EuropeanLoco wrote:Hi Dave Gald to see the MT is still intending to produce product. Keeping MSTS alive . . Season Greeting to you Dave and all at MT
Ken A
Seasons Greeting to you Ken also.
To be fair MT have never dropped MSTS for any other simulator, or announced any withdrawl from the market place.
We've been true to our customers and have carried on developing for MSTS, (although at a slower rate than before). It IS just 12 months since our last route release Great Eastern 2.
The MT team have also built NWC and NWC 2 in the last 2 years or so. So we have been busy.
My hard drives are littered with the contents of stock packs in various degrees of completeness. The detail level of some of the new stock is much much higher than its predecessors as its all being built now with Open Rails in mind. As such it might struggle to run on middle of the road MSTS set ups. I have Multiple Units which are basically nothing more than a MK1 coach which now come in at over 12000 polys per car, the original HST was 3000 polys.
The reason that MT has not announced any new routes, with the state of the MSTS market now I don't personally beleive that its worth starting any new routes at this time, the development time for a decent length and high quality route is just too long to risk it for what is a sim that has to be considered to be in its twilight years. A year down line you might find all interest has moved to something else. Other like EB clearly feel differently.
Once Open Rails reaches version 1 I think that all bets are off and MT will be strongly considering at least one route which we can use to show off our abilities without being constrained by the base sim, which is something we've been battling with for years. For instance, in GE2 there are brand new custom built level crossing barriers, it took about a year to make these low enough detail to work in MSTS, I for one will be glad when my creativeness is not limited by what the sim can handle.
Stockpacks ARE without doubt a much simpler and quicker product to produce, but I still hang on the idea of producing an outstanding route being good for our reputation. It is just hard to justify the amout of work and cost for the kind of sales that MSTS generates these days. I have in the past considered moving MT towards a stockpack only product line. Looking at some freeware routes, sometimes I wonder if we should leave them to it, things like Dorset Coast have proved most popular and cover an area that I think we'd struggle to compete with size wise. But I think a set of stock packs providing excellent stock for Dorset Coast would have a very popular product should we have ever done it.
While EB certainly have released a large number of routes I would hesitate to agree that MT do not also offer "variety".
We have released 7 retail routes plus Springfield our freeware fictional route (plus built 2 more for charity). I don't think 10 routes of the quality we work towards is an amount to be sniffed at either. It's not only about quantity.
We'd released or built a 3rd Rail route, An OHL modern route, a steam branch line, a large part of the Irish Network, a fictional route, a Scottish diesel route and a significant part of Wales.
Our stock packs cover current day multiple units. Wagon. Classic and recent Locos, even down to Shunters. We don't cover every possible era and interest, but I think we've spread our product range over a reasonable period.
