A thought re MSTS and Trainz

[mikebate]

This may prove controversial, but i have been looking at the release notes on Trainz, and have a few thoughts regarding the ethos behind it.
You have to relalise that i live in the uk - so we tend to be 6 months behind events anyway - but Trainz claims that you should not look to build long routes but short ones to give the "feel" of a journey (does this mean even larger directory sizes for any given mile of route?). Now i am by no means a rivet counter but i have slaved, cursed, consulted you guys, and lost all my hair to create a reasonable facsimile of a late 19th century steam rout in the uk. Yes there are things that annoy - no turnatable for one - glitches in the editor - the new memory i have bought - but there again such things existed in FS2000 before the patch. Like an inabilty to get aiport info from the filght plannner - and now with all the hindsight we can muster this is one of the best sims ever.
So I feel that i will persevere with MSTS which seems to offer a more complete solution to my needs from a sim rather than being like an arcade game.
I am writing this in crayon as i am not alowed sharp objects!!!
For balance i have posted this in the MSTS forum as well, I do not want to start a pi$$ing contest - just like to hear if you agree or not.
Mike

[rabid]

It's my understanding that Trainz Surveyor will let you build routes as short or as long as you want:

"Railroads can be virtually unlimited in size. The limitations are very much dependent upon your system's memory and hard-drive. But there are no programmatic limitations to railroad size."

The fact that Auran won't be releasing 'scale-length' real-world lines in their packs doesn't mean it's not possible, just that they don't recommend it in terms of the time it would take you to do it. In any case by all accounts it should take less time and less disk space to create the same thing than MSTS.

[mikebate]

Then that is good news - the way i read it was only for the ulta insane (for which i probably qualify anyway). Do we have any comments from the actual testers on this?
mike

[CeeBee]

LAST EDITED ON Oct-24-01 AT 08:51AM (EST)[p]LAST EDITED ON Oct-24-01 AT 08:50*AM (EST)

A long route would take time to build so mine are fairly short at this point in time. HOWEVER, they are small on the HD and I don't see a 150km route being gigantic on the hd. A lot will depend on the amount of detail and objects, especially further away from the track where its not really needed.

[brucek]

I am into the preliminary stages of a long route (estimate about 80 kilometres, but it could be further) that replicates a real-world line, but using selective compression.

I will not be including unnecessary detail beyond the route corridor...which will be about 100 metres either side of the line. (By "unnecessary" I mean anything that would simply load the landscape down with unnoticable and inconsequential detail).

I guarantee you that it will be significantly smaller than any equivalent created in MSTS!

Bruce.