The good old days? long gone

[smarty2]

Blimey Ash, if you'd have hung one you could have got the lot for a £125!

[ashgray]

... and not run any of those lovely scenarios for the last three years, or so.

As they say Martin, hindsight is 20-20, but I'd still have bought them then...

Ash

[smarty2]

... and not run any of those lovely scenarios for the last three years, or so.

As they say Martin, hindsight is 20-20, but I'd still have bought them then...

Ash

True.

[1S811985]

Interesting debate.

Strikes me that many of us have reached the point where we are taking a cold, hard look at just how much cash we've spent over the years, wondering if we've really had our monies worth out every last penny of it and concluding that we could quite happily get by with spending a lot less but much more wisely in future.

The arguments that seek to explain the relative dearth of freeware upon the march of technological complexity alongside a more entrepreneurial outlook in society are sound and well made. Perhaps though part of the explanation also lies in a user base that was prepared to put it's hand in it's pocket every time a new payware product came along, often simply to pad-out an ever-growing collection that was already under-used. It could well be that the seemingly rude health of the payware sector is, at least in part, based upon a market characterised by over-inflated demand.

1S81

[Merlin75]

To many even a repaint or scenario takes hours to do so I'll hate to guess what a route or train will take one person to do. So if anyone wants to make a bit of pocket money and users are willing to pay then who can blame people for charging. Some are going to buy everything no matter what. Others are going to buy less and think about what they buy. Others will just stick with what they have and buy no more. And then there are others who are now calling it a day and quitting. No group is right or wrong here it's down to you to decide which group your in.

[AndiS]

I would not even call it over-inflated demand. I remember -- from the times of UKTS community CDs sold for MSTS -- that there was a considerable group of people who did not want to come home from work and hack files to spend that single hour of trainsimming they could muster. They were prepared to pay for these CDs (£3-5 for long hours of ready to play entertainment) and believe me, there were enough who objected such sinister commercialisation of freeware that you could get for the cost of bandwidth alone plus hours of matching files.

So now we see the segment of ready to play add-ons largely expanding, upping the price at the same time. As said before, that is strongly connected to technical developments. However, it does not lock out other options in the hobby.


1) Freeware taking and giving. It has been said quite shortly after the release of MSTS that freeware is not about demanding but about creating. Rages between freeware creators and freeware demanders have been with UKTS for 10 years now, approximately.

The question therefore is: Where are all the scenarios for the UKTS freeware packs and all the UKTS downloads (not to forget other sites)?

If you consider creating freeware and you refrain from it because something comparable is offered for pay, consider whether you would be prepared to create it for about 10% of the list price times your guess at the download count. Don't forget to deduct taxes and insurance from that amount. And factor in at least 50% your time for fixes and adjustments just to please someone who is loud enough about his case.


2) Moderate payware consumption. If I would have the time to enjoy Pete's railmotor, I would beat up some scenario (however humble in terms of AI) to drive it up and down every route I own, at every time of the day. When I am through that, I could start again and enjoy the better ones as if they were new.

You can get a lot out of any item, payware or freeware, if you get active for your own purpose alone. You need not upload that, which means that no one is questioning any of your design decisions (like choice of rolling stock and traffic patterns in scenarios).


3) Route building for your own. I am sure there is a huge number of people just building their own world, without consideration of "quality standards" and "prototype image" and such stuff. You can download a hell of a load of stuff. Just look at the threads where people cry out how sluggish the game is now that they own all the freeware available. (50 GB is one figure I remember).

If you find some of the stuff "not up to your standard", try beating up something on your own. It can be a reskin of a building. As long as you don't distribute it, you don't need any permission. Or beat up some boxes in SketchUp or so to hold your favourite photos of buildings. Of course, there is some learning involved, but if you do it for your own, you are the only critic to please.

After you did that for a while, you may or may not find that you would like to share some of the things you are proud of with the world. And suddenly, you became a freeware creator and considerations of "today's professional standard" have not interfered with that.


4) Returning to MSTS or Trainz or Zusi. Notwithstanding some tremendous group efforts like the Trans Pennine Network, you can clearly see that the predictions were right in saying that routes and stock will not surface at the rate they did for MSTS and other simulators of that generation.

If all you aim at is a huge collections of routes and rolling stock, then RW can only be a financial fiasco. Sure, you can go from mega-sale to hyper-sale and obtain a large part of the offering for surprising amounts of money. But nothing can beat your existing collection if you manage to get it running on your current computer. You will even find positive surprises because some stuff will work now without a jerk that was a slide show on your previous one.

Of course, there is the difference in presentation and game features. But you got the option. Lots of stuff for (nearly) no money or some items of an expensive kind. Just like in all aspects of life.

[RobertM]

Hmmmm, good to see a proper debate going, I was wondering myself how far this would get until it went south, and we have gone past my expectations

It seems that there are people who are willing to support pay-ware.

I suppose I should clarify I myself and my gripes. I am not against pay-ware, as long as its for something decent, a loco with advanced scripts ect (and as long as it floats ma boat) I will gladly accept that. But if its just a loco with no extra whistles or bells then I then have to question the logic.

My main gripe is when it comes too scenarios or re-skins, I keep on seeing increasing numbers of sites which charge £3-10 for a set of scenarios. Scenarios should be the bread and butter of Train Sim in my opinion. But there are people who charge for them and unfortunately, people who will pay for them.

Sounds aswell, we had freeware sound packs for RS, but that market has now gone commercial, another disappointment

[deltic009]

I keep on seeing increasing numbers of sites which charge £3-10 for a set of scenarios. Scenarios should be the bread and butter of Train Sim in my opinion. But there are people who charge for them and unfortunately, people who will pay for them.

Sounds aswell, we had freeware sound packs for RS, but that market has now gone commercial, another disappointment

I don't think you can just put a blanket over these two headings and say that charging is wrong, flat out. The amount of time I had to put in, the preparation, the fault finding, the shouting at the AI dispatcher and the lock ups endured during my first (admittedly jumping in at the deep end) scenario meant I spent something like 40-45 hours on creating one single scenario.

As to sounds going commercial being a disappointentment, you're not going to get a guy hiring out trains and recording them - with total control over the trains behaviour for the recordings - if the end product is to be free. So I think the fact it is payware actually leads to much better sounds as far as Armstrong Powerhouse is concerned as an example.

[AndiS]

Scenarios are a good example of how things can be seen from different angles.

The interested train enthusiast recreates some snapshot of the prototype, is a bit creative regarding the script to throw in some extra challenge or entertainment.

The professional game producer sees scenarios as entertainment value. And the buyer who wants to spend a nice hour after work without extra trouble does so, too. You fire it up, you run it, you are entertained. After a few runs it gets boring and you turn to the next one. So you directly buy entertainment time, provided you own the rolling stock.

Now with payware, but also with freeware that is not totally easy to obtain, there is the huge problem of rolling stock requirements. Whatever you create, lots of people will not own the required stock, and complain about it. And here comes the big divide: If you are a freeware creator, you just get frustrated and discontinue your efforts. If you are the seller of the required stock, these scenarios are your best marketing device. Therefore, I am surprised that we are not flooded by attractive scenarios produced by RSC and featuring all the stock that needs a bit of a sales boost.

However, RSC did note the demand. But they opted to try to solve the problem via the new exchange platform for scenarios first. With some luck, users will produce scenarios promoting RSC products for free. Then people get lots of added entertainment value for free and RSC have no extra cost (other than running the platform).

In parallel to this development, you will certainly see people charge for the effort of creating scenarios, on whatever platform. As long as it is on a balance with other efforts, i.e., roughly the same payment per hour, it is not immoral. Creating scenarios is not more fun than model creation. And doing it good is not too easy either.


P.S.: Is there any good source for free sounds? I never delved into that domain, but I see quite strong copyright protecting any and all recordings. So how would there be free game sounds without free raw material?

[gptech]

Freeware Vs Payware is a debate which often crops up, but this time I think there's a little more to it than just a *complaint* that we're asked to pay for stuff--I don't think anybody can seriously expect that someone who spends upwards of a 1,000 hours of their leisure (?) time producing a model should make that available at no cost; some do and for that we should be grateful.
Route creation is very much the same, particularly as we now demand such a high degree of accuracy, even to the point that the colour of the station seats *matters*
Scenario creation has often been erroneously thought of as a pretty simple exercise but that's far from the truth. deltic's just stated he spent 40-50 hours on his first offering (very enjoyable by the way) but I wouldn't be surprised to find his maths there was quite inaccurate and very much on the low side; I've never created a *real* scenario from scratch but I've been fortunate enough to have been considered of use as a beta tester for a handful. Testing, finding glitches, suggesting improvements or ways round a problem all take an enormous amount of time. Once a change is made when testing it's not as simple as just picking up where you left off, the scenario has to be run right from the start again so 40 hours can soon get eaten up after the 'guts' of a scenario has been decided on.
If someone considers that they deserve a few quid for that time can you really begrudge them?
That leaves us with re-skins to consider, and where I think the latest round of angst stems from: once again, not as simple a job as many think to get all those little details right. The more prolific re-skinners all have their own techniques to make the job easier and to satisfy our increasing desire for 100% accuracy---compromise seems to be disappearing.

Recently we've seen a number of 'macro' sites spring up offering re-skins of commercial DLC at what are really pocket money prices but this seems to have caused more than a few ripples, being seen as just 'piggy backing' on somebody else's hard work to make a fast buck and without gaining the proper 'license' to do so. This led to one developer announcing that commercial re-skins of their products weren't allowed, probably compounded by the fact that a few of the offerings have been of a 'low' standard--incorrect colours in various elements of the livery in particular--if they'd have been to the standard of the free stuff from the likes of David Hossacks would they have been better received?
That recent development, I believe, has given rise to the 'everybody's out to screw us' feeling and I can understand that, and why it's spilled over to encompass ALL of the guys just trying to get a wee bit back for their work.

[1S811985]

Scenario creation isn't difficult and it needn't take forever. Anyone who is capable of using a scenario is capable of making one and those for whom that's all too much bother can always mine the workshop and have quick-drive to turn too as well.

I genuinely cant understand why anyone would want to pay for scenario's?

1S81

[deltic009]

Scenario creation isn't difficult and it needn't take forever. Anyone who is capable of using a scenario is capable of making one and those for whom that's all too much bother can always mine the workshop and have quick-drive to turn too as well.

I genuinely cant understand why anyone would want to pay for scenario's?

1S81

With all due respect, putting in 63 AI services amongst a player service that range from stoppers to empty stocks is NOT easy, by any stretch of the imagination - and checking it all works harmoniously is not either as you can't get an accurate picture from the scenario 'play' button.

[Easilyconfused]

Scenario creation isn't difficult and it needn't take forever. Anyone who is capable of using a scenario is capable of making one and those for whom that's all too much bother can always mine the workshop and have quick-drive to turn too as well.

I genuinely cant understand why anyone would want to pay for scenario's?

1S81

With all due respect, putting in 63 AI services amongst a player service that range from stoppers to empty stocks is NOT easy, by any stretch of the imagination - and checking it all works harmoniously is not either as you can't get an accurate picture from the scenario 'play' button.

I have had a few goes at scenario creation and never came up with anything I considered remotely suitably tested for general release either on UKTS of via the Steam Workshop. Whilst the mechanics are relatively straight forward, the devil is in the detail and getting it to work how I wanted it to work proved more time consuming than I had time available.

Our dear departed friend Laurie who never looked at RS / RW but stayed with MSTS to the end, told me many times that to produce and test an activity that took 2 hours to run would easily consume 100+ hours of development and testing time until he was happy to let it loose on the world. Having driven many of his MSTS activities and seen the AI crammed into them with the signalling checks and TSRs I can well believe him.

I found that if you just want to blast from A to B and have green signals all the way then it is very simple to knock out scenarios but as soon as you start introducing conflicting traffic then the testing phase gets exponentially longer since you have to test it driving normally, driving like a total lunatic and driving like my mother would. Only with the full range of testing can you ensure that you don't get unpleasant surprises when somebody pushes the limits one way or another.

[DavidVI]

Scenario creation isn't difficult and it needn't take forever. Anyone who is capable of using a scenario is capable of making one and those for whom that's all too much bother can always mine the workshop and have quick-drive to turn too as well.

I genuinely cant understand why anyone would want to pay for scenario's?

1S81

With all due respect, putting in 63 AI services amongst a player service that range from stoppers to empty stocks is NOT easy, by any stretch of the imagination - and checking it all works harmoniously is not either as you can't get an accurate picture from the scenario 'play' button.

Indeed, I spent over 2 months working on my first GEML pack. Although I enjoy it.. I was spending nearly every waking hour working on the activities.. some took weeks due to problems that just kept driving me insane. Driving a 2 hour activity over and over just to see if a problem is fixed is not fun. I take extreme pride in what I do and I will obsess over the tiniest detail. With the first GEML pack I think I had about 300 or so hours on TS..and after the pack it's around 700.

Granted you can churn our an activity in half a day but more often than not it won't be as engaging as if you add in little details, challenges, chasing yellows, scripting, interesting services.. All within realism and WTT... I make things at a standard i'd expect.. not just to churn out and get money for. I tend to make my life really difficult.. for example in my in production GEML pack 2 I made one or two 156 activities using my reskin which were quite simple and short.. I later scrapped them thinking how dull they were and choose some much more intensive and interesting services, now if I were after a quick release and money I could choose easy services and activities to make. Still I am hoping to include the shorter simpler activities as extra ones and not part of the initial number.

And for the price they are, considering the blood sweat and tears.. and the passion (I wasn't doing it merely for money, i would probably have done most of the activities anyway as i'm obsessed with GEML, but it would have been over a much longer period). The fact I was doing it with the intention of selling them made me more conscious about the quality and I think people expect payware to be of quality so the fact they cost money would show its a good product.

I don't think it's crazy for someone to spend just over £4 for 9 or 10 activities that will offer a great consistent and realistic experience in one package without the user having to worry about downloading many acts from UKTS or Workshop, not sure about them and then having issues.

Considering the hours of enjoyment I think it's a bargain with a few of those 9 activities actually being 2 parters, so around 13 total activities altogether at an average of over an hour each.

[gptech]

so around 13 total activities altogether at an average of over an hour each.

Disregarding how long it actually took you to create those scenarios, if you charged for just the 13 hours of play at commercial rates (about 35-40 quid an hour for web design) you'd give them something to moan about