Question and Answer session with RailSimulator.com

[Acorncomputer]

I like the idea of 'Drive A Steam Train" program which is being showcased by RS.com at the moment and available shortly.

I wonder if this will be a fully stand alone product that you could give to someone to use out of the box or would they still require to register with Steam.

If there is no Steam registration required then I can see such a DVD filling up the shelves at all sorts of retail outlets, including Heritage Railways, thus bringing the idea of RailWorks to many more people who might want to progress to the full version.

[Kromaatikse]

Acorn, I think the idea was floated last year as well, but eventually developed into the Flying Scotsman "digital postcard" rather than a saleable product.

It's worth mentioning however that the Flying Scotsman postcard is fully standalone and doesn't interact with Steam at all. It would have been nice, however, if they had managed to make it take less disk space for what you get.

[Acorncomputer]

Hi

I was referring to the product in this Showcase -

http://www.railsimulator.com/showcase/

[Retro]

Good morning,
In the future , could we hope no rain inside the tunnels , réalistic night cabview for an activity between 21h pm and 6h am,or when we pass inside a tunnel (like MSTS) , realistic lights for the engine when we run in the night (to see the plateform,the other train in AI and to see the track) , and if it's possible a program like TRAINSTORE for MSTS.
Many thanks if you accept to take some minutes to read my request.
Regards.
Jean-pierre

Good point. Also no rain under large Station Canopies would be great.
Kind regards James.

[haddock1000]

TBH, general rain interactivity would be nice. Could then stream off of the rooves and onto the ground!

Would need a few server processors though! Really need to implement grid computing!

thanks,

chaddockdk

[DanHill]

What is the likely hood of Preserved Railway Routes like the Bluebell, North York Moors, West Somerset, Severn Valley, East Lancs etc as addons.

[Acorncomputer]

The Bluebell is my next major project but we looking at a very long build time to include bespoke assets. They have also made it longer with East Grinstead and some of the main line to model as well

[bigvern]

What is the likely hood of Preserved Railway Routes like the Bluebell, North York Moors, West Somerset, Severn Valley, East Lancs etc as addons.

My Heartbeat Moor available in the file library here is a representation of the NYMR albeit with some artistic compromise and using default assets.

I believe others have done similar for the SVR and WSR albeit these may have been for RS rather than RW.

[steved666]

Please ask the company if they will look at the inordinate length of time it takes to load Railworks 2 and then get the Package Manager page open. My system is currently taking about six minutes.

Thanks and regards,
Steve D

[Darpor]

Please ask the company if they will look at the inordinate length of time it takes to load Railworks 2 and then get the Package Manager page open. My system is currently taking about six minutes.

Thanks and regards,
Steve D

What sort of system do you have?

Although your question has already been answered when the original questions were submitted.

Q. Are there any plans to address the performance of loading both RailWorks itself and Routes? - Specifically, currently when the launcher starts it goes through a labour intensive process of scanning and cross checking all the items you have installed against the .pi files so that it can build up the relevant information for the "packager" and "package manager" tabs. Until this is done (and it can take minutes) loading RailWorks is very slow because the launcher is hammering the disk - most users won't care about this as they just want to get in to RailWorks, so its wasted effort. Once in RailWorks, loading some routes can take 10 or 20 minutes which seems excessive, again are there any plans to optimise this?
A. Yes

[vlado960]

Is there chance for more smoke on steam locos?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoJngPNIr3c

Regards

[jimmyshand]

What is the likely hood of Preserved Railway Routes like the Bluebell, North York Moors, West Somerset, Severn Valley, East Lancs etc as addons.

Agreed, very good question, it would be marvelous to see a major commercial route builder have a crack at creating some preserved routes. I'm sure it would be an easier challenge for them too due to the short length, would be much easier than recreating 70 plus miles of mainline. Preserved routes are very popular and well known to many enthusiasts too.

[Kromaatikse]

Is there chance for more smoke on steam locos?

It is already possible to run custom smoke effects on a loco, it's under the loco author's control.

The video shows a typical American loco. These are known to make much more smoke than a typical British type, due to the method of firing and the type of exhaust fitted.

[crazyfrogbro]

I think he thinks about the easy way, for example you set a number and a switch in blueprint and the game makes some smoke preprogrammed smoke, which isn't possible in rw now, you need to lua script the smoke, which is not bad, since the preprogrammed smoke don't give such freedom as the programmable smoke, and there are a lots of loco type with various smoke things, so it's impossible be accurate with preprogrammed smoke.
For example there were a Hungarian express, and a freight electric(AC 50hz) locos in the '30s, what are emitted some steam at the acceleration, because they used water resistance to make the acceleration smoother between traction motor pole and phase changes. With preprogrammed smoke it would be impossible to make that, since it's a very rare technique, but when you can script the smoke everything is possible.

[bigvern]

Are we likely to see any more answers? I thought the original idea was that Matt was going to collate everything into an ordered list and to an Andrew Marr on Paul Jackson!