After the big donation I gave for TANE...for which I never received what was promised to me. After buying many first class tickets and contributing many creations to the DLStation, I still have to dish out yet more money to stay involved in the hobby or deal with that embarrassingly slow download speeds... Not to mention that everybody and their mother is only seems to be interested in creating payware anymore, so if you want something with a hint of quality get ready to part with more of your money.
Name me a hobby these days that does not involve a continuous output of money to keep yourself going - even stamp collecting requires a constant supply of materials. We have had these discussions over the FCT before - servers and bandwidth still do not come cheap, despite cheaper technology and increased competition between suppliers.
My mother is not the least bit interested in Trainz and I have no interest in creating payware. It is too much of a hassle - you are expected to provide support 24/7 and then there are the tax issues. But I do not blame creators for wanting to make some money out of their hobby if they think that their work is good enough, and it is us users who will ultimately make that assessment. With payware you have to spend your time creating what you think people are interested in buying. With DLS freeware you spend your time doing what you enjoy and creating what you want and if no-one downloads it then it does not matter because you have not wasted your time.
This franchise seems to be all about keeping a certain groups of people employed instead of making a quality program that everybody enjoys. This is all just the monetary aspects of what is killing Trainz.
This argument resurfaces every time there are new product announcements in Trainz. Auran/N3V is not a charity, it is a business. It has to pay wages, taxes, utility bills, insurance, rent (of servers and bandwith if nothing else) and it has to keep ahead or, at the very least, up with the competition. By "stagnating" just to keep some users happy, Trainz will disappear then who will benefit?. I would be interested in hearing who you think are the "certain groups of people" that they are keeping employed?
I think that making a program that
everyone enjoys is an interesting concept. Just look at the threads in the Suggestion Boxcar forum and you will see all the different directions that people want Trainz to head of into. Curved baseboards that would allow the entire surface of Earth to be modelled as a sphere was a recent interesting one.
There is still all the content creator side, as soon as you get a grasp on the building in the sim, they raise the standards of model building even higher. Also, by the time you finish your project, so much time has gone by that it is most likely obsolete. Why would anybody want put up with all that?
If you create assets that work perfectly in TRS2004 then there is nothing stopping you from using those assets in TRS2004 for as long as you have TRS2004 on your system. You do not have to move up to TRS2006, TS2009, TS2010, TS12 or TANE. The forum regularly gets posts from users who have decided that they are not going to move to the next version of Trainz and will stay using their current (or an already obsolete) version "forever". It is amazing how many of those same users popup again in the forums some time later with the new version registered on their timeline.
I'm not even going to get into the over all declining of the quality of people in the Trainz community and how some people are more privileged and segregated by how much money they have paid.
Well that is a "slap in the face" to a lot of people in these forums. I really cannot make any sense of that passage except to assume that it was made in anger and will be regretted later.
If you really want to make a rail sim, N3V has shown us what not to do to be successful.
How long has Trainz been in the market? What happened to MSTS? Where are all the freeware train sims in terms of market share, user base, progress, etc. How much does it cost to buy assets from that "other rail sim", the one from DTG?
You seem to have a strange idea of what "success" looks like. Again, I suspect that remark was made without really thinking things through.
The only way a rails sim is going to survive is to have a massive community working on an open source program like in Blender. Where ideas come in from the community and not just a privileged few.
I have had Blender for many years now (I even keep it up to date), and have had GMax even longer. But I have never been able to make any sense of those CAD programs. I suspect that most other users are the same. If any individual has the time, patience and ability to use those programs to make a locomotive (it can even be an "Alco", I don't care) then I will happily put them up on a pedestal and sing hymns to their name. Unfortunately, Train Sims will never be a "massive community" because it is very much a small niche market so we definitely need the "privileged few".
My thoughts only.
Peter