Lack of consultation.

As a Trainz addict for the past 2 years I have been watching the ups and downs of 2009.
I am surprised that when there was going to be such a massive change in the way content was handled, Auran didn't consult or advise about it.
I would have thought that they knew that a lot of content would not work effectively with the new system, early in the development. They could have advised creators back then, giving them time to modify their content before the release of the new product.
That way we would have had more than a loco, a tree and a track, ready to go with 2009. I presume that the changes required would still have worked in previous versions, 2006 at least.
Development times on software are usually quite long, so I can't see why this was not done. The work required by creators also is time consuming so the two could have married together well.
We now have a lot of people dissatisfied because the product finds it hard to live up to the hype. The new aspects of the simulator sound great and I look forward to using it in the future, but I would need to update to a new computer and this is beyond my finances.
Considering the size of the Auran company I think they are doing a good job.Look what happened to MSTS in the hands of a massive company.
The other thing I think has been a good move is to have a stalwart of 2009 in the form of Zec Murphy to answer any questions the community has. He is around most of the time and is one of the boys, not some trocyldyte sitting in a distant tower. Keep up the good work Zec.
We all need to be patient and give credit where it is due as Auran works through the bugs and give us a great simulator for years to come.

Cheers,
Mike

Hi Mike
In some of the earliest stages of TS2009's 'public' development, we saw a large number of 'developer' builds released for the specific purpose of allowing creators to play around with the new systems, and to figure out what did and did not work. This was a few weeks after Trainz Dev was setup, which was also for the specific purpose of helping creators to learn the new techniques.

For 09, we do now have more than just the built-ins. There has been content from a number of creators, including myself, who have uploaded not only TS2009 'native' content, but also TS2009 compatible content.

As for myself, my job is to be here to help. Which is what I hope that I am doing.

Hi Mike --

"They could have advised creators back then, giving them time to modify their content before the release of the new product."

The fact of the matter is that some of the creators have moved on, some have even passed on, some have lost interest, some don't want to, some don't have TRS2009, ... .

When you consider the number of items on the DLS, what you are asking is a heroic task.

Phil

Phil you are dead right there..

Besides we don't have a crystal ball when we make content.. Who knows what new and wonderful features will be in the next version. And once made, the content lives on the DLS, so we don't want to be messing around with new versions.

That's one of the clever things about Trainz..most properly made content from early versions works fine in later ones.

Unfortunately there is a lot of content with mistakes (errors) that worked in older versions that had little or no error checking..

As you may have noticed a lot of the built-in content for WBE TS2009 has these errors but as built-ins the errors can be suppressed.. Not so if you download such content and try to commit it into the game.

mikeaust said:

As a Trainz addict for the past 2 years I have been watching the ups and downs of 2009.
I am surprised that when there was going to be such a massive change in the way content was handled, Auran didn't consult or advise about it.
I would have thought that they knew that a lot of content would not work effectively with the new system, early in the development. They could have advised creators back then, giving them time to modify their content before the release of the new product.
That way we would have had more than a loco, a tree and a track, ready to go with 2009. I presume that the changes required would still have worked in previous versions, 2006 at least.
Development times on software are usually quite long, so I can't see why this was not done. The work required by creators also is time consuming so the two could have married together well.
We now have a lot of people dissatisfied because the product finds it hard to live up to the hype. The new aspects of the simulator sound great and I look forward to using it in the future, but I would need to update to a new computer and this is beyond my finances.
Considering the size of the Auran company I think they are doing a good job.Look what happened to MSTS in the hands of a massive company.
The other thing I think has been a good move is to have a stalwart of 2009 in the form of Zec Murphy to answer any questions the community has. He is around most of the time and is one of the boys, not some trocyldyte sitting in a distant tower. Keep up the good work Zec.
We all need to be patient and give credit where it is due as Auran works through the bugs and give us a great simulator for years to come.

Cheers,
Mike

Click to expand...

It takes time to build content and to figure out what new features are available and how to use them. Some locos take a year or so to build.

Auran did have developer's releases but a number of content creators held back until things stabilised. Normal mapping probably the big feature of TRS2009 needs new software to create it. GMAX out of the box won't do it. Blender will but even here until the wikibook Trainz had a tutorial on how to do it with Blender and opened up the number of people who were using it only the 3DS content creators were using it and not many of them. Again nVidia has a Photoshop add in that happens to work with Paintshop pro provided you don't use preview, if you do it crashes everything.

Some of my creations use it but the most successful are ones created by some one else is photoshop and added to my content. The other side of normal mapping is that it has been supported since TRS2004 so now there is content with normal mapping version 2.4 sitting on the DLS, if your video card is less than 6 years old it probably supports normal mapping so the benefits are being made to content for earlier versions. Practically all my normal mapped content is on at TC3 level by the way.

The support I've seen from Auran in Trainzdev has actually been extremely good and cleared up a number of areas where things were a bit hazy for me.

My background is hardware, and I've been very impressed with the new software. It actually makes better use of existing hardware. So if your machine will run one of the earlier versions of Trainz then it will run TRS2009 without a problem at the same or better frame rates. On very old single processor machines you may have to reduce the distance to the same as TRS2006 to see the improvement but it is there. One example of this is texture compression on the Video card by using DXT compression it basically quadruples the amount of memory on the video card. The video cards have supported it for many years but the software just didn't provide the texture files in the right format. TRS2009 now does this.

Errors in content, well most have been there a long time and many of the content creators are no longer available or interested in fixing the errors. Pev has come up with some excellent tools to assist.

Cheerio John

mikeaust said:

when there was going to be such a massive change in the way content was handled, Auran didn't consult or advise about it.
I would have thought that they knew that a lot of content would not work effectively with the new system, early in the development. They could have advised creators back then, giving them time to modify their content before the release of the new product.

Click to expand...

Yeah, this seems to be a real problem when you count on third parties to produce content for your repackaged software, and only make the minimal amount of new content yourself. Reap what you sow and all that....

Hi thanx for all your input.
I hope I didn't give the impression I was putting 2009 down. I was just making an observation that maybe things could have been handled a little better, so that the forums need not have been filled with disgruntled users, with high expectations.
I can see where a creator would not be interested in working on old content.
I had a go at Gmax a while back and as you say it takes a long time to get a finished product, and I had a fair bit of knowledge of CAD drawing.
When 2009 is run in compatability mode, what does this effect? I mean in the new abilities of the program.
What are the changes usually required to make say 2004 content reliable in 2009? I do change things already,like fitting animated trucks to all the content I install(for my personal use only)and fixing broken content with the help of TO.
Cheers,
Mike

PEV said:

Phil you are dead right there..

Besides we don't have a crystal ball when we make content.. Who knows what new and wonderful features will be in the next version. And once made, the content lives on the DLS, so we don't want to be messing around with new versions.

That's one of the clever things about Trainz..most properly made content from early versions works fine in later ones.

Unfortunately there is a lot of content with mistakes (errors) that worked in older versions that had little or no error checking..

As you may have noticed a lot of the built-in content for WBE TS2009 has these errors but as built-ins the errors can be suppressed.. Not so if you download such content and try to commit it into the game.

Click to expand...

this was the problem, the error checking was very minimal, and now it needs to be better. i can applaud auran for that. there are not any new demands in the 09 content that were not there before, whether or not they were actually followed. there are new effects and things like that for use, but none of those cause old content to not work. the real reason old content is not 'working' for people is because it was always wrong to begin with.

mikeaust said:

Hi thanx for all your input.
I hope I didn't give the impression I was putting 2009 down. I was just making an observation that maybe things could have been handled a little better, so that the forums need not have been filled with disgruntled users, with high expectations.
I can see where a creator would not be interested in working on old content.
I had a go at Gmax a while back and as you say it takes a long time to get a finished product, and I had a fair bit of knowledge of CAD drawing.
When 2009 is run in compatability mode, what does this effect? I mean in the new abilities of the program.
What are the changes usually required to make say 2004 content reliable in 2009? I do change things already,like fitting animated trucks to all the content I install(for my personal use only)and fixing broken content with the help of TO.
Cheers,
Mike

Click to expand...

Try your hand at Blender, the interface is unique but it works very well once you get used to it, much more sane than GMAX.

Compatibility mode isn't optimised for performance so much. Items made in GMAX are very difficult to retro fit to add normal mapping. The other big difference is knowing more how things work creators can get better performance or use more polys to get better looking rolling stock etc.

2004 content, if its error free will for the most part, say 97%, have no problems in TRS2009. Strangely enough if you fix the errors often the items run better in TRS2004.

Cheerio John