Am I a Traitor

Nice to know we are in the same corner so to speak there re this issue wholbr.

I am immensely glad when I first accidentally came across Trainz. At first I had been disappointed at the giant mountain you had to climb to build something on MTS, etc.Timidly at first after that disappointment I then realised I could make a dream come true and build something that had vanished way back in 1962 here in Glasgow. In the local Glasgow parlance Trainz could be described as 'pure dead brilliant'. I always laugh when I heard local kids use this but it sums up Trainz. It challenges, is fun and when you complete something there is a feeling of success. To be frank for all the cost of the thing it is tremendous value for the hours of enjoyment and involvement.

After building my city which took a good couple of years or more off and on as my first venture I am now doing the whole rail system of another constituent country here in the UK such has been my satisfaction. Yeah, there are quirks and probs at times but it rains and snows sometimes too doesn't it and we girn (good Scots word that!) at that as well!

Hi everybody.

rjhowie2 said:

Trainz. It challenges, is fun and when you complete something there is A feeling of success. To be frank for all the cost of the thing it is tremendous value for the hours of enjoyment and involvement.

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If you don't mind me saying RJ I think that is a really great quote you posted there and really sums up what so many of us feel about Trainz.

I have not had much time to run Railworks since I Bought it two days ago but I had a go at setting up a simple scenario on the Oxford to London route this morning and have driven on parts of the same route late yesterday.

I have now got it to run in 1600 X 1024 resolution but I'm still somewhat disappointed with the grayish looking graphics but this is still early days and I am really waiting for the release of the Bristol to Exeter add on to make final judgment.

Having said all that, it just doesn't feel the same as Trainz in that it doesn't seem as friendly. Some may find that statement a bit naïve but to me personally it is definitely a true statement of fact. Railworks looks very professional and runs very smoothly on my system and seems to be well supported if you don't mind putting your hand in your pocket for payware add ons. But perhaps the foregoing is the problem (or at least to me).

Trainz has its glitches, crashes, download problems and patching problems but we've all come to know them, have our different ways in getting around them and dare I say it come to love them. They give us much talk and discuss on this forum which makes Trainz so much of our lives. However, above all that as rjhowie states for the small price of the product you pay it gives so many of us hundreds of hours of enjoyment and involvement, and to add to that hundreds of hours of fun.

That's how I feel, and I am now off to watch the football (Manu v Man city) which is the only love I have above Trainz. (Better not tell the wife that)

Bill

RW2 is very twitchy.

As mentioned above I reinstalled it and against my better judgement thought I would start off a small route as a side project while working on my Trainz route(s). Ho hum, all going well until trying to add a section of track and I got the infamous lock up and "SBHH" message. Ctrl-Alt-Del out of it, go back in try the process again and same thing happens. Thought why waste my time with this nonsense when TRS is ready and willing to provide trouble free route building.

So I've kept RW2 installed on the main PC purely as a driving platform but I definitely do not intend to go back and do any more route building. I will stick with Trainz or, if I fancy a change, even look at reviving MSTS.

I notice on UKTS there are more reports of crashes and that RW2 seems far more twitchy with the longer routes than RW1 was...

lewisner said:

... I prefer to think of my Routes as forever "Work In Progress"...

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So pleased I'm not the only one! I've got three serious routes in progress, a Winter, a Summer and a Model layout, and I can't seem to 'finish' them so much so that I became quite depressed about route creation and considered leaving Trainz for a while. But I'm keeping going - I want to get these routes up to the DLS one day!

'Finishing' is the hardest thing to do in route creation.

Paul

No probs with your comment at all there wholbr as it was well, positive! Glad you are of the same mind and feel what commented was right. As a kind of postscript can I add this?

When I tried MTS I had this thought of building the whiole former city tram system here which shut in 1962. I had a large map of every route but quickly realised the difficulty I would have trying to do it. My sudden hope was dashed then came Trainz and after some initial footering realised that my dream could come true. It might have meant covering most of the city and those suburbs that had lines (it was big -can see that on my website). I then for 2 years seen my old tramway system again taking the streets as if it was that time period again (before all the motorways). I have often laboured it one of love when i came across it as a wee boy living on a trunk route of 6 routes.

Sometimes I cannot believe that I ever finished that with routes all over the place. It is my tribute to the largest one that existed outside London. Now I am for my second big dive creating the whole rail system in Ulster which is a favourite holiday haunt of mine from me here in Glasgow. The enjoyment even allowing for the odd frustration and satisfaction I get never mind keeping the grey cells going is immense. Maybe i can't get the inventor The queen's Award for industry but would give him a medal!

Pure dead brilliant!

Well, I still think the Railworks world editor is the easiest AND the most versatile of the big three - but I uninstalled RW last spring when I got Trainz, never looked back. Problem is once you create a big beautiful route, what do you DO with it?

"I had a go at setting up a simple scenario on the Oxford to London route this morning and have driven on parts of the same route late yesterday."

That's what you do, set up simple scenarios and "have a run". Can't do anything else with it, the Railworks AI traffic is hopelessly retarded. It will never be fixed because it was never intended to simulate railroad operations, the game is designed for casual gamers to "have a run" and admire the pretty scenery.:n:

Glad to see....

more people getting into RW. I like it because it's more like real railroads and I like Trainz because it's more like model railroading. As a dealer for Trainz the first pitch I tell the customer is it's like model railroading only on your computer. Both RW & Trainz have their good points and bad,but they are both worth the money to buy and enjoy in whatever way you like. So buy RW & Trainz and have fun with both. That's what I do. I just enjoy both of them.
Alco_P-A.....www.bigboytrainsandhobbies.com

Hi,

I have Rail Simulator and RailWorks but left these for Trainz2010EE.
I find Trainz2010ee which is patched up to date very good indeed.
I also like the way TS2010ee will, from time to time, check the installed assets against the DLS assets for compliance.
Trainz rail simulator to me is an enjoyable Hobby with plenty of assets available to use without breaking the bank, I can't say that about RailWorks.
Both have good and bad points but over all Trainz does it for me.

Kind regards
Mike

I would with respect say that there will be people taken with Railworks and each will always have their fans but for the general punter they want something easy and simple. This might not appeal to the more technical minded who like a challenge but the vast bulk I suggest are like me. The more techy person will not appreciate that the majority don't think the same way and maybe in all innocence. I am an intelligent person with a history of good jobs but I found Railworks a challenge compared to Trainz with a greater ease and slipping into. In practive I could never have contemplated doing the gian tramway system I completed or tackling a country's rail network in Ulster aprt from Trainz.

We can argue about the merits of authenticity - real-like or model rail like but it is that ease of mind and practice and the DLS thrown in that the mainstream like.

With Trainz, I always feel something's off-scale, but am never able to pin it to a particular item(buildings or trains). Railworks doesn't have that problem, the camera makes you feel like a puny human standing by the majestic SD-40s, which are overshadowed by the even bigger grain silos....

I guess most people hate railworks here because they probably don't have a very good CPU/GPU. Content creation for railworks is easier than trainz and plugins are available for Gmax/Autocad. DEM and Lat/Lon are builtin the route creation system of railworks.

You can import a file with a bunch of GPS co-ordinates and railworks automatically draws lines connecting the points, which makes laying tracks very easy. There are programs available for free which interface with google earth and do this automatically along with importing basemaps. So I guess if you're interested in prototypical route creation, railworks is awesome.....

It's not the lack of grunt

"I guess most people hate railworks here because they probably don't have a very good CPU/GPU."

Absolute nonsense.

"So I guess if you're interested in prototypical route creation, railworks is awesome....."

Possibly true. But if you are interested in prototypical operations RailWorks is absolutely hopeless.

philskene said:

Possibly true. But if you are interested in prototypical operations RailWorks is absolutely hopeless.

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I have agree 1000%. As an engineer, I think it's junk, but that is my opinion and I'm entitled to it.

Mouse84 said:

I have agree 1000%. As an engineer, I think it's junk, but that is my opinion and I'm entitled to it.

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But do you know if we could code it to work better on that front? LARS was user created in trainz right?

Anyways, can any of the veterans here tell me if theres anything odd with the scaling or if its just me finding trainz off-scale? I'm still a noob here, and I'm not sure if I have to change any settings in trainz to make it look realistic(Like the scale option in surveyor).

Hi Everybody.
Apologies for this thread being bumped up again speaking as the original op, but I too thought that it had run its course but as you can see it still seems to be causing interest.

As I said in an earlier posting I installed Railworks last week for one reason only and that was the pending release of the Bristol to Exeter route which I was able to download on Saturday (15 November). I have been able to spend some time in the last couple of days getting to grips with the simulator and the route so as a confirmed Trainz fan here are my initial impressions.

The Bristol to Exeter route is brilliant in every respect and worth buying Railworks just to get this one route I would state. It is my local line and and so I have traveled on it many hundreds of times. The scenery is definitely very authentic to the actual landscape and buildings and the only predominant feature missing I could spot was the large Victoria Park by the side of Bedminster station Bristol. So well done Just Trains for turning out such a great product.

I have created a fairly complicated scenario for the route based on the real-life 6:30 AM Weston-super-Mare to London HST timetable (one I have traveled on very often half-asleep). Setting up scenarios in railworks is far more complicated compared with the simplicity of Trainz session creation. It took me the whole of Saturday evening just to get a consist placed on the line at Weston-super-Mare and facing in the right direction. It then took me all of the day Sunday to actually master the intricacies of getting it to move and more importantly getting it to move to where you want it to go. It would be fair to state however I was interrupted for long periods by visits from the family etc.

Having stated the above once you have mastered the technique of scenario creation it can be fairly impressive in what you can do. The big drawback is that you can only travel on the consist you select as the driver train. No matter how many AI consist you create you will only see them in passing from the consist you are driving. I have found the foregoing a big minus as I like to travel as passenger on AI Trains as I know many others on this forum do, in that you will be let down with Railworks. Throughout any scenario you can only travel on one train and only then as driver. You cannot swap between consist as you can in Trainz

Overall as someone completely new to the simulator I would give it a fairly neutral judgment at present. I have not tried any route creation so far, so that is yet to come. I am informed that this is the weak part of Railworks and having looked at several of the videos on route creation it certainly looks as if that information is correct. That said I do love the Bristol to Exeter route as for the rest of it, well...we'll see, but at the minute Trainz still gets my vote most definitely.

Bill

"I guess most people hate railworks here because they probably don't have a very good CPU/GPU"

Totally opposite. What I have;

Model: Dell DXP051
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 2046MB RAM
Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 3 (2600.xpsp.080413-2111)
DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

Video: NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT 512.0 MB
NVIDIA Driver Version: 6.14.0012.5721

Sound: SigmaTel Audio
sthda.sys Driver Version: 5.10.4823.0000

Hard Drive: Maxtor 6L160M0 147.8 GB

On that system, Railworks runs much smoother than TS2010 given equal detail. Again, I find the railworks world editor easier to use than Trainz surveyor, but the railworks scenario editor is ludicrously complicated and clumsy. If you have a four track mainline passenger route with two way local/express lines where the AI trains never need to oppose or pass each other it works okay (but requires a LOT of setting up, debugging, adjusting timing, and rigid adherence to the schedule by the player), but for typical US freight traffic it's completely hopeless. If railworks had AI traffic that was even half as intelligent as TS2010 AI logic, then railworks would be my sim of choice. Since the railworks AI logic is worse than MSTS, for me that's a deal breaker regardless of how good it looks.

Hello wholbr,

I cannot understand why you think of yourself as a traitor, I would imagine that there are hundreds of folks on this forum that have obtained at least 2, 3 or maybe even 4 different train/railway simulators over the years. This is our hobby, when all said and done, you spend your hard earned money on what you want to give you the most enjoyment in your real life spare time, it's hard enough in the present economic climate for all of us, so, if you get satisfaction from playing more than one simulator then good luck to you, there's lots more of us "traitors" around than you might think.....

Cheerz. ex-railwayman.

I also downloaded the Bristol to Exeter route, and have to say that I'm very disappointed with it. There's no new Career Mode scenarios, for a start.

The attention to detail is non-existant - there's many, many areas that look nothing like their real-life counterparts, especially when you then go and set a scenario based in the 1970's with a 21st century layout. This is on top of Railworks existing problems of terrible sound effects, limited rolling stock and the extortionate fees to download new content.

I wouldn't mind the slight innacuracies so much if the fist paragraph they used to sell it to you was;

"This new route includes 85 all-new miles of track from Bristol Temple Meads to Exeter St Thomas, all painstakingly re-created brick by brick and mile by mile. Painstaking research of the route and its immediate environs ensure that this is one of the most realistic RailWorks expansions ever"

Erm, right - not sure that I want to see the less realistic ones!

DavidBrown said:

...
Erm, right - not sure that I want to see the less realistic ones!

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That'd probably be Rascal to Cottonwood, another payware route, which is simply a pair of ovals with a pair of small yards inside them, straight out of the hornby layout book.

wholbr said "It took me the whole of Saturday evening just to get a consist placed on the line at Weston-super-Mare and facing in the right direction."

Hope you don't mind if I snigger wholbr!

It reminds me of MSTS where by the time I had figured out what to do the train had crashed!