TS2009 - my review

As I understand it, the upgraded steam sound system requires a change in the engine specs file for all pre TC3 steam locomotives.

Paul Hobbs has produced some guidance which is available on www.trainzdev.com

weevil said:

All of these snippets

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That represents something like a 99.6% drop in content creation take-up for the last four releases! It would seem that there is little desire by the community to make content specifically for the latest and greatest versions of the software

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People move on , people loose interest , people lack the required skills , people don't receive enough encouragement when they're new and just starting on the 3D road , some people would rather take than have a go at creation themselves ... and some people will never move to a newer version.

and would indicate to me that Auran may just be heading in the wrong direction by introducing even more strict and complex creation and checking requirements for TS2009.

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The game has suffered from lack of control over submitted content due to p*** poor error checking and now it seems there's a price to be paid .. people complaining when their toys are flagged with red ! marks .
If auran fail to take advantage newer technics then they will fall behind , and given that M$ are bringing a new product to the market what else should they do ???

A lot of fuss is being made about alpha blended trees now being no longer supported. Now I have looked at the single supplied TS2009 tree I can see why! The tree looks absolutely superb if you are actually within it's branches or standing close enough to be able to pull a virtual leaf off. The problem is that from anything more than a few meters away it looks absolutely awful. No exaggeration. Placed next to a standard alpha-mapped tree, once the viewer is more than 10m away the TS2009 wonder just can't compare, and the further away you go the worse it looks by comparison.

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That's the LOD's kicking in .. and the result of less than stellar(imho) textures . Chris is advising that culling is to start as soon as possible .. not something I necessarily agree with for this very reason , I'd much rather a gradual drop to keep the detail until it's not needed , but different strokes for different folks ... and what works for me ( 2k tri's in the first LOD ) will almost certainly not work on lower end systems.

This single example tree is a whopping 8 megs in size!

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TGA's with an alpha channel are large and theres no avoiding the size of the raw files .

Sci

amigacooke said:

As I understand it, the upgraded steam sound system requires a change in the engine specs file for all pre TC3 steam locomotives.

Paul Hobbs has produced some guidance which is available on www.trainzdev.com

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Drat!!! I'm still waiting for my trainzdev account approval. This sounds like the document I'm looking for. In the meantime, I have managed to find a TC3 E-spec and sound set that was a work in progress and I've been fooling with it. It looks like the TC3+ sound uses several loop files for sound. One thing that is disappointing about this is I can clearly hear when it changes loops. I don't have TC3, but there is a Youtube video that shows it clearly.

There is some potential here to improve steam sound from 04 and 06, but it's going to take some work.

I think Auran would have been better off leaving the older content out of 09 rather than releasing a bunch of stuff the doesn't work right. Call me picky, but if the content is there I expect it to work. I don't consider the legacy steam locos working with their sound in the current state. I mean come on, they sound worse than 06, the previous crown holder for crappy steam sound.


-Mike

From 2006 to 2009?....Hmmmm

Well, I am fairly new to trainz and started with TRS2006. Been pretty serious into the sim for about 6 months now with a couple of small "learner" routes that I built, and one pretty serious route for the D&RGW in western Colorado. So far so good in TRS2006, no real glitches to mention, or real nightmares so to speak. Everything seems to work smooth, graphics are good. All of my payware, and freeware seems to do what it is intended to do. Ok, cool..all is well in 2006..

WOOOOO HOOOO!!!! New version comes out!! TRS2009!!! Gotta have it!! .......or do I? LOL.

Bought it, checked all the system requirements, yep check! Got a tower (Dell Inspirion 530 "loaded" if you have to know) with 4GB RAM, Win XP Home Prem SP3 (No I will not revert backwards to SP2 just to play Trainz that is the only game so far that I have seen that people have said revert back to SP2 to fix problems) Intel Duo Core 2.2G, The faster MoBoard with 1333 FSB and plenty of storage space with a 350GB HDD. Graphics card is a BFG Tech 512Mb 8800GT PCIEx16 GDDR3 with both DirectX and OpenGL. I use OpenGL as it performs better on this system even with Trainz versus the DirectX which is glitchy. Ok, there is the computer... Now for Trainz 2009...

So far, have had it on here about a week and a half messing with it... So far, DRIVER is wonderful, smooth, all the content shows up "after" the SP1 install, and the mass migration from the TRS2006 Local folder over to the content manager. Ok...most of all the content shows up..Ok, went and committed the whole bunch of stuff that I migrated over, go back into driver and check it out... Hmmm.......Engines must have had a frightening transition over to the new software because they turned ghostly white! The move scared the paint right off of them! Weird... Ok, will work on that later...Probably just need to install them direct. Roads were train tracks, but got that mess fixed with the commiting of all the assets...again. Roads became roads again, cool... Textures, and all old content seems to be loading ok with the exception of the scared to death white engines...

Ok, the more serious problem is that in SURVEYOR only, I cant move... hardly to save my hide. Meaning that this thing is more glitchy than anything else I have dealt with in a long time. Only in Surveyor mind you. Driver works smooth as glass. Ok, ran the gammut of video settings on my video card from new drivers to completely going through all the settings, lowering, and raising most all of what you can mess with to tweak in the card. Same thing, glitchy in Surveyor, smooth as silk in Driver. Ok, In trainz, I have backed off the view distance to the lowest possible setting, got rid of all the clouds (clear setting) set drawing qualities all to lowest or off, train quality to lowest setting, ok, everything to as minimal of graphics as you can go! Same thing, glitchy and bad refresh rates...

So, Does anyone out there have this problem with Driver working smooth as silk, and Surveyor just making you pull your hair out because to slap a texture down, I need some prozac, valum, and probably a bottle of Teqillya to settle the hurky jerky down on the screen.

To sum it up, I am actually excited, and really bummed all at the same time...

Not quite sure what direction I need to go now...New video card? New pc? Hmmm. Pretty big extremes just to play trainz considering all of my other games "HL2, Battlefield 2 ect..." all play flawlessly on here. I use 3DS Max 9, program in MasterCAM9 (CAD-CAM) for my machine shop, run Adobe Photoshop, all being higher end graphics demanding applications.

I have ambitions on making freeware for Trainz 2009, but hell, if I cant even use the stuff I make, then all bets are off.. I will just stick with TRS2006.

Please guys, let me know what things you have done if you have experienced the same glitchy Surveyor, and smooth Driver situation.. I REALLY want to use 2009, but am not impressed...yet..

TXRFan said:

In other areas I've noticed the 06 is just more solid. 06 on my machine loads up fast and has never crashed or rebooted the PC. View transitions are smooth. In contrast, 09 has caused my PC to reboot once during driver, view transitions can be choppy, loading times are much slower, and sometimes it is difficult to select a particular car in driver mode. I'm running a fairly high spec machine: Core2 Duo overclocked to 3.75GHz, 4GB of 1GHz 5-5-5-18 DDR2 RAM, 8800GTS512 overclocked to 9800GTX+ levels, XP SP2.

For 2009, the out of the virtual box experience is pretty bad, about a 2 out of 5. The digital download worked well, but this is not something I would spring on somebody new to Trainz. The 06 out of the box experience was much better. However, the potential is there. Since I'm new to creating content, I'd like to start with 09 if at all possible.

I think I'm going to go back and try it without the service pack, just to see if it runs better for me. Auran still has some work to do here. The $30 US price helps here. I'd be pretty upset if I dropped $70 or so on 09.

-Mike

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Sounds like you are having a LOT of the same problems as I am having... Same thing here, right now, I would not recommend jumping into TRS2009...At least until more of the glitches are fixed.. I agree Mike, if I were in another country where the price is equiv to $70 or so, I would be a bit ticked off!

Lain

The responses here echo a lot of my findings as well so far. My Surveryor works fine. I did repair my database after importing all the content and before starting up Surveyor if that helps.

Stu - I also have the ground disappearing issue as well and was going to post somethng about it, but didn't get a chance. What I've done is move my camera view away from the saved area and let the system catch backup again. This is definitely something wrong and hopefully Auran will take a look into this issue.

Does anyone have CM2 crash to the desktop with an error to send to Microsoft? This has happened to me on a few occasions after selecting items to download off of the DLS website and not directly within CM2. When this happens, the download queue is empty, which is pretty frustrating when I've been searching for missing content that I needed.

I have still to go into Driver and see how that works.

John

I did the installations as prescribed or indicated by Auran. This in a fresh copy of Windows XP with the latest SP. So far I never had a crash in CMP, Surveyor nor Driver, and my FPS is quite high. So I am quite happy. But there are many other flaws, such as the white cars and locos, commodities failing to show, some stations not showing passengers and many other things that need to be fixed. My point is: Why some people have poor performance in Surveyor, why the same in driver? What has gone wrong during installation? Is it the hardware?, compatibility?, there must be something that makes the program to operate differently for some hardware or any of the other variables of the puzzle. I think that Auran should address the matter urgently.

Thanks for the review. I have 2004 and 2006, but I uninstalled 2006 and stuck with 2004. I went ahead a purchased 2009 and have to say that installation went smooth and I'm fairly impressed. CM2 has been a learning process, but I'm getting there. My biggest disappointment is the look of the trees. They look absolutely horrible. I'm also disappointed that so many 04 and 06 items are broken in 09. There are so many items that have to be modified or won't work at all. I don't know how many creators are going to go to the trouble of learning the new creation standards, especially since there isn't a CCG out there for it other than the 06 and TC CCG's.
There seems to be a lot of texture problems and I've been reading the forums about these issues, but I haven't got a grip on it yet. I doubt that I'm going to go to the trouble of learning a whole new set of creation tools since Gmax won't work for 09 assets anymore because of the normal mapping. I've tried Blender a little and just don't like it at all. I may change my mind as time goes on, but as long as it keeps running smoothly for me, I imagine that I'll gradually migrate to 09 for route creation, but not for content creation.
Mike

I got this earlier. Just go to your 09 menu, and select content. Then wait for it to repair the assets. Now of course, I keep getting a message saying that the server is full.