Trainz: New Era

[HiFlyer 9,359]

after watching that video I dont want Trainz

 

It was awful

 

LOL!! Well of course it was, but there are also nice things, and I guess that's why the reviews on Steam are marked as "Mixed"

 

Nobody can fault your decision though, and maybe with more information, it will even change!

[n4gix 4,947]

Yikes! That first engine's horn sounded like a wet fart...

 

...and the interior was bloody awful! Those windows were horrible.

 

The last scene was not only stuttered, but the last bridge was the final straw for me. Trainz will not find a home here.

[peppy197 165]

Yikes! That first engine's horn sounded like a wet fart...

 

I was going to say that but I did not want to embellish the sound

 

Seriously looking at Train Sim 2015 just for amusement and relaxation....

[HiFlyer 9,359]

You only get the better graphics on ultra or high settings, and then you are going to need a monster pc. If your Pc can handle it, things look a lot better. They are kind of where FSX was once upon a time, where it seems nobody can run it. Teething pains of a brand new engine?

 

Confusing, isnt it? 

 

Mixed reviews............

 

Pick your video, and make yer' choice!!

[peppy197 165]

would i7-4790 8 threads OC to 4.6G + 16G RAM with a AMD R290 suffice?

[HiFlyer 9,359]

Yup!

 

Can I have it?

 

(Not really. I don't do AMD)  :ph34r:

[peppy197 165]

Yup!

 

Can I have it?

 

(Not really. I don't do AMD)  :ph34r:

 

I should be switching to a 980-Ti  soon as they become available

[HiFlyer 9,359]

Anybody here would tell you will be fine for pretty much anything.

 

Actually, I'm thinking about it myself, just so I can "ha ha" at X-plane X recommended graphics

[spesimen 135]

Are we to assume that DTG and others are too small to do better textures?

 

GTA had more than 1,000 devs working on it. ("much more" according to the rockstar north pres.) expecting similar results from a team of 20 or 50 is wishful thinking at best, no matter how talented they are.

 

 

 

Its not money; at least not always. Its also about of focus.

 

doesn't matter how focused you are when you are using 1/50th the manpower it's just not physically possible to achieve the same results. each of those textures, models, map bits, etc, takes time to create. money is how you get more devs. GTA is in a very lucky sweet spot that is shared by only a few franchises (warcraft and call of duty mainly, maybe final fantasy) where they are popular enough that they can afford to budget for the staff required to constantly push the envelope. 

 

it is what it is. sims can leverage large, if unorganized, amounts of manpower by allowing lots of modding and third party support. personally i will be curious to see the next gen of TS, and i might give trainz a try down the road a bit when they've worked out more of the kinks..

 

cheers

-andy crosby

[Patriot3810 182]

all jokes aside, anyone interested in buying trainz a new era, buy the deluxe edition as it comes with 5 routes.look into a website called jointed rails, they have a ton of freeware locos and rolling stock.i own about 30 payware locos from jointed rails ranging from the sd40 up to the 90 macs, and they look 100 times better than the default trains in trainz.if you want to tinker, trainz is the way to go and can be alot of fun.if you want to flat out drive a train for hours on in and fall asleep looking at track buy ts 2015.i own both and play both, just like fsx and p3d.oh and in trainz, you can actually load your cars/wagons with freight and you feel like you have a purpose to play.

[peppy197 165]

jointed rails >>  I saw a bunch of impressive payware locos but no freeware at all

[HiFlyer 9,359]

GTA had more than 1,000 devs working on it. ("much more" according to the rockstar north pres.) expecting similar results from a team of 20 or 50 is wishful thinking at best, no matter how talented they are.

 

You know, people keep coming up with what I call "absolutist" posts, whereupon something or other is conclusively stated, now and forever, and dropped into the conversation with a thump.

 

Well then, how about Frozenbyte, a team on only 20 people, not all of them graphics artists by any means, yet who can do absolutely beautiful graphics without requiring GTA's budget. And before we start looking for something unique about them, let me tell you that my next thing will be to post the names and videos from at least 20 other games from tiny teams with similarly luscious visuals.

 

Yes, it can be about focus, and no you don't need to have 1000 developers nor wishful thinking on your side to have great visuals in your program.

 

 

doesn't matter how focused you are when you are using 1/50th the manpower it's just not physically possible to achieve the same results. each of those textures, models, map bits, etc, takes time to create. money is how you get more devs. GTA is in a very lucky sweet spot that is shared by only a few franchises (warcraft and call of duty mainly, maybe final fantasy) where they are popular enough that they can afford to budget for the staff required to constantly push the envelope.

 

Much as we make jokes about it here, Goat simulator (from coffee stain studios, with about 17 developers) manages to have quite nice and acceptable graphics, partially obtained by thinking outside the box. They purchased their goat model for instance, from another developer for $20, and used assets from Unreal engine, Nvidia Physx, and Apex to make something that compares quite well with modern games, and they did it on a limited budget. In fact, they originally did it as a joke. Yet ended up with a much better looking world, for instance, than TrainZ. http://www.coffeestainstudios.com/about-us

 

Or, how about No Man's Sky, from Hello Games? (14 developers) Great graphics, awesome concepts, no apologies for excellence. http://www.hellogames.org/about-us/

 

 

The fact is, while there are always excuses, some of them valid, there are also exceptions. Plopping the one and only true answer on the table, while sounding cool and all, usually has nothing to do with anything but preconceptions, and usually ones that have not been challenged enough.

 

Goat Simulator graphics

 

all jokes aside, anyone interested in buying trainz a new era, buy the deluxe edition as it comes with 5 routes.look into a website called jointed rails, they have a ton of freeware locos and rolling stock.i own about 30 payware locos from jointed rails ranging from the sd40 up to the 90 macs, and they look 100 times better than the default trains in trainz.if you want to tinker, trainz is the way to go and can be alot of fun.if you want to flat out drive a train for hours on in and fall asleep looking at track buy ts 2015.i own both and play both, just like fsx and p3d.oh and in trainz, you can actually load your cars/wagons with freight and you feel like you have a purpose to play.

 

Sounds like a plan!  :smile:

[spesimen 135]

You know, people keep coming up with what I call "absolutist" posts, whereupon something or other is conclusively stated, now and forever, and dropped into the conversation with a thump.

ha! it wasn't my intention to sound absolutist. i mostly speak from experience working as a game dev, nothing more. honestly i've followed your posts about these topics with some interest lately and i genuinely admire your optimism, i really do! i just think you have a rose-colored idea of what is really involved with the nuts and bolts, when you compare some very specific and limited game areas to sims that try to model huge areas realistically.

 

Well then, How about Frozenbyte, a team on only 20 people, not all of them graphics artists by any means, yet who can do absolutely beautiful graphics without requiring GTA's budget.

trine looks amazing no doubt. but it's a 2.5d platformer! those rooms are all 20-100m in size, that's not even an airport (or train) terminal. a lot of the elegance of their visuals comes from fantastic character animation and beautiful impressionistic texture painting, neither of which is fully relevant to realistic simming..

 

Goat simulator

no argument that goat simulator is a fun game. i haven't played trainz yet so i can't compare the grapics quality but goat simulator certainly doesn't cover hundreds of kilometers. it's all in a small suburb if i recall, which again means they got to avoid all the messy questions of how to store and manipulate thousands of miles of terrain or even worry about how to make a bunch of realistic buildings have good fps..it's highly instanced already with a lot of repeated assets ...

 

as fun as it is, personally i got bored with it after a few hours, compared to the thousands of hours i've spent in fsx... why? because there's not much depth there, it's a humorous take on the skateboarding game genre, not a sim. if you say, well, it looks better than trainz, that's great, but i highly doubt that engine would support a hundred km long railway and all the associated terrain, not to mention the physics and systems stuff to emulate the engines, cars etc, at least not without a LOT of man hours. not having to stream terrain already simplifies the engineering workload considerably for example. and that doesn't include the massive effort to build out and texture all the real world elements. i think it's a unity game, who knows maybe somebody has already made some good terrain streaming plugins for that already hehe..

 

Or, how about No Man's Sky, from Hello Games? (14 developers) Great graphics, awesome concepts, no apologies for excellence.

yup, really looking forward to that one. again tho, a procedural world is one thing for science fiction but when you're modeling the real world it's a whole different ball of wax. most of the man made structures they show are basically giant obelisks or relatively simple geometric spaceships. and they don't have to deal with the complexity of handling a globe's worth of real data since they can generate it on the fly. that in and of iteslf is quite a technical accomplishment, but it simply isn't possible to generate the entire cajon pass route system network on the fly...we already see that sort of approach with fsx autogen where vectors define the features and the details are filled in, and it works 'ok' but that's all they can do for a reason!

 

the converse being the hand built terrain in TS which covers that route looking pretty solid but limited by how many people can work on it and how much time they have. not to mention the systems side also, where the ships seem to have fairly straightfoward arcade stuff which is a world of difference from something A2A might construct for example.

 

anyway again, its an apples and oranges issue. outerra is probably the closest example of how that procedural sort of approach could work in a realistic sim...though they still seem to be a way away from having anything other than a nice tech demo. it's been a couple years now and there's a basic GA plane and a couple airports in alaska.. stuff that looks fantastic but isn't really gonna hold the interest of hardcore simmers or people who are trying to do rw traing or whatever. maybe that matters, maybe it doesn't..

 

i have high hopes for their long term prospects but i'm not holding my breath that it will be a replacement for fsx/p3d/xplane anytime soon.. it's certainly the most promising out there as far as evolving the tech past the fsx format. DCS maybe also has a handle on that, it performs really well but also suffers from the limited operational area, lack of civilian stuff, and doesn't really look all that spectacular either..

 

The fact is, while there are always excuses, some of them valid, there are also exceptions, and plopping the one and only true answer on the table, while sounding cool and all, usually has nothing to do with anything but preconceptions, and usually ones that have not been challenged enough.

not excuses! compromises! anyway like i said i wasn't trying to point out a 'true answer' merely pointing out the reality of how manpower affects your ability to make content. even with GTA as the example, they still only model a city about the size of toronto or SF. trying to extrapolate that level of detail to an entire globe (or even an entire state) is just not physically possible, which is where those compromises start to emerge. i'm mainly just trying to point out that when you say, 'why dont sims look this good' you are being kind of stubborn about believing the answer which is that it takes time and manpower to make it look that good even on a small scale, and on a sim scale it increases dramatically or you have to make choices that cut into that in order to make something shippable in a reasonable timeframe.

 

your posts about thinking outside the box of what a sim could or should be are probably closer to the ideal of what interesting things can be accomplished with small teams... but that gets into the bigger question of what people want from a sim. a lot of it has to do with how much you want realism vs. how much you want to just have opportunities for entertaining experiences. both are perfectly valid ways to spend an evening! but to say they can easily be the same if people just focused and didn't make excuses isn't really taking the production problems of making that stuff into full consideration.. it's just orders of magnitude easier to make a twitchy cartoon goat than a fully functioning 737. and we already saw with flight and xplane what under-featured sims can do..they have their strengths but they haven't dethroned the big one yet because they are still incomplete featurewise.. xplane may prove to be quite a contender now that some of the bigger 3rd party devs are onboard with it, we'll see.. i also think dovetail will probably have an interesting answer with whatever they come up with next for the flyers.

 

anyway cheers man!

-andy crosby

[HiFlyer 9,359]

Then we may have misunderstood each other. In an earlier post, I pointed out that as far as simply polygons, there was not that much difference between a TS2015 Train and a GTA5 train. The real differences lie in the textures and lighting, and while the amount of textures for the entire GTA world might require a huge team, the textures required for a trainsim (for instance) are much smaller as they are generally used over and over again. same rails, same trees, same brick texture, a few cars, etc, most reused from previous versions.
 
I suspect the amount of unique textures used in Trine (for instance) over the course of all the various levels compares favorably to Trainz. In fact, it's even worse, since trains has years and years of existing textures that simply needed some work, but the work seems largely undone. Thats a conscious decision, and a result of their own internal focus (probably on engine development) and other factors you mentioned, like shipping date.
 
Now if we jump to flight sims, its again another story, and once again, to me its about focus. If you look at something like X-plane over the course of its life, it's obvious that as far as focus, graphics is waaaay down the list, and many people like it that way. It's been blade element theory all the way, and only recently (and belatedly) that graphics has received any concentrated attention.
 
Even now, the art assets for european buildings and other architectural styles remain undone, many buildings remain unlighted at night, airports remain bare, seasons are coming "soon" etc etc etc.... It goes on and on. Thats money and resources speaking partially of course, but after 10 years and more, it's also a matter of focus, and where "serious" sims allocate their resources.
 
Too many of them have allocated towards the demands of the superfans (also known as the hardcore) and added layers of sophistication (Trainz was known for instance as the more realistic sim as far as physics, etc as well as run 8) but both of them paid for it in smaller audiences which in at least one case left the company unable to completely fund further development. Time for a kickstarter, that didn't do so hot. (1,729 backers pledged $191,771 to help bring this project to life.) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/426668601/trainz-simulator-a-new-era-create-drive-operate-sh
 
Apparently enthusiasts, even ones with deep pockets, only go so far. While TS2015 garnered the dislike of many hardcore users, they gathered casuals in large numbers, who more than paid for better graphics and fairly robust development, not to mention a dominant market share. Moving on a bit, I appreciate the relative simplicity of No Man's Sky's objects even as I also appreciate the sheer number of objects and the enormous amount of textures created for them by a tiny team
 

xplane may prove to be quite a contender now that some of the bigger 3rd party devs are onboard with it, we'll see.. i also think dovetail will probably have an interesting answer with whatever they come up with next for the flyers.

 
I wish!!! I've thought for years that based on the history of the sims developement, it's only by the intervention of very determined 3rd parties that there's any chance at all of saving X-plane from its own lethargy. Left to its own devices, it would probably happily coast along forever as a second, third or forth choice.
 

outerra is probably the closest example of how that procedural sort of approach could work in a realistic sim...though they still seem to be a way away from having anything other than a nice tech demo. it's been a couple years now and there's a basic GA plane and a couple airports in alaska.. stuff that looks fantastic but isn't really gonna hold the interest of hardcore simmers

 
Outerra is a "slow burn." They have great tech, but due to their various contracts that bring in apparently acceptable funds, they don't feel large pressure to produce anything quickly. Whether thats a strength or a weakness remains to be seen, but they are definitely perfectionists. For those thinking there could be something great there, we can only watch and wait. (and some can get in there and mod a bit, while we watch and wait.)
 
Apparently, they are expecting some fairly big news this week about their tools for modding, so we shall see.
 

We are aiming for a summer release a new version with completely reworked sandbox editor, making it much more usable and extensible. 

Pasto is promising a video for this week showing the upcoming sandbox functionality. Also including a better object browser.

Apart from that various functionality bits in vehicles and aircraft, including a way to attach and fire rockets and projectiles. Hopefully also a new configuration UI for controls will be completed with that, allowing us to finally release the extended controls.

 

Clickable cockpits incoming?
 

but i highly doubt that engine would support a hundred km long railway and all the associated terrain, not to mention the physics and systems stuff to emulate the engines, cars etc

 
Well its the unreal engine, which is also about to be used on TS2016..........
 
Also, If I jumped the gun, I apologize. I've had one too many things that looked like "One and only true answers for all people, everywhere" plopped on me this week, and I may be waaayyyy too sensitive to anything in that genre at this point. I'm going to watch myself carefully.

[TooWings 17]

That is not realistic.  The last time I did that with my car it got totally smashed on the first impact...

 

But If that car in GTA had got 'smashed to bits' on first impact, where would the fun gaming value be?  It would be game over in seconds. My point is that Rockstar have intentionally tweaked GTA to cater for various tastes, including the 'arcade-demolition derby' fans.  But having said that,  GTA is a heck of a lot more 'realistic' damage modelling wise than Trainz, FSX and DTG Train Simulator all put together.  In TS for example, cars drive straight through obstacles as if they weren't even there, as do FSX planes and cars.

 

Can you imagine some gook kid believing the physics in there and trying things like that in real life? Almost as a set up to unrealisable expectations as does porn

 

But GTA isn't for 'gook kids'.  It's an adult 'rated 18' certificate game.  But anyway, lets say that 12 year old Joey did play at 'cars vs trains' in GTA, he'd certainly find that the physics/ damage modelling was much more realistic than other trainsim/games and flight-sims;, ..and if he wanted to he could download a 'realism' mod from the Internet for more realistic damage 

As for the 'unrealisable expectations' of porn ...well that's a different ball game!! 

.......

Cars vs planes  GTA-5

https://youtu.be/x6pEROxt1UE?t=312

 

Car vs plane - FSX

https://youtu.be/M4kiVNkmqlI?t=263