I'm taking the liberty to announce that the Romanian Trainz fandom has a new HUB. ROVI-Rail.
Unlike all the sites that have existed and still exist in our country up to now, ROVI-Rail is centered around the community and the players, not on a specific team in content creators. There are more than 20 people that pitched in with various kinds of contributions. We have been live for about 2 years, but only now do we feel we've reach a maturity worth sharing with the international community.
Over the past 2 years, together with my collaborators we have initiated talks with all the people who ever created Romanian-themed content for any version of Trainz. We shared our vision and obtained approval to freely distribute their content. Right now we have over +600 assets consisting of locomotives, (roughly 350 reskins), freight carriages and passenger coaches. We have also found old routes, and convinced shy creators to publish new ones.
This content has not all been uploaded....yet. We aimed to fix it and make 100% sure it's complete and works in TS12. We aimed to index it, and write down the creator, the kuid, the technical data. Basically, we're creating a content library and giving everyone filters to choose what they look for based on loco type, loco class, operator, home depot, era etc.
Furthermore, we want to become an educational hub, so part 2 of the project is to fill in the site with information for the fresh railfan, so that people can learn about the history and the curiosities of romanian rolling stock.
Phase 3 of the plan, when we will have had everything in order for TS12 will be checking, fixing, and re-uploading this content with TANE compatibility.
Our end game with this project is to grow the Romanian community. People here were not generally accustomed to paying for games, or payware content. That is why in the past, many great creators left our community and strayed towards other simulators, or just generally gave up. We have had many misunderstandings due to copyright infringement, payware content getting distributed without permission, and generally people just being rude to each other.
I've been Trainz-ing since 2006, and lived through most of that, on-and-off. That is why today, I see a new generation of creators, and through the ROVI-Rail project we aim to support them by providing this free library of older content, giving them technical support, tutorials and help with troubleshooting.
If you want to see our community grow, or even better, want to help us grow and support our movement, you can follow us on facebook, or join our forum!
Thank you for your time! I will continue to post updates in this thread, and answer questions, share thoughts and ides about this project with anyone interested!
Best regards,
Sabin
