For me, it's a toss up with TS2015, because I find some of the scenery very realistic but my wish wish for more realism is still there. But I still enjoy it. It does annoy me, the lack of realism, but the scenery keeps my interested

For me TS 2015, with its lack of realistic "duties" yet abundance of eye candy, is good for relaxation and stress reduction. The mere fact of having to slow down and plan a stop without jettisoning the passengers, has its calming effects influencing myself to "slow down and smell the roses" sort of thing(ie)

To me Trainz is OK but tends to have a toy-town look about it -while DTG's Train Simulator seems much more realistic...so much so that when

I 'drove' the TS-2014's 'UK east-cost mainline' a while back..every turn I took, and every station I pulled into, looked and felt like the 'real-life' journeys I'd made many times before.

 

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/47_fdPS-gZA/maxresdefault.jpg

 

I pkayed around allot with the original (Auran) Trainz back in the days and it was said then that Trainz was not a railway simulator

but rather a mode railway simulator, though I don't know if this have changed for the newer additions of the franchise.

For me TS 2015, with its lack of realistic "duties" yet abundance of eye candy, is good for relaxation and stress reduction

 

I know what you mean, TS can be very relaxing, or alternatively, if you enable 'derail' and then overspeed on corners etc, it can take your full attention.   Likewise in GTA where cars buses and pedestrians are AI-enabled and can catch you out if you're not careful.....

 

https://youtu.be/rWe46WzUpe8?t=1756

I played around allot with the original (Auran) Trainz back in the days and it was said then that Trainz was not a railway simulator

but rather a model railway simulator, though I don't know if this have changed for the newer additions of the franchise.

 

I think being a model railway simulator is still in its Dna, but now it's trying to be a bit more realistic as well, probably to compete more with Train Simulator. There is also a feeling that Trainz relies more on exterior views that is typical for Train Simulator, and that may also contribute to the model railway ambience.

 

Beyond that, though, I also found an interesting comment on Trainz: A New Era that I think rings true:

 

So basically I just talked about this like 30 seconds ago in another comments section. The reason why people are saying that its really bad is because they don't put everything on ultra or high. The reason why they cant do this is because most people don't own a great enough computer. So basically what I am trying say here is that when they do get the full experience, there computer gets like 10FPS. This is why there saying its a lag monster. But, When they turn the graphics down, they don't get that good of graphics, witch basically means that they start thinking its a disappointment. So yeah, hope this answered why people are hating on the game when its really good.

So if you can't turn the settings up and get more than 10FPS and it looks poor with settings turned down then imho it is a poor release.   TBH, for as much fluff as DTG has in TS 15 I run it at max settings on a 4096x2160 screen with pretty decent AA levels and there are only a few places it gets choppy.  It also does a pretty good job with immersion ie. stations/routes feel correctly regional where those 2D trees in the Trainz video are a killer for me.  I too tried it ages ago with one of the original releases, found it way to cumbersome without anything to back up the complexity.  This was after MSTS and before TS so once TS was released that has been my go to...

 

Just not seeing anything in Trainz compelling me to move over outside of the no length restriction on routes...   Just my .02   Hopefulyl they can polish it up and get satisfactory performance or it will be like all the other Trainz releases.

I guess it depends in this case on your machines horsepower. If you look at the videos on the web, you could almost think you were seeing people reviewing different games instead of the same one with different hardware.

by chance is anyone using a amd 390x for trainz or flight sim? i was curious how it stacks up against the gtx 970,i am wanting to upgrade to a faster card in the near future, but the gtx 980 and 980ti are out of my reach.

All the reviews place the two cards neck and neck, despite the fact that the 970 has less ram. In that circumstance, its probably going to come down to price. The 8gigs of ram on the AMD card would probably be nice for X-plane, but little else will currently make use of it. Alternately, the 970 is less future proof when games finally do use more ram, but Nvidia has traditionally had the lead in FSX benchmarks.

 

Your milage may vary.

Maybe some new info?

 

Maybe some new info?

Looks like TS2015 with some miner improvements. When they bought the rights to FS, I was hoping that included the code for MSTS2 (Based on FSX/ESP engine) which Aces didn't get to complete. That would have created a global track database allowing you to traverse across continents where you can add more detailed payware and freeware scenery along the way, just like we do in FSX. The ultimate goal for them was to link it to the FSX world via multiplayer, so you can drive your train, while planes was flying above,and Vice versa.

Edited September 4, 201510 yr by n4gix
Removed the quoted video. Please do not quote images or videos!

This was demoed on TS2015

So here is the trailer for TS2016 with the release date. Dovetail admitted under skeptical questioning that this is pre-rendered and thus very misleading, but at least we have a date.

 

Some US content ie routes are no longer available for customers outside of the USA. BNSF have altered their lic agreement with DTG,so TS2016 will have no interest to me as I only enjoyed using US routes. Weird situation to be honest.

Don't know if it's true, but some people on other sites, are claiming DTG is actually removing BNSF content off their systems, even those that were purchased as separate DLC that they paid extra for. If it is true, I can't believe this is a legal practice.