Trainz: A New Era

[artimrj]

Half the fun of building models as a kid was blowing them up.

Like I said, I do both ;) I had my own Pearl Harbor at one point and me and my best friend Chuckie Wilgus made the attack! With M80s. After a heavy rain there were ruts behind a local Open Pantry store, that was our Pearl Harbor on a Sunday morning. When I was a kid, nothing was open on Sundays. Religion still had us hooked back then.

[OldProf]

I grew up in the 50's with a small set of Lionel 027 gauge trains. My friends had larger sets in their basement, with 027 and 0 gauge. I also used to watch a weekly show on TV that had HO layouts every week. I always loved trains, but quickly grew tired of the same small model layout, which after a short time I found very boring, and soon, I dropped it all together. In the past few years, after over a half century of time, I find railroad sims are like a gigantic, unlimited train set, that makes you feel like you are actually driving a train in a real world instead of pretending you are with a tiny, limited piece of track on a wooden table and a few pieces of rolling stock. To me it's like the difference between one of those plastic model airplanes that you glue together and then just place on a table or hold it in your hand and pretend it is flying, to a radio controlled aircraft with a nitro engine that you are actually flying.

I don't think I ever really imagined myself driving a train on our layout, which, if I remember correctly, covered 4, maybe even 5 sheets of 4x8 plywood and took up an entire end of the house's basement. Being able to control 2 trains at once made me more of a dispatcher, but I pretty much just thought of it as playing with trains and in the long run the part I liked best was getting under those boards to work with the wiring and then crawling out, turning the current back on, and watching something I'd done work -- or, sometimes, not.

[Chacal]

Tom you forgot to mention the fresh smell of green-dyed lichen.

[OldProf]

Tom you forgot to mention the fresh smell of green-dyed lichen.

You're absolutely right! And while we're at it, what about paste=soaked newspaper strips?

[artimrj]

I like the smell of hair spray making puff ball trees for the distant viewing.

[dgallina]

I've had something like 13 years of experience with Trainz so can offer some friendly input:

Download station is technically free though it does have daily download and bandwidth caps. I don't recommend getting a pass UNTIL you find that you are downloading enough content consistently enough to make it worthwhile. Agree that the download mechanisms are confusing. In general don't bother with 3rd party sites with a few exceptions like the following one.

Try the payware content from Jointed Rail if you'd like to see more prototypical looking / running engines and layouts. They make some nice stuff which you may already have seen in Railworks if you fooled with the old GP38 model by Justin Cornell. HP Trainz makes a nice Marias Pass too.

Granted Trainz still looks like a big model railroad compared to Railworks, but IMO there is fun to be had if you take it on those terms.

Diego

[artimrj]

Thanks Diego, I know about Justin Cornell, he does some top notch work. I don't plan on buying anything at the moment. I am looking at it like a model railroad and am thinking of importing what I got at home in the basement into it. Just to see what it is like to build in Trainz.

[hminky]

Good looking payware from RRMods:



The game's assets are stuck in 2007 at the moment but the new engine drives it great.

The functionality of the game is far superior to anything else. It is a "sandbox" that is easily manipulated.

No other train sim has a car forwarding system where trains come thru portals and drop off and pick up cars in a 24/7/365 system.

David Peterson's car forwarding system is the main reason I like Trainz, trains can be operated like the prototype:

http://www.chinaotoole.com/Trainz/Car%20Movement%20&%20Traffic%20Management%20System4%20120112%20Release.pdf

There is more to life than a pretty face.

Just saying'
Harold

[cor726]

I have to say that the original "screenshots" and what I am seeing now are completely different. I have Trainz12 and I think I ran it a few times but really didn't care for it. At this point I am glad I didn't buy in to T:ANE - I guess we will see what happens in the future with it but from what I can see what was promised is not what is going to be delivered.

[NorthernWarrior]

Bear in mind what we currently have is still technically a beta, the "main event" arrives on 15th May, barring any further delay.

That said, the only way I can even navigate the supplied routes is to turn off shadows altogether and drop the water resolution to "low". This on a PC that eats all but the most graphically intense sections of RW-TS routes for breakfast. One hopes some further optimisation has taken place since release of CE 1.2 but I'm not holding my breath.

The strength of Trainz and hopefully eventually TANE has always been in the Surveyor sandbox, which is by far the easiest route creation tool of all the sims. However as Bob has noted on the thread at TS, running trains in Trainz is quite a different experience where, unless you've mastered the obscure and arcane command system, it's virtually impossible to set up a structured passenger or even freight activity with the game controlling signals and points.

I'm hoping TANE will work out okay for N3V and all the customers (myself included) who either put into the Kickstarter or pre-ordered but I doubt DTG will feel anything breathing down their neck anytime soon.

[artimrj]

I have not explored making a route yet, but I have a bit of a handle onthe session thing. Been studying rules and looking at HTML assets. Figured I would start small with Phil's model RR route. Except after last night all my assets are obsolete. Had the thing all populated as was ready to start issuing orders and went to take a break, shut it down and on restart the database got rebuilt and whacked everything under version 2.9.

I realize it is still beta and I also discovered how to import downloads so I will make a copy of all my stuff for when the final release comes out. I have 80 hours logged on Steam in it. But have barely played for 6. All of that was downloading from the DLS. 20 gig.

If I tell Steam to continue downloading I can run RW and work on my route while downloading, gets a little slow while Trainz installs something but it works ok letting me do both at once.

[ex-railwayman]

To Bob, and anyone else new to Trainz, I can pop a couple of websites up for you for FREEWARE content, which I'm sure will go down quite well with the community, these are for routes, with added extra scenery assets that are quite easy to download and install. They offer a good insight into the type of scenic routes that are fairly modern and not only look good, but, perform excellently on most low to mid end computers, and if you have a snazzy dazzler PC then you'll be smiling for months when you go onto these layouts for a quick play.
And these are all North American, by the way, there are hundreds of others in Britain and Europe, but, I thought you'd like a taster of something from your homeland.

Cheerz. ex-railwayman.

http://www.ccrx.us/

http://checkrail.com/

And these sites are for scenery, locomotives and rolling stock, thoroughly recommended.

http://sufferinpacific.weebly.com/

http://s4.zetaboards.com/amtkz/pages/downloads/

http://socaltrains.weebly.com/downloads.html

http://www.waynestrainz.com/

[hminky]

The game has potential:

T:ANE video from ZaparaVladimir

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD-UObsN9Ls

Too bad all the assets are from 2004 and don't do justice to the new game engine.

Harold

[dgallina]

True, but there's no way to get newer and better assets without starting a new game engine. Hopefully the assets will come.

Agree that some of the assets have gotten hoary though. Oldest have been around for 13 years now :-)

Diego

[artimrj]

Thanks Ex Railwayman, what is on the DLS is not very good so far route wise. Every one I dl'd had missing or unknown dependencies and the ballast texture for the tracks is invisible and looks like the sky. Anything that is labled as made by Auran does not download. I discovered I can paint new ballast to fix the tracks, but I do not have time to work on another route at the moment as I have one for RW almost complete. Once that is done I will attempt more.

To hminky, I agree with you, it does have a lot of potential, except for understanding how to program it. The Rules thing is making me go cross eyed at times. Trying to find tutorials has been a total bust. So I am exploring what is already done by someone else to try reverse engineer their knowledge.

To Diego, Auran claims this friday all the assets will be opened up and we who bought it early will get our FCT.

All in all what little I played with it, I can say it is a keeper. So now I have 2 trainsims to play with.