The problem with Trainz ...

General Trainz discussion and questions.
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The problem with Trainz ...

Post by klambert »

I think I've identified the biggest problem with trainz, and as to why trainz continually has a declining UK community but a seemingly endless US community. I think that the US community has figured out how to appeal to the younger generation, and it's the younger generation which forms the backbone of the community. The jointed rail stuff they seem to lap up!

The UK trainz community meanwhile continues to decline as we're loosing the market share of younger Trainsim fans. I think this is because Trainz has produced a lot of excellent Steam era and post steam era content, which is of obvious interest to the older Trainsim community. But we're somewhat thin on the ground for Modern DMUs and EMUs, something I think the likes of Railworks has exploited, the sheer quality and quantity of modern stuff is impressive, they've just about covered the major UK EMU classes. It may come as a surprise to some users but modern EMUs and DMUs are very popular, eg my Electrostars I've created have had over 2000 downloads in the 8 months they've been on the DLS, this is compared to the rather paltry 400 downloads for my Class 501s which have been up now for over a year. I think this shows that interest in modern content may possibly be greater than older stuff. Although admittedly Class 501s have always been one of those trains of specialist rather than mass interest.

I think trainz is at a cross roads and due to the launch of T:ANE we have a chance of gaining some of the younger market share back and also with a lot of trainsim users getting tired of the rip off prices off of Railworks, trainz could quite easily win back its audience. By possibly creating more stuff aimed at the younger generation, we maybe in with a chance of bringing back something akin to the trainz glory years between 2005 and 2009. I've tried to address this problem myself with some of the content I've made, as well as a couple of other creators, but I feel we're in the minority.

Please don't mistake this as me having a pop at other content creators, I'm not, I'm just stating what i think trainz needs to stop the UK community entering a terminal decline.
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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by PFX »

I think there is a lot of modern era rolling stock in both sims. Personally, I like anything from 70s onwards as it's what I grew up with. I've been using Trainz a lot less for one reason alone and that is the quality of the driving experience.

I don't know if you have RS or not, but when you 'sit' in the cab of a train in RS, it's pretty hard not to be impressed with the graphic and sound quality. Sure, there are negatives too but for me, if I want to 'drive' a train, Trainz doesn't even come into it. If I do drive in Trainz, I invariably end up using the chase view rather than cab. Having seen the new class 55 cab, this may change if I ever manage to get TANE downloaded.

On the other hand, the surveyor feature in Trainz is a breeze. Totally intuitive and a walk in the park when you compare it with RS. I can't make head nor tail of the RS route building so in that respect, Trainz is a comfortable winner.

There's the argument that it costs a lot of money to own anything in RS but that's the catch; you get what you pay for as the saying goes. If you're going to part with hard earned cash, it has to be good and I think up until now, the best modern cabs I've seen in UK rolling stock are those which came with the Railwaves class 170 and 375/377. Again, it's payware. Can this be replicated on freeware? Who can say. I imagine creating a cab is a complex bit of work.

As for keeping younger sim users with Trainz, fingers crossed TANE will do just that.
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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by klambert »

Yeah I have RS, what I mean by rip off prices is they're charging about £10.99 for train that comes with only two scenarios, (they used to come with far more!) usually the sound and the scenarios are a bit naff too. If you want to improve the experience of driving the train and get your moneys worth of scenarios, you have to be prepared to spend an extra £10 on scenarios and a sound pack from Armstrong Powerhouse, that amounts to £20 spent on one item of content! I could buy a whole game for that, which would give me many more hours worth of fun than one Railworks addon!

I think a far more reasonable price would be £5.99 per addon and perhaps £10.99 rather than £15.99 for a whole route.

I do see what you're saying though.
Last edited by klambert on Mon May 18, 2015 6:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by PFX »

I agree with you that the price can be a bit steep, especially when there are only 3 scenarios with a purchase. I'm not so sure that we're losing younger folk to the other sim though. The converse of your initial post is that the cost would very likely put younger users off. I've seen plenty of forum threads where younger members give off about the cost of payware and say that, without being in work of some kind, this makes it prohibitve. At least with Trainz there is a good selection of freeware.

It would certainly be interesting to see some proper figures relating to this.
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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by PeruvianLlama »

Some good thoughts being said here. :) I think I agree with most of what you two have been saying.

I did buy the basic version of Railworks for £10 or something just so I could run this thing, http://www.sptalyllyn.co.uk/.
I think I once had a copy of the Microsoft Train Simulator version of it, which is why I bought the updated version. A nice little route, with rolling-stock, made by a few 3rd-party creators as a donation-ware for the Talyllyn Railway, with just the price of shipping.

They even worked out how to use scripted signals to get the train services to pass each other in the passing loops, something which was I believe unheard of in that program before then.

I don't really use the program other then for this one route, as I prefer Trainz in every respect. There's nothing on that one route
that can't be done with Trainz, it just hasn't ever been made as of yet, but that is really how I am about it. Whenever I see anything
in it, I don't think 'wow this is amazing', I just think how can I make this in Trainz to get it even better. :D

I don't really have a problem with anything in Trainz, I quite like everything it does, the driving trains or making things, I think it's
got a lot to offer if you like railways. Yet it's not really out there in the UK shops, I bought my TS12 from JustTrains' web site last year,
and they don't sell it anymore, it's been the case for about seven months now, which is weird because it's the current version.

Shops, like Game as Briggsy said, only really sell TS2009, which is now, along with the Add-ons for it, all that JustTrains sell as well.
This is a quite different situation compared to the Railworks product, as Briggsy said again they refresh their stocks of it in big shops
each year, so it's always being promoted, as well as out there to buy in plain sight. It's run by a successful British company who
are located in the UK, unlike Auran N3V who are in Queensland.

Who are N3V? What's is this "Trainz" game their selling, what's in the box (the DPS' "East Coast Main Line" is good in this respect), can I get more things for it, will it cost me money, how good is the quality of the extra things*, (the whole First Class Ticket thing (paying money to download what exactly?) is a rather weird concept in this day and age).

It's all very complicated and abstract, where's with the other product you buy the game (which is patched automatically for you),
the company has it's own shop, and if you want to you can pay money for more trains and railways.
There are other online shops around who also make things for this game, by the looks of it JustTrains really thrive on doing this,
and make some good products for it.

*I really think they missed something here by not making a new DLS for TS2009, it's starting to get a bit confusing,
looking on the DLS in TrainzContent.exe for T:ANE there's is quite a fair number of things which,
while fine for use in TRS2004 and shouldn't be got rid of, just isn't any good for TS2009+, it makes it confusing to look for things.

Get past all this though, and you should have some fun with Trainz, because it is very good.

Arthur
Last edited by PeruvianLlama on Tue May 19, 2015 7:04 pm, edited 18 times in total.
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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by fudginator »

I'm a fan of both, but the trouble is I don't use Trainz as a sim, I just build routes and that's it. I spent 100's of hours building Duchy and Midshire, but when it comes to 'driving' on them, I bet I haven't done 10. Trainz is more of a community thing so it's always down to good folk giving up their free time to make content for others to enjoy. TS is a cash cow, but the models are generally good, but like the old saying 'You pays your money and make your choice'.
It's a shame there isn't a similar site today, like Railwaves back in the day. It was great content at the time and some of the units are still the best out there after all these years. I also think a trick is being missed here. If someone was to jump ship from TS (which has many sites) and set up a decent Trainz payware site, I'm sure it would be a winner. I for one would pay for some decent UK stock.
I work a lot with Nexusdj and when I see how much content he has provided over the years, it makes my contribution look small. So N3V will keep doing what they because there are others out there just like Nexusdj who do so much for the sim. T:ane has made half the content out there faulty, but N3V know that us as the community will spend countless hours sorting all this out so we have a half decent sim again. They move the goal posts all the time, yet are never helpful to the content creators that actually keep Trainz going.
How many of us have now installed T:ane, tried moving content which has been a pain only to find half of it is now bust. TS give you latest version free and folks like AP adjust their content and tell you, just download and re-install, simple.
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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by PFX »

All good points. I'd say 99% of the time I've spent on Trainz has been route building (despite only having one route to show for it and that was originally by someone else!). The driving side until this point, just doesn't cut it for me.

I agree that the Railwaves multiple units were and probably still are some of the best UK stock around. Will be interesting to see if it works in TANE.
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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by klambert »

I've spent a fair bit of time driving on trainz especially when it came to creating my route, that's why I created the 313 cabs as I cannot stand driving in an incorrect cab. The track cant in trainz has now improved things a bit. It would be nice to have a properly working in-cab AWS system rather than the current AWS HUD, I do believe it could be scripted but I would never be able to figure that out. In-cab signalling has manged to be scripted in trainz so I'm sure it's not impossible.

I think the driving experience overall isn't too bad though, especially if you can find a decent quality route to drive on.
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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by Briggsy »

I think there are two other key areas that are having an impact.

"The other sim", generally, recieves a bit of freshening up and re-release with a "2014" or "2015" each year - and each time that happens, it re-hits the shop stores in places like Game, etc. I've seen "the other sim" quite often when I have a wander round the PC games section - but it's very rare I see Trainz. When I do, its usually an older version like Trainz 2006 or Trainz 2010 in the £5 bargain baskets.

I don't think Trainz is as well known as the other sim - simply because it slips off the radar to potential customers a year or so after it's released. The next update isn't usually until some 2 or 3 years later - whereas the other sim appears back on the radar ever 12 months. If its not on the shelves to buy, people can't buy it.

In addition, the other sim generally works "out of the box" - whereas I think Trainz can be particularly frustrating for a new user when they've just bought the latest Trainz version, downloaded a lot of stuff from the DLS, only to find that a large chunk of those downloads won't work because they're flagging up errors because of Auran/N3V continually and pointlessly moving the goalposts for the sake of it. To the less computer-savvy, they wouldn't know where to start on fixing them - so just put Trainz away and rarely bother with it again.

There are two key areas that need addressing with TANE in my opinion:

1. It needs to be kept in the public eye. Rather than releasing it and then forgetting about it for 3 years, it needs to be "freshened up" once every 12 months (perhaps with the latest service packs built-in - similar to how Microsoft do with their DVDs when a new service pack is released - and perhaps with some additional content, new routes or "limited edition" versions that differ slightly in terms of built-in rolling stock). That way, it re-hits the shelves every 12 months and brings it back into the public eye.

2. N3V need to ensure that all older content is updated each time a newer version of Trainz is released so that content always remains useable. One DLS for numerous different versions of Trainz has resulted in a massively clogged up server of content that was intended for varying versions of Trainz - and isn't always compatible with another.

People like simplicity. Once they have to start repairing content and patching software just to get it to work, they will lose interest, switch off, and look elsewhere. Trainz is too buggy.
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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by klambert »

Briggsy wrote:I think there are two other key areas that are having an impact.

"The other sim", generally, recieves a bit of freshening up and re-release with a "2014" or "2015" each year - and each time that happens, it re-hits the shop stores in places like Game, etc. I've seen "the other sim" quite often when I have a wander round the PC games section - but it's very rare I see Trainz. When I do, its usually an older version like Trainz 2006 or Trainz 2010 in the £5 bargain baskets.

I don't think Trainz is as well known as the other sim - simply because it slips off the radar to potential customers a year or so after it's released. The next update isn't usually until some 2 or 3 years later - whereas the other sim appears back on the radar ever 12 months. If its not on the shelves to buy, people can't buy it.

In addition, the other sim generally works "out of the box" - whereas I think Trainz can be particularly frustrating for a new user when they've just bought the latest Trainz version, downloaded a lot of stuff from the DLS, only to find that a large chunk of those downloads won't work because they're flagging up errors because of Auran/N3V continually and pointlessly moving the goalposts for the sake of it. To the less computer-savvy, they wouldn't know where to start on fixing them - so just put Trainz away and rarely bother with it again.

There are two key areas that need addressing with TANE in my opinion:

1. It needs to be kept in the public eye. Rather than releasing it and then forgetting about it for 3 years, it needs to be "freshened up" once every 12 months (perhaps with the latest service packs built-in - similar to how Microsoft do with their DVDs when a new service pack is released - and perhaps with some additional content, new routes or "limited edition" versions that differ slightly in terms of built-in rolling stock). That way, it re-hits the shelves every 12 months and brings it back into the public eye.

2. N3V need to ensure that all older content is updated each time a newer version of Trainz is released so that content always remains useable. One DLS for numerous different versions of Trainz has resulted in a massively clogged up server of content that was intended for varying versions of Trainz - and isn't always compatible with another.

People like simplicity. Once they have to start repairing content and patching software just to get it to work, they will lose interest, switch off, and look elsewhere. Trainz is too buggy.
I've heard somewhere that Trainz, ever since Auran went bust is basically an Indie game, and I think for an Indie game considering the size of it's online community does very well. I don't think N3V have the money and resources to lavish on trainz like Dovetail does on Railworks or the skilled programmers to make the game more intuitive to the ordinary punters. There was a time when Trainz was run for a while basically by a few blokes in a shed. Hence why we didn't have really any trainz releases between TRS 06 and 09 or any major improvements since TS12. (Believe it or not I've been using trainz since 2006 although I didn't join the online community until 2008).

Indie games typically tend to be the preserve of those more clued up on computers, I think the mistake N3V are making is that they're marketing their game to be more than just an Indie Game when really they should be advertising it as one considering they're very much in the vogue nowadays.
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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by cyberdonblue »

Briggsy wrote:In addition, the other sim generally works "out of the box" - whereas I think Trainz can be particularly frustrating for a new user when they've just bought the latest Trainz version, downloaded a lot of stuff from the DLS, only to find that a large chunk of those downloads won't work because they're flagging up errors because of Auran/N3V continually and pointlessly moving the goalposts for the sake of it. To the less computer-savvy, they wouldn't know where to start on fixing them - so just put Trainz away and rarely bother with it again...

...People like simplicity. Once they have to start repairing content and patching software just to get it to work, they will lose interest, switch off, and look elsewhere. Trainz is too buggy.
It's not just the new user who is going to get frustrated. I have used Trainz for many years (2006) but my attempts to import stuff into T:ANE from Trainz 2012 have been so frustrating. It's as if N3V WANT people to throw T:ANE in a corner and forget about it. Most of my Trainz fleet of locos, units and rolling stock has been decimated. At the last count it showed 3,840 Errors (and tens of thousands of warnings.) The beautiful 86/2's and 87's by nexusdj are all red flagged due to some texture problem that I wouldn't have a clue how to fix. All of my DMU's are the same. Klambert's wonderful 501's are also in the same predicament (and yet I imported them into one of the early beta releases of T:ANE without any problems.) Loads of Mk I and Mk II coaching stock gone the same way - the Class 201 is red flagged because of a texture problem on a lamp bracket, how bad is that? The 08 shunt engine is red flagged because of one of the textures on the screw coupling. I mean, come on...

Many of us have spent years acquiring various assetts yet N3V come along and wipe them out in one stroke. They say it is to improve quality. Maybe it does but what's the point if half of your target audience says, "No thank you," because you are destroying their enjoyment and wiping out their favourite locos/units/stock? Don't get me wrong, I think the progress made by T:ANE is a fantastic leap into the future, but surely it doesn't mean you have to drop a bomb on the past to make that progress.

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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by PeruvianLlama »

Good stuff guys.

I've updated my earlier post. It takes me a long time to type these things. :lol:

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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by CaptEngland »

Good posts from all! Sums up what I am felling at the moment with T:ane.

At this moment in time, I am trying to import over 10 years of stuff into T:ane. Next job will be to check what assets are now upgrade to T:ane standards (on the DLS), and then I will start the texture fault repair (Getting rid of jpg's/tga's or changing the config file to look for a .texture), and finally getting back to making routes.

This all seems like deja vu from when we made the big jump to TS2009/2010 and again we had to repair a lot of stuff. As always, N3V never gives us the full story on what gets changed, added, or how to make stuff without faults for the latest version, only that it is always up to the content creators to update stuff by testing out ways, themselves.

I am now starting to see why some people will not upload items to the DLS. Perhaps if all the content makers agreed not to upload to the DLS for 6 months, we could force N3V's hand into giving proper documentation and to stop moving the goal posts each time there's a update/fix. At the end of the day, without the content makers making free stuff for N3V's core engine, N3V would still be stuck with TS2004 items and a program that would only sale for £5, if that!

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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by Chris1955 »

Agree with Capt of Englands comment.

You can understand why the TPR site now has more UK content than any other countries, that includes all trainz versions 2006 thro to 2012.

Perhaps creators should boycott N3V for six months as suggested and send all stuff to the TPR site instead and see what happens.

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Re: The problem with Trainz ...

Post by clam1952 »

Boycott the DLS? All that would do is cause more users to have to go on a kuid hunt, wouldn't affect N3V in the slightest if they even noticed. I don't use TPR and and have a DLS only policy anyway.
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