Atomic Systems

Sorry to use the old BR line but hey, what the heck

A couple of months into KRS and the release of the dev tools, things are coming along nicely, what with new Scenarios being uploaded and a new (and brill) HST soundset, the community are slowly turning the sim into what we wished for in the first place. Obviously a long way to go yet, but as the title suggests...........

anyone agree?

... but the forums seem far less busy now.

Is that good?

Are people busy creating things or are they playing RS?

I'd like to see what other people are up to, but there seems to be very little activity.

There are plenty of things which could be being done, but are they being done?

Personally I would like to thank those who have uploaded Routes, Scenarios, Re-skins, Tutorials etc in such a short space of time. These people must have put in a lot of hours and absorbed a great amount of knowledge plus have unlimited patience while working on our behalf. I can speak from experience regarding Routes and Scenarios as my numerous posts asking questions will verify. Even with all this help I am still struggling to produce a short route and have only produced one Scenario which does not work properly yet. It would be interesting to know the time others have spent working for our benefit or just for their own pleasure.
Needless to say without these forums I wouldn't have a clue what I was doing.
Also the Incredible Customer Service from RSD Derek and Adam has been a great help.
I am spending about 3 to 4 hours a night working on My Route and things are progressing very slowly
So I take my Hat off to all our uploaders and despite my earlier reservations I think KRS is going to be a very popular program indeed and IMHO MSTS2 will have to be on another planet to beat it especially in the U.K. market. In short I think we are "very definately getting there"
Thanks and Regards James

Got to agree with Scorpion. The game is improving steadily. Just small steps are already making a big difference for example the Deltic cab view mod, the HST sound set and the new scenarios are all shifting this game in the right direction.
It is early days yet but I am excited as things are set to get bigger and better all the time now. New downloads and improvements are starting to roll in on a much more regular basis now. Keep it coming!!

[quote="UpsideDownBox"]... but the forums seem far less busy now.
]
Yes the forums are much quieter now,but the RS section is probably the busiest at the moment,
the last time i was looking at the MSTS2 section tumbleweed was blowing down the street
joking aside,the RS side of things is much more positive with more and more addons appearing, this is great!
kevin

I think that now the grumblers have all shut up, many users are now getting down and building things, hence not so many messages on the forum, everyone is busy building mega-routes. However with a few helpful messages here and a lot of decent tutorials on train-sim.com (considering the sim has not even been released outside of Europe, the amount of tutorials on the train-sim site is excellent compared with here by the way ) route building is becoming easier by the day.

We must remember that with MSTS, it took months before any decent routes or models appeared. There were very few accomplished 3D model builders in the train simulator community in the early months, so all sorts of quite average models were uploaded in the early days - Now, we have a lot of quite professional 3D modellers in our ranks, so I expect we will be seeing some really nice models soon (once they work out how to get their models into RS that is).

I personally am not counting out MSTS2 as being a killer program by the way, yesterday we got the DX10 patch for FSX and the water and shadow textures are mind-blowing (assuming you have a rather high-end PC).

mikesimpson wrote:We must remember that with MSTS, it took months before any decent routes or models appeared. There were very few accomplished 3D model builders in the train simulator community in the early months, so all sorts of quite average models were uploaded in the early days - Now, we have a lot of quite professional 3D modellers in our ranks, so I expect we will be seeing some really nice models soon (once they work out how to get their models into RS that is).

But that's why I'd have expected more models by now... people itching to bring out a model they've released for anther sim recently, on RS.

As yet, there have been no new models (not even wagons!) and a few re-skins. For a community that has had years of MSTS I find that a little strange.

Are people having problems? Is the creation of 3D cabs causing problems, if so, why isn't rolling stock being uploaded?

It just seems strange that there hasn't been a dam-breaking deluge of models.

UpsideDownBox wrote:
But that's why I'd have expected more models by now... people itching to bring out a model they've released for anther sim recently, on RS.

As yet, there have been no new models (not even wagons!) and a few re-skins. For a community that has had years of MSTS I find that a little strange.

Are people having problems? Is the creation of 3D cabs causing problems, if so, why isn't rolling stock being uploaded?

It just seems strange that there hasn't been a dam-breaking deluge of models.

It does actually take a fair bit of time to make models!!
Also, the tools to allow the creation of models for Railsim have been only available for a few weeks.

There is also the fact that there is a bug with the object filter, which will most likely cause a crash in any scenario that uses third party models :-

http://forums.uktrainsim.com/viewtopic. ... 18&t=77812

Matt has had two of my Steam loco's for a few weeks now, but can't upload them because of this bug.

Once these things have been ironed out then, I think you will see more uploads.

Kevin

UpsideDownBox wrote: But that's why I'd have expected more models by now... people itching to bring out a model they've released for anther sim recently, on RS.
As yet, there have been no new models (not even wagons!) and a few re-skins. For a community that has had years of MSTS I find that a little strange.
Are people having problems? Is the creation of 3D cabs causing problems, if so, why isn't rolling stock being uploaded?
It just seems strange that there hasn't been a dam-breaking deluge of models.

I'll stick in my word, as a modeller. Some of us ex TSM users and the the like now have to learn new programs in order to get our models into the sim without tricky conversion steps between programs. This will be easier for some, but harder for others. Also, the 'Blueprint' editor is all new to us. Each item of stock has one 'Main' blueprint and several (read many) blueprints that the main blueprint depends upon. Practically everything has a bluepirnt, from wheels and bogies, to steam effects, to one I found the other day that contained all the locomotive variables.... Alot of what we are working with in the Blueprint/Asset Editor is undocumented and involves a bit of hit and miss.

3dCanvas models are also having a little issue with Specularity, which I personally haven't been able to solve (which is why over the coming weeks I am teaching myself max - have been professionally trained in Lightwave, but the concept is same, its just finding what MAX calls it...).
Here is a model of mine, as it would appear in sim at the moment:

A little too shiney methinks.

Personally speaking, the lack of new stock does not surprise me. MSTS had a slow start as well. Everyone keeps saying 'but we have all this MSTS stock!' This, while true, is a little incorrect. RS uses a rather different set-up to MSTS and requires different part naming and the like. A standard MSTS model needs 'groups' - to use a 3dC term - merged to form no more than 24, it needs new materials set up, it needs a 'shadow object' made for providing dynamic shadows of the piece of stock, it needs a dark area under the model to be added, and for high-quality textures the textures should also be 'surface baked'. Surface baking can take anywhere from a couple of minutes, to a few hours depending on PC speed and how detailed/how anti-aliased the required surface-bake is.

All these factors are undoubtedly contributing to there being no "dam-breaking deluge of models."

My questions answered. Thank you Kevin and SavV1.

Good luck with your modelling - everything I've seen so far looks good.

I perceive this is simply a case of gaining familiarity with what is a new paradigm. We do indeed have many experts who have years of MSTS experience...but barely weeks of RS experience. I'm in the same boat. I know exactly WHAT I want to build (e.g. a LUL stock train) and all its details. I know exactly how to do it all in MSTS (years of scar tissue). I do NOT yet know how to do it all (or even much of it) in RS. There's the model itself, and how it runs on rails and couples to other units(many files and blueprints). Then lighting (more blueprints). Then a 3D cab model, and each of its animated controls (yes, more blueprints). Then the 'physics' and how the controls interact with that (more blueprints). The list goes on. In short, we have to re-implement what we know in a new way - learning about each required loco component and system as we go. That's why I asked for guidance from RSDL regarding the physics bits (especially motoring and brake systems) in another post. In my perception, we will advance quickly once examples are available and also documentation at a detailed level explaining how the bits work and what facilities/functions are available. Thanks to RSDL, that is steadily happening with new docs and 'how-to' videos being released. Kudos to them for that. So while, maybe unlike the early MSTS days, there are now many 'experts' around, we still have to figure out how to use our subject-matter expertise in this new implementation. So I don't expect a deluge any time soon. More likely, a few people will figure out various bits and will release something. Others will look and learn from those and will contribute further. Over time a critical mass of knowledge and skill will form - as happened with MSTS. Very early days yet... but IMHO there is great potential here.

Best, Jimi