Comments and Personal Musings

I've been sort of setting back and listening to what everyone is saying about the new generation of our hobby and I must say the future looks bright indeed. We have not one, but two dedicated and talented organizations working on a new simulator, which is more than enough to sent me into fits of excitement, but even more - these people are actually listening and communicating (can you believe it!) with their future customers!! And, along with this good news, we have the freelance artists out there who keep raising the bar day after day with new rolling stock, locomotives, routes, and anything else one might want. The new stuff is so realistic it's almost scarey. In my opinion, the future of Virtual Railroading has never looked brighter. I can't wait to see what the next year brings - or the year after that. I'm seeing things now I never dreamed could be done a year ago and if this trend continues - Wow!Like everybody else around here though, I have a few suggestions (comments, gripes, whatever)to toss out for what they are worth.My first: SMOKE. The smoke in MSTS sucks. I mean it really sucks. I've shown a lot of people my virtual train layouts and almost without exception one of the very first comments I hear is "The trains look great but the smoke looks really fake." And they're right, it does. People are starting to get decent looking smoke on steam engines but diesels still are really bad, folks. Is there anything that can be done about this?The second comment I have is about cars - not rail cars but automobiles, trucks, vans, pickups, and so on. They are almost as bad as the smoke. All of my screenshots I try to avoid crossings beause the traffic looks so crummy compared th the highly detailed and accurate rail equipment. I've seen good looking cars and trucks here and there, and I'm told that the Pacific Surfliner might have some good stuff - if it's ever released. But for the most part, the highway vehicles we have really detract from making this a really great sim. They look silly - like an old "friend" used to say long ago "Looks like toy!"Other than that, I'm quite happy. Trees are looking really great, buildings and structures are almost up there with rail stock and getting better every day.Damn, I love this hobby!Larry Steiner

Never criticize a person until you walk a mile in their shoes. That way you'll be a mile away and you'll have their shoes!!

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RE: Comments and Personal Musings, GaryG, Jun-11-04, 06:04 PM, (1) RE: Comments and Personal Musings, landnrailroader, Jun-12-04, 08:10 AM, (2) RE: Comments and Personal Musings, mjs2101, Jun-12-04, 05:18 PM, (3) RE: Comments and Personal Musings, Eric in UK, Jul-06-04, 09:47 AM, (4) RE: Comments and Personal Musings, RailDriver TS, Jul-06-04, 10:14 AM, (5) RE: Comments and Personal Musings, muskokaandtahoe, Jul-06-04, 12:59 PM, (6)

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Hi GeekmanNow, you are a person with a very realistic view with your statement, "I can't wait to see what the next year brings - or the year after that."That's my thinking also; not actually knowing how far along the development of either sim is, I would think a minimum of six months away is probably quite accurate, probably somewhere between nine and fifteen months away for a sellable product would probably be even closer.Even if the MSTS 1.2 source was available, there are so many design flaws that starting from scratch might be best. Providing a new product that can still use the existing routes and equipment is the part I like most about the TMTS version; I hope it can be done. I haven't looked too much at the other version.The TMTS people appear to be actually listening to us and their end goal of a product that can actually be used for real-world training implies a real simulator where problems are intentionally introduced problems instead of design flaws that we've all seen. Won't it be nice to be able to say when our front coupler is broken instead of knowing it always is.I'm looking forward to what we might see, but remember, it's a huge task and probably not too profitable for the developers and will be a fairly large financial risk. Remember Micro$oft decided it wouldn't be profitable.Hopefully everyone will remember that a quality product will take time to create properly so be patient. It's hard to type with all my fingers crossed GaryG

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Colleagues,I suspect that the new TMTS is probably fairly well along, at least as far as getting a image to the screen. SInce PI bought out TrainMaster, which was a very good product itself, though it was lacking in certain useful views and the ability for users to create new routes.Four or 5 years ago, before MSTS came out, Bob Lielich was working on producing new routes for it, and from what he told me at the time, and later, after I had acquired MSTS, he felt his editor was simpler to use than the MSTS editor. So I expect that the basic tools are in place. Now TM-4 was designed to run on rather limited PCs that did not have much video "oomph". At the time, I was using an Intergraph PCI based video card which, as I recall only had 8M of vram, and TM-4 ran fine. Now the PI folks are ramping up the product so that it will use the Direct-X capability, and the more powerful video cards. I am currently using a 32M GeForce 2 card, but since I have seen 128M cards for under $100 lately, I am getting tempted.The really great thing about the new players in the TS ballpark are that they are listening to the users - something MS was not very good at, although those of us who have been at it for a while should be eternally grateful to the MS analyst who stuck his neck out and helped us in the beginning to learn - and - overcome many of the limitations of the MS editor. I suspect that the first release may not contain all of the bells and whistles that subsequent releases will have, simply because you have to get a salable product in the markeplace as quickly as you can in order to make back some of the costs of development. Sinc PI is producing a professional simulator with a consumer product off-shoot, they may be able to recover costs more quickly than would be the case in a strictly game situation.What would I like to see in the new release: Most of what has been said, and this:Global shapes, textures, track -- so that you don't have to eat up a ton of disk for each new route.Regional flavor, folks, jolly old England is okay, but I really do not care for a "Settle & Carlisle". I suspect our colleague in England may not care much for a Marias Pass. So I would like to see a box that contains the simulator, a really good editor, or set of editors, and 1 or two routes that are indigenous to the country of sale. Now if I want that English route, I should be able to get it for a nominal fee from the vendor on a seperate CD. In this way developers working with PI (or whoever) can create locally desirable routes.User Interest: I suggest that PI and any other vendor creating a Sim, poll the user community to see what routes would be desired. Each of us has our preferences, but there should be some commonality. My own vote would be as follows:United States: CSX Kingsport and/or BlueRidge Sub., NS- Middle district of the CNO&TP, UP - Eugene, OR to Klamath Falls, OR, NEC,
CSX- Louisville to Nashville, BNSF-any part of the Powder River lines, UP - Denver to Craig, CO (part of this is in the current TM product), Canada-Kicking Horse Pass, or Fraser Canyon.
Foreign Lines: Albula-Switzerland, Australia-Sydney over Blue Mountains west, Australia-one of the heavy haul iron ore linesJ. H. Sullivan

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I too think the future looks very bright for the Train-Sim hobby!Aside from 2 developers working on the next generation sim, they are also interacting with the "fan" base to get ideas and they are interested in developing something that will allow some of the excellent MSTS items to be imported in to the new sims. To me, I think this is a big bonus!It will be very interesting to see what transpires.However, I hope they will keep the "world" flavor intact. That is one thing I really like about MSTS, that you can go from running a route in NA, or EU or Australia without any troubles.Personally I would like to see more transitional era routes, when passenger trains were abundant and you could have either steam or diesels or both running!Mykel

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I would second the CP route from Banff to Hope or even Vancouver and add other Canadian routes, such as BC Rail, Algoma Central, so that when we can no longer visit Canada each year, I can still enjoy the sights I have seen so often on the ground.Eric in UK

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Hi All,Thank you for your Comments.We are keeping a "World" theme but being as the sim is still under development then there are more urgent things we need to atend to befre we work out what the content will be, needless to say, as Michael had mentioned earler, we are looking at an open architecture sim, the level of that openness has to be determined as the maximum programmability with the minimum potential destruction We are listening and inwardly digesting all of your comments, whilst we hope to deliver what you want, not everything is likely to make it into the first issue, basically because we have to cut off the list at some point or we would not be able to release when we wanted to (No I don't know when).We are at a crucial stage at the moment and are going away to the NMRA show at the weekend which is keeping us busy, we will be releasing a little more info after the show.

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> we are looking at an open architecture simWhatever you decide upon please do so in the understanding that the architecture you pick will be extremely hard to change later on. Feature extensions, yes; bug fixes, yes; architectural corrections, hardly ever.I suspect the reason Kujo failed to produce MSTS 2 was because their architecture in MSTS 1 could not support the kinds of fundamental features MS required of them. Either they tried something wholly new -- and ran out of time, or tried to fit requirements into the old one and the effort collapsed under a deluge of hopeless workarounds.So design something for version 3 -- very, very full featured, and then go code the minimum for version 1 in a practical amount of time. Good luck.Dave NelsonWP mainline, Oakland-Stockton: 100% complete;
SP mainline, Oakland-Stockton: 20% complete;
Aug 1950
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