I call the announcement another bad slap in the face of the community.
Rail Simulator, the new game now available from Electronic Arts, provides the most immersive train experience possible on the PC.
Now that brings me in line with Jon Bilton. However, no one should give too much about marketing fuss. But it is simply not true. Both MSTS and Trainz perform more immersive than KRS as of this writing.
In addition it allows users to create their own landscapes, trains and missions.
If creating your own landscape, I's say some succeeded, some did not.
If you define "create your own trains" as assembling one train which you will drive afterwards from the included rolling stock, this claim is ok. However, you cannot assemble more than that and you cannot "create" anything, more precisely, you cannot import anything.
Anyone created a mission yet? I thought the FAQ (and various people in the know) said you cannot create scenarios. Also, further below it says that with the additional tools you will be able to create scenarios. So what is a mission then? For fact, timetables are disabled and AI does not work outside scenarios.
For those wishing to take content creation to the next level, the developers of Rail Simulator are offering an additional suite of tools that enable professionals and experts to really get their hands dirty.
Most of us are neither professionals nor experts, but dirty as hell. All we want is run a scenario without setting the switches ourselves, and a way to fix a few things ourselves (signalling, wagons jumping on coupling). Other than moving the trees off the track little can be done currently by any non-expert enthusiast sticking in the dirt.
These tools allow the creation and editing of the more complex elements of Rail Simulator, adding new content to the game and authoring scenarios, as well as providing more in-depth documentation about features, functions and facilities.
I hoped for the
complete documentation to be available on release. Then we would have spend the weekend fixing your product for you instead of moaning about it (well, some of us, at least). If someone at RSD is indeed reading the posts here
and giving just a little hoot on "the community" (which is oh so important to Kuju/RSD), then please, may I beg for the documentation of the data format now? Keep the user manual of the tools which are not ready, no one could make use of those, but you must have the API for signalling, passenger programming/configuration, "mission"/scenario/timetable etc. data somewhere.
However, you will need a high degree of specialist knowledge of railway systems, computer simulation and programming to use these tools effectively.
No problem. Most of us will outperform any Kuju developer regarding that. I am not talking about 3D modelling. But regarding "specialist knowledge of railway systems, computer simulation and programming", Kuju did not engage the biggest geniuses on the planet. And for most aspects, it is not true that you need programming skills. If you stay clear from Lua stuff, all you need it railway knowledge and persistence to face the abstraction challenge which any simulation poses.
Btw., the conversion tool to turn the binary data into more or less comprehensible XML and back is already available, it is called serz.exe and sits in Rail Simulator\Packager after you installed one of the additional liveries. This means that it is perfectly legal for any naughty payware creator who wants evade the license agreement, to figure out how to convert his creation into KRS format - without signing any agreement. The amount of work involved in figuring that out will hurt him much less than it hurts the enthusiast who wants to help salvage this project. And "salvage" is no exaggeration, because if you go on selling KRS without fixes, PR will be catastrophic.
But agreed, a month is a frustratingly long time.