Atomic Systems

Just a heads up that the PC Gamer review of Rail Simulator is in their Xmas edition. Not a huge article (not surprising given the same issue is covering Crysis) but the game fared better than it might have done. The inevitable asides about anoraks and engine spotters abound, the main criticism is t...

The disk is protected by SecuROM I believe. It has been known to cause people some problems in the past.

At least it's relatively benign when compared to the horrors of StarForce.

I've always thought that games should always make you see the consequences of your actions. That's why I think games that trivialise violence by making it cartoonish and consequence-free are verging on poor taste, while the ones that attempt to be fairly realistic are on the right path. When it come...

With the greatest of respect, since when did lawyers worry about PR ? They don't, but the business that employs the lawyers does. The company lawyer may well advise the company to sue, but it will be a business decision whether or not to take that advice. second, who's going to be brave enough to t...

Hopefully you can see where I'm going with this in that £25 suddenly becomes a £975 loss when the letter from RSDL arrives on the doormat with the opening statement, " We notice your station building made with tools under our freeware licence is now included in "A's" payware route and you didn't te...

The best scenario resource by far for this line must be the two volumes covering the S&D in the The District Controllers View series by Xpress Publishing. As the name suggests these books are written by people who supervised train operations and they include WTT's, train formations, loco workings p...

Publishers, when they see an essentially complete and working product, tend to start applying pressure to get the product released. There is always a tension between developers that want to perfect every idea they have and the money men who need a return on their investment. Games development is an ...

This thread is a nice illustration of how tricky communication can be. It's amazing how you can write something that seems perfectly clear an unambiguous to you, only to find all sorts of misinterpretations and misunderstandings crop up when people start reading. I have to write technical docs on a ...

I didn't say for sure that we weren't going to allow you to drive along with AI trains. I just don't know yet. One other thing is that even if we do not ship with the "rail network" functionality, through the use of SimConnect I forsee similar concepts being added by 3rd parties. If you look at the...

If I were to speculate on the World of Rails aspect, I'd expect it simply to be something fairly generic derived from mapping data. It's relatively straightforward to use the same basis as flight sim to achieve this, I guess, and all it will mean is that there will be track in roughly the right plac...

Fingers crossed that the dev tools released on 12th November will allow us to create proper timetabled passenger runs and freight ops that aren't too far away from what happened in real life. The Somerset & Dorset has been an early favourite for me, but I'm fairly ignorant of what day-to-day activit...

Having said that I never witness steam locos travelling past either house or workplace, have a guess what happened last night? :D I was suffering from a bout of insomnia, and at just before 4AM, I heard the familiar sounds of steam passing by. Isn't that just typical? Anyway, sorry for the brief div...

A possible factor of thinking the chuffs are too rapid is that these days we are used to hearing trains on preserved railways, where train speeds are only 15-25 mph. This is what they sound like at proper speeds: http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=1499265970929867420 8) Thanks for that link....

At the very least, some kind of scenario tool needs to be readily available. It really should be available on the game disk. As it stands, you can 'finish the game' in a few hours. That's fine for an episode of Half Life 2, but a sim needs the ability to make your own fun for long-term play.

The small number of (occasionally buggy) scenarios out of the box could also not bode well for the utility of the dev tools. On the other hand, the delay could be more to do with needing time to document the tools: we all know how much programmers love to write documentation!