Atomic Systems

I'm going to have a rant here...

Is it me, or have the good old days of people making stuff for the sims for FREE come to an end?

For MSTS, we had people churning stuff out left, right and centre for free, from scenarios all the way through too cabviews, sound-sets and locos that were of high quality and in some cases, better than some commercial stuff that was being made. Ian McMillan for example and the 100's, possible 1000's of wagons he made for free.

But now it seems there is an increasing number of individuals who seem to only want to make acouple of quid for themselves, and not for the greater good of the trainsim community, which saddens me and at times, makes me question where all this and UKTS is going, if people are just wanting to go alone and do there own websites/shops. TrainSim is becoming far too expensive and for some, unaffordable with all these little sites wanting a fiver here, a tenner there ect, it soon adds up...

And I say all this as a long term user of the sims, I started back when MSTS was first released and I had the huge A4 boxed edition, I have played it ever since and this has been bothering me now for sometime.

Thats my rant over, I felt it needed saying as it is just bothering me so much these days.

Robert

not the sim, just modern life mate!

Gav

There are still many people producing high quality things for free, routes such as Crouch Valley 3 upcoming, the Mayflower Line, Great Central Railway, upcoming Severn Valley too.

The higher the game detail unfortunately the higher demand on accuracy and workload is required. Many models that look fine in MSTS, if they were just ported across, I'm afraid to say they would look horrendous. This is across the board for all types of rolling stock, bogies I seem to recall were particularly nasty in MSTS yet in TS2014 we have detail down to the level of AP/Waggonz producing the Koni branded manufacturer sticker on the shock absorber!

You can't expect or demand that people will invest such time and skill for no reward. It is pleasant and most welcome when we do get things that are free but I don't feel in a position where we should expect it to be the norm.

Have to agree, the trade off for higher and higher fidelity is that there is a much greater investment in hours required to create something. No doubt it will be even more extreme in future generations of rail simulators, there is a limit to how much of their free time most people are willing to give away. IIRC the class 90 has taken the best part of a year or more to produce and probably more than just a couple of hours a day. Ultimately you have to ask yourself if you would willingly give away so much of your time, very few will say yes.

Anybody seen Darren's incredible work?

http://dpsimulation.blogspot.com/

For better or worse, TS is based around payware DLC and it is something that I have learned to accept. It would be great to get loads of quality freeware of course, but the relative lack of it doesn't lose me much sleep. The proliferation of payware vendors if anything, makes me more cautious with my cash. I'll spend it on those vendors and products that I feel will reasonably meet my expectations, those that don't will not get a look in.

I have nothing against people trying to make a few bob out of the sim, if pursuit of that motivation results in quality products and support. Sorry to sound like a fanboi, but no one forces us to part with our money, and I for one am very fussy when it comes to that

There's a freeware NYMR in production, Full of custom assets rather than RSC clones, More of the same is bound to inspire freeware routes not reliant on payware, If I had any 3D modelling skills I'd be building my own assets because my own route uses a lot of payware items.

A good example of what I mean is the Class 156. I consider the model done by Thomson/Oovee to be one of the best model shapes around, really well done. Here is a screenshot of the MSTS version (and let's not forget that Ben Laws made the model, so it's no half measure) and the TS version.





I would imagine theres more polygons in one bogie of the latter than whole of the former model.

I'll take a punt at this as I'm one of the "offenders" and having recently "come out" as a new payware provider I may be the final straw that caused Robert's wrath.

Personally I'd done nothing at all towards TS work since the last time I posted a WIP pic of the railmotor - back in July 2012 until mid September this year. My life is just too busy now with my young family and I'd written off the thought of ever finishing it because 2 hours a week for a project that takes hundreds of hours is just not useful.

Then through various circumstances I've found myself with an chance to build TS stock full time (amongst other employment opportunities), and in the past 3 months I've got the 56xx back on sale, completed the Railmotor (to what I would personally call a very high standard) which involved a lot of new learning (the new shaders for example), a lot of re-learning (creating sounds were just one thing I'd not touched in 2.5 years) and have now started work on fixing some of the biggest physics bugbears with custom scripting ready for the next project.
The difference for you all is that you can either have a new quality loco hopefully every 3 months from me - this is my target, obviously things may be slower or quicker than advertised - but you will have to pay for them. Or you can have 1 every 6 years, but more likely not at all.
At the end of the day to commit to this full time, it has to pay the bills. I personally don't resent my spare time being spent on building for TS - I just don't have that spare time to spend anymore.
But this way I have 45 hours a week and you can expect to see a lot more from me, but to give you my Mon-Fri, 8-4 I'm afraid you do need to pay my wages. Otherwise it just doesn't work when 'er in doors goes for the weekly shop and the coffers are empty.

With photo quality texturing, models exceeding 60,000 polys (with many tiny details modelled), not to mention the demand for a 3D cab of the same quality (2 of them in the case of the Railmotor!), custom sounds for all (remember a lot of MSTS locos use the famous "2 cylinder sound set") and then my personal desire to script everything to death so the experience is as realistic as possible, I'm afraid the days where you could knock out a usable loco in a fortnight of evenings are long gone.

One indeed may not be aware of the time involved in the production of models for TS and I for one don't mind paying a reasonable amount of money as long as the quality and support are there, and going by Pete's former free work we should be in for a treat with his payware, good luck with that.
Its the way the world is now, but saying that there are still plenty of freeware items out there, you just need to know where to look is all.

Here's another take on it. We shouldn't assume that all people who make freeware to a very high standard are currently busy people with jobs and demanding families -people who might insist should be paid for whatever reason. To become really engrossed in this creative hobby is usually a by-product of an individual being maybe unemployed, retired, socially at a loose end or disabled in some minor or major way that means they have a lot of time to donate to their hobby. I myself am currently out of the employment stakes due to caring for a young son, but that isn't going to last for ever. It does mean I can donate time to creating routes and assets, which I intend to release as freeware once they are good enough to be seen. This in itself promotes a mindset of producing content for free - it is often the case that you have creative urges and would go bonkers not having an outlet. It will always encourage a good positive community spirit because the whole issue of commerce doesn't enter the equation.

I have no problem with people wishing to charge money for what they produce, it must be a lot of fun setting up your own cottage industry and seeing how you compete with the bigger boys. I'm pretty sure when we have to pay for products we are very choosy in what we acquire. Some products will be left on the shelf and invariably given away at a later stage. Such is the learning curve of running a business, however small.

Whilst there has been a lack of new free content overall compared to the past, look what we had recently, the excellent North East Rails. A superbly detailed atmospheric route like that for free depending on what assets we owned. We should be pinching ourselves, that would be £14.99 on Steam. In fact all the routes packed as freeware by UKTS have been excellent. Hopefully mine will pass the quality control and be accepted when it's finished and given the UKTS treatment.

karma99 wrote:I'll take a punt at this as I'm one of the "offenders" and having recently "come out" as a new payware provider I may be the final straw that caused Robert's wrath.

Personally I'd done nothing at all towards TS work since the last time I posted a WIP pic of the railmotor - back in July 2012 until mid September this year. My life is just too busy now with my young family and I'd written off the thought of ever finishing it because 2 hours a week for a project that takes hundreds of hours is just not useful.

Then through various circumstances I've found myself with an chance to build TS stock full time (amongst other employment opportunities), and in the past 3 months I've got the 56xx back on sale, completed the Railmotor (to what I would personally call a very high standard) which involved a lot of new learning (the new shaders for example), a lot of re-learning (creating sounds were just one thing I'd not touched in 2.5 years) and have now started work on fixing some of the biggest physics bugbears with custom scripting ready for the next project.
The difference for you all is that you can either have a new quality loco hopefully every 3 months from me - this is my target, obviously things may be slower or quicker than advertised - but you will have to pay for them. Or you can have 1 every 6 years, but more likely not at all.
At the end of the day to commit to this full time, it has to pay the bills. I personally don't resent my spare time being spent on building for TS - I just don't have that spare time to spend anymore.
But this way I have 45 hours a week and you can expect to see a lot more from me, but to give you my Mon-Fri, 8-4 I'm afraid you do need to pay my wages. Otherwise it just doesn't work when 'er in doors goes for the weekly shop and the coffers are empty.

With photo quality texturing, models exceeding 60,000 polys (with many tiny details modelled), not to mention the demand for a 3D cab of the same quality (2 of them in the case of the Railmotor!), custom sounds for all (remember a lot of MSTS locos use the famous "2 cylinder sound set") and then my personal desire to script everything to death so the experience is as realistic as possible, I'm afraid the days where you could knock out a usable loco in a fortnight of evenings are long gone.

Do you have a webby of FB page Karma ? Struggling to find anything with Google.

steve

Stone75 wrote:Do you have a webby of FB page Karma ? Struggling to find anything with Google.
steve

Not yet mate. There is a pic in the Screen shots WIP thread here (and an old style one in the photoshop thread) - in fact I'll chuck a couple more up in a mo - but that's all so far. I've just been so busy building until yesterday so I can take time off with the family over the next 2 weeks, I'll look at getting some kind of site or fb page up in the new year I expect.

It's indicative of the world today.

I remember when I got my first car, not that long ago in the mid 90's, it was a heap of junk but was designed so that you could do most routine maintenance easily yourself. I used to change my own oil and filter, spark plugs, starter motor, alternator, brake pads, leads, distributor etc easily in minutes and without specialist equipment.

Nowadays, car manufacturers have sussed out that there is money to be made in making DIY maintenance and repairs all but impossible. Rather than being designed for easy maintenance and modification, cars are now designed to make maintenance impossible for the DIY mechanic. About the only thing you can do now yourself is fill up the windscreen wash! Now if you want to tinker about under the bonnet, mend or improve your vehicle then you need to pay handsomely for a professional to do it as the car is now so much more complex, time consuming and awkward to work on than it ever was before.

Exactly the same applies to Railworks.

Hi, I must say my pre-Christmas blues have evaporated,with the news that Petes Railmotor is finished,so hope for some railmotor fun very soon.
As for the views on the thread title,ok producing high quality items for this title is not easy,and if talented model makers like pete,can make a living out of it, then that's good , we all get to benefit, because we know modelers like Pete go that extra mile to produce real quality items, that no one should complain of having to pay for.
But there are aspects of TS that are pretty straight forward, Scenario Creation,Route building, and Reskinning are all within the grasp of the average TS user, scan the forum its packed with some fantastic tips and advice,and have a go,i have only recently discovered the joys(and woes )of scenario creation,most of my time with TS is route building, so thought I would try my hand at creating scenarios,if I can do it anybody can.
Regards Kev