Trainz First Impressions
By Pete Higginbotham (22 December 2001)
My name is Pete Higginbotham. I am a 51-year-old retiree from the
San Francisco Bay Area now living in Southern California. I have
been a train enthusiast for quite sometime and worked for a short
while in a retail store, which specialized in H.O., and Lionel model
trains. I have been involved in several, I believe, rather
impressive model train layouts. I spent the afternoon downloading
the “demo” version of Trainz from Auran to see
what it was all about. I was very impressed with the product. These
are my impressions after one day of fooling around with it.
First of all this is a big program. 50+ megs to download the demo
which was compressed. It took about 4.5 hours on my 56K phone modem
so be patient if you want to try it out. Second, don’t think you
will get a free program by downloading the demo. Several of the
features are disabled and the rolling stock is very limited in the
demo version. And third, this is not TRAIN SIMULATOR and is no more
comparable to it than, say, RAILROAD TYCOON. With that said, the
program is more of an attempt at a computerized version of a scale
model train layout than an attempt to duplicate a “prototype”
train experience. There are three sections or parts to the program.
The most basic section is an interior shot of a maintenance building where
the rolling stock can be looked at. Now, I am a nut about collecting train
stuff, so to me this was great. You can look at each car individually
through a 360-degree camera and just “show off your stuff” so to speak.
Each piece of equipment is listed on a sidebar type of menu and when you
choose a particular piece by pushing buttons next to it, the piece shows up
in the maintenance barn for you to inspect. If this is an open architecture
program so that third party developers can add to the stock, this will
really show off some of the artistry out in cyber land. I can imagine a
beautifully detailed steamer by Train Artisans or one of Mark Toland’s cute
little switchers in this barn! And, we can criticize the heck out of every
detail from every angle!
The second part of the program will be the meat and potatoes for most
people. It is the “driver” section or the
man-with-the-hand-on-the-rheostat section, if you are a H.O. fan.
Here the train, you make up your own consists, goes around one of
several layouts. These are more like a layout that we built in the
good ol’ days in that the train goes round and round the
countryside that you or someone else developed. It is not a
point-to-point prototype rail operation. The graphics were superb on
my computer, which, by the way, is almost the exact definition of
minimum by Trainz' standards; Pentium 2, 400 MHz, 32 Meg video card.
You can have one or several trains running at the same time and
apparently can operate from a rheostat like controller or from the
cabin of the train (I could only operate from the rheostat as the
inside the train operation seemed to be disabled in the demo).
There were several vehicle crossings with moving vehicles on model
roads, model towns, model people, yep really neat! The one criticism
I had was the darn cars drove on the wrong side of the street! When
are those folks on the other side of the ocean going to learn the
right way to drive? The audio, in my opinion, was not so great. I
love my room shaking Dash 9 roaring in the middle of the night
keeping everyone awake with Microsoft Train Simulator, but again this
program is much more like a model railroad--read that quiet. The two
engines provided in the demo were nice, not perfect but nice. The
rolling stock, limited as it was to one boxcar and one passenger car
were equally nice and actually pretty detailed.
The last part of the program is the surveyor section, or the build it/modify
it yourself section. I have done some modifications to Train Simulator but
let me say right now, I am not (in big capital letters) an artist. I can
lengthen track, add buildings and some other basic stuff, but route layout
and that are beyond me. This was my favorite part of this program. I could
actually work it, without a help file! I could make little mountains,
change the concrete to grass, add and move buildings around (and they fit
the contours of the ground), I was impressed! Some of you out there will no
doubt think this too simple, but for me it had great potential. It may well
turn out to be the best part of the program.
I’m sold. When it comes out I will have one. It will not replace Train
Simulator in my house; it is a different type of program. I hope the real
version comes out loaded as promised. As you exit the demo it lists the
things that the retail program will include, several locomotives, worldwide
liveries and other stuff that went by too fast for me to read, even after
several attempts, but what I read sounded great. The demo is very easy to
use even without a help file, the graphics were great and the program is
plain fun to goof around with.
The system requirements:
Minimum
- Adjusted details: no shadows, low draw distance, low draw detail, low
train detail - Intel Pentium II 400 MHz processor
- 128 megs RAM
- Nvidia TNT2 16mb videocard
- usable settings:
- 640x480 display resolution
- 16 bit color depth
Recommended
- Adjusted details: shadows enabled, medium draw distance, medium draw
detail, high train detail - Intel Pentium III 733 MHz processor or equivalent
- 256 megs RAM
- Nvidia GeForce2 32mb videocard
- usable settings:
- 800x600 display resolution
- 32 bit color depth
Recommended requirements are pretty tall, but if you have a system
that is within 3-5 years old it should work fine. Again my system
meets just the minimums and the program worked fine for me. I have
my display set for 1024x768 16-bit resolution and I had no
complaints at all about the graphics. I think this will be a great
program. Try it.
M.P. "Pete" Higginbotham
donnaandpete@sierratel.com
Links:
Auran, Trainz' designer:
www.auran.com
Strategy First, Trainz' publisher; go here to download the demo:
www.strategyfirst.com