Atomic Systems

I'm struggling to find a definitive list of changes between the two products in order to weigh up whether or not the new product offers value for money for me, the occasional user with aspirations to make rolling stock.

Most of the official (and unofficial) blurb concentrates on what Rail Works is and doesn't directly list the features/content it has that sets it aside from Rail Simulator, which would be usefull to see.

Can you guys help me fill in the blanks below:


Additional stock:
Class 37

Additional routes:
Bath-Templecombe
Three fictional routes including a UK large goods yard and harbour set in the late 1960 and early 1970s

Improvements/Fixes:


New Features:

Hi

Support ...........

Seriously ........the development of RS has finished..... so you haven't really got the option.

Cheers
Jon

A lot less stuttering( for myself anyway) not completely eliminated though.

RW is going to be supported with updates and this has been proved once so far this week, Railsim is all but gone from that. But, they have a lot of work to do to say the least.

Additional stock:
F7 and V200 also, plus from Steam update: Added Plettenberg Container Loader (although not sure if this was something that should have been there previously)

Improvement:
routes.xml no longer an Achilles heel as it got removed and each route is basically treated as its own seperate entity.
Signal lighting much improved.
Draw distance improved.
Slack action.
There has been graphical enhancements to all routes generally.

ForburyLion wrote:Additional stock:
Class 37

German V200
American F7

ForburyLion wrote:Additional routes:
Bath-Templecombe
Three fictional routes including a UK large goods yard and harbour set in the late 1960 and early 1970s

Bath-Templecombe was there in the original release for all.
If you got the European release, you get the US route on top of the 4 European ones. Americans get the Newcastle route, they, of course, have the US route already.

ForburyLion wrote:Improvements/Fixes:

Better signal visibility
German signals corrected
Hagen-Siegen route improved
Dispatcher reportedly says something meaningful if he does not like your plans (can anyone give details on that?)
Generally, a lot of small optimisations in the various assets, which make the game run smoother

Bad
RW has a new track bug of were you go to add a track to another track and it dosent show up plus all the other stupid track bugs that were there is RS

Good
My CrossRail route dosent crash every 5 secs and hasnt crashed since ive had RW

just had a run on the fictional us route and distance mountains looked quite good, i havent ran RS in a while but i seem to remember distant mountains being a problem

Gav

If there is an error with a scenario it will tell you what the problem is 9 times out of 10 and gives you the opportunity to edit it or quit, also when i loaded up a very troublesome scenario the consist that was causing it was deleted by the sim, no worries, i then had the opportunity to re do the bit that was deleted. Good idea.

Mart

Switch directions can now be seen in the map with a thick line.

Don't forget the new weather patterns that I think look amazing and make a HUGE difference! Just have a close look at some of the RW photos in the atmosphere thread and compare them with the RS ones and you'll see what I mean.

cougar55555 wrote:Switch directions can now be seen in the map with a thick line.

and pre set for manual switches ( for the start of the scenario )

the ability to add scenario placed platform,siding and destination markers so as to fine tune pathing ( though some seem to have problems with them at the moment )

John

I would say that the lighting changes have gone from a toytown look to a much higher level of reality. They look immense now. Shadows are deep and light variable. Clouds don't look dull and flat now.

davidhossack wrote:I would say that the lighting changes have gone from a toytown look to a much higher level of reality. They look immense now. Shadows are deep and light variable. Clouds don't look dull and flat now.

Yes I would agree with that, overall it has a cleaner more atmospheric look to it.

John

Dispatcher reportedly says something meaningful if he does not like your plans (can anyone give details on that?)

Yes, at least to a point. I went ahead and built another small test route to carry out more signaling and AI stress tests. The dispatcher has definitely been improved in a couple of visible ways:

It no longer causes train wrecks by misrouting trains left and right. Trains are now prevented from both entering the same section of track (at least in all the tests thus carried out).

At least one of a) signaling showing "correct" aspects or b) points being set correctly for trains - happens when running a more complex scenario. Unfortunately it's often only one and not the other.

The situation with the dispatcher is more complex. Some errors do make sense, for example:



Here the dispatcher can't figure out how to route a train to its destination and explicitly says so. So far so good. However, there are also messages such as:



Why is "Success" an error? I honestly don't remember what the conditions were to trigger this one but it wasn't awfully helpful in diagnosing the problem.

Thus I'd say RW is showing some promise with the dispatcher as it's no longer completely braindead like in RS. That combined with RSL's reputation for fixing things means we could conceivably have a much more useful sim sometime (soon?). That's the biggest difference for me.

Cheers,

jkxx

The AI has not been fundamentally resolved.
It seems to me, that we have a RailNotWorks pre-processor involved.
It will tell you to '!!!' off if there is no perfect timetable involved.
It cannot cope with holding at a signal.
This is a major issue for those who want an operational rail simulator.
I hope 'they' are listening.