Railworks America

Paul Jackson wrote:Dear friends, I am pleased to announce that over the next couple of months we will be showcasing the new technologies we have been working on. We’re going to show you new developments each week over the summer, looking at the different advances we have been making.

Our first announcement will be tomorrow. Each announcement will focus on a different area of the simulation. All I can tell you until then is that I have been playing with some very exciting new technology and I hope you will like the work we have been doing.

Since founding RailSimulator.com my vision has been to constantly take train simulation forward. Continually developing and improving our technology is at the core of that vision. I think over the next few weeks you will see our commitment to that ideal.

Paul Jackson Esq OBE
CEO RailSimulator.com

Source: https://www.facebook.com/railsimulator

This announcement strikes me as very promising and encouraging. I hope that the usual malcontents can keep their worth in their pockets until Paul Jackson completes his series of announcements. There's no need to jump in with demands, impercations, and negativity at this point. Remain calm and let the man speak his piece is my advice.

/puts pop-corn in microwave
/drags deck chair over to the TS forum

Chacal wrote:/puts pop-corn in microwave
/drags deck chair over to the TS forum

Don't forget the anti-acid.

I am looking forward to what Mr. Jackson has to reveal. I sure hope true CPU multi-threading is in the near future.

Trevor

THAT would be pretty cool multi player on the seattle. operations coordinated by a single dispatch.

eyein12 wrote:THAT would be pretty cool multi player on the seattle. operations coordinated by a single dispatch.

What are the current capabilities of TS2012 and multiplayer usage?

Please let RSC fix the glaring and obvious defects first before adding any new features.

There is so much broken still and the core game physics and rendering engines could use a serious update to make full use of current computer hardware.

Multi user running and proper train dispatching require almost a completely new and different game.

I will wait with anticipation for the announcements and can only hope for my wishes to come true.

Old Prof wrote:This announcement strikes me as very promising and encouraging. I hope that the usual malcontents can keep their worth in their pockets until Paul Jackson completes his series of announcements. There's no need to jump in with demands, impercations, and negativity at this point. Remain calm and let the man speak his piece is my advice.

I have to agree with Tom there. Let's keep this amicable.

_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha wrote:Please let RSC fix the glaring and obvious defects first before adding any new features.

There is so much broken still and the core game physics and rendering engines could use a serious update to make full use of current computer hardware.

Multi user running and proper train dispatching require almost a completely new and different game.

I will wait with anticipation for the announcements and can only hope for my wishes to come true.

I agree 100% with this. Don't need multi player, need the core fixed. I really look forward to this big update! Not gonna throw any stones yet, just wait and see. RSC is making a great effort finally.

We at VORA will be quite interested to see this development. We have been running prototype sessions for months on the few useful routes in RW. BY useful I mean prototype routes with enough size and traffic to actually run a real day on the railroad.

As to running a line with a coordinated dispatcher in RW, we have been doing that for months now. We can accurately mirroe what a real road does down to the last detail including MOW, Yardmasters, Train Masters and as many dispatchers as the seen on the 1:1 scale route. Only thing missing is the "game" feature" of seeing the other train. It will be nice to have this but we already know that this does not happen in real life many times in the course of a day. Our busiest session to date 37 trains...most any one crew saw in the course of their run was 8 for a total of 22 minutes running time out of a 6 hour and 45 minute run.

Every session uses the exact schedule of trains that ran over a route on a given day we are recreating. We never use AI traffic in a session. Every train has a live crew and all support people are live and pass a written test to earn their job on the railroad with us.

VORA already does the hard part of turning any sim into a railroad. "I can see you" if it is truly coming will be a nice final piece that will make our sessions the best on the planet.

Come on, Paul....

Nick

Multi player is an interesting option for sure, especially being able to see the other trains. I was about to say "opponent" trains, but that is really not the direction I want multiplayer gaming to go in a prototype railroad simulation. Safety is of paramount importance, wrecking trains is strictly out of bounds.

I play Farming Simulator also, where there already is a multiplayer feature. Closed sessions with friends on a LAN are fine, you actually cooperate and have a vritual beer together once the crops are in. Open sessions over the WAN are usually bound for disaster, for there are always people spoiling the fun by running your equipment into the ground, creating crashes and generally not being a sport.

So I think VORA walks the right path by first having members to pass qualification, getting to know the rules, getting to know wether this mode of play suits them.
Then you sort the wheat from the chaff and have a group of reliable and enjoyable people who like to play games together.

I wonder if you need to set up a dedicated game server and what the actual dispatcher's role will be if there come no CTC panels and electronic timetables with the game?
You just dispatch your trains from a remote desk with pen and paper and a telephone, and have to keep track of the movements using magnetic pieces on a trackplan schematic just like in the pre-computer world?

Anyway, this is all speculation from my part. RSC needs to sort out its priorities and correct all those errors first. I don't want bloatware suffering from featuritis.
The actual game core is incredibly small, for I believe the whole of TS 2012 is contained in the 13.4 MB gamemanager.dll. The rest is just xml parsing, asset management and physics/graphics rendering.

While I wouldn't give multiplayer a high priority, I can't think of a better way to do it than this.
After reading through those pages, it all seems so natural and obvious.

Interesting news.


Just a guess, but given the often poor performance of TS2012 (especially with tons of lighting; the auto plant on NS-AND at night brings my system absolutely to it's knees) they definitely need true multithreading and better graphics card utilization before expanding what has to be calculated (right now by one single CPU core).

I sometimes load up DCS: A-10 Warthog and it is smooth as butter in any situation; it has a colossal "world" (far larger than any TS2012 route) and insane draw distance for people who care to mod it.

Chacal wrote:/puts pop-corn in microwave
/drags deck chair over to the TS forum

http://i.imgur.com/tCp90.gif


Looking forward to what they have to say.

If they fixed the stretchy couplers and called it "TrainSim 2013" I wouldn't complain.