lad, probably around 8 years old said "Oh that's Trainz! Cool! I have that at home." I then let him drive the route in progress. He knew how to go about it. There were other people that came in who were not as astute on the product, but they had fun anyway after some coaxing.
Among the crowd, the word crowd being use rather liberally here, was a very severely mentally disabled young man. He loved trains and loved watching them. His caretaker, probably him mum, said he doesn't have the coordination to build stuff but likes to drive them and has Railworks (some version). She then asked me about T:ANE and I told her about the Driver products. The young man had no problems driving and was quite happy using one of the external cameras to watch the trains pass by the view.
TMR2017
It appears you haven't been here for long, but if you were to look back at various Trainz versions, in fact look at some of the product lines associated with some of us here. You will see Trainz Classics 1&2, and in some cases Trainz Classics 3. These too are a subset of the full Trainz versions. They came with the full product, but contained a specific and small amount of content only for the routes that were sold with the product. Classics 1&2 was based around passenger operations in the greater New York City metro region while Classics 3 was based around UK rail operations and came with its own version of the Settle and Carlisle route.
These sub-versions too are based around the same game engines which were available at the time of their release with Classics 1&2 being closer to TRS2006, and Classics 3 being TS2009. They may contain some newer features which put them in between, such as the TMR2017 being slightly ahead of T:ANE at its release, but they are essentially the same products.
This too is a niche product based on a Pre-SP2 game engine. This product was aimed at those who want to build stuff based around a model railroad theme without the larger quantity of huge routes which comes with T:ANE. Since it is essentially T:ANE, people can and do import as much content, including large routes if they want.
There's a lot more I could say on this, but I think this drives home the important points we've been discussing.
