Zusi 3 - Honest Opinions Please

[NorthernWarrior]

Trying not to give DTG any more of my money this year, looking at finally biting the bullet and buying Zusi 3 assuming it attracts a reasonable discount in the Steam Xmas sale. The other title I'm interested in is Simrail, but that doesn't release until late January.

Still a bit on the fence about Zusi 3. Obviously graphics wise not up there with TSC or TSW but how good really is the actual driving experience? Is the localisation good enough to get by with a bit of pigeon German? How many routes are now in the base package? How about the sounds?

The elephant in the room is that you can't save a run in progress which effectively limits you to the time available on the PC.

However assuming it comes in at around £45 as previous sales, that's only the equivalent of 1.5 TSW DLC's at DTG's new price so, as I say, very tempted.

[haverfordwest]

Did you read about the update 23.06.22 on Steam, Vern ?

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1040730/view/3330989990381326074?l=english

EDIT: The manual is in english now anyway, buddy.

Mike.

[gammaray84]

I did write a review on Steam. Very positive one i might say.

Zusi 3 is proper step up from Open Rails in terms of simulating trains behavior in different situations. It is limited to only German trains and systems. But what they got inside the game is amazing. Sure graphics are almost the same as in OR but you know, train simulator is about trains anyway.....
I admire the efforts and the development of this simulator. You can watch on youtube how this come to be, very interesting story.
If this can reach other continents and countries around the world it would be the perfect train simulator.
I admire how accurate trains behave and what your job is as a driver.

Final word is this, it is wort the money. But that is just me.

Have a good day hope this helps.

[NorthernWarrior]

Thanks for the information.

I definitely think this is worth getting, certainly better than throwing more money at DTG.

[haverfordwest]

MSTS graphics though Vern, for the external views. Cabs looked a bit better internally, from what i saw.

Mike.

[SurvivorSean]

I don't too much about Zusi but I've heard some good things. If I understand correctly it's a small team similar to a Run8. As I was mentioning in a thread in Run8 and it probably applies to this as well. Smaller teams are going to have difficulty building the lushious worlds that made people drool in TSW when it first came out. But TSW even with their big graphics departments still can't built nearly big enough worlds like the smaller teams can with less detail. Railroader for example coming out next year is a smaller team with better graphics than a typical small team development. Of course the trade off is it's only 13 miles currently.

Thanks

Sean

[NorthernWarrior]

Like Run 8, this is a case where the simulation and physics probably trump the graphics - at least in small doses.

[haverfordwest]

Have to be very small doses for me Vern, hehehehehe.

Mike.

[Shawmut]

Vern, I don't have Zusi 3, but have had Zusi 2 for years now. If you think 3's graphics look dated, you ought to see 2: there aren't even any wheels!

That said, I'll reiterate what gammaray84 said: for simulating trains it is unbeatable. The AI is the most sophisticated AI I've ever found in a trainsim, and I've had, in chronological order, TrainMaster, MSTS/ORTS, RW/TS, Trainz, Run 8, TSW, and TSW2. Even back in Zusi 2, I had no problem getting English documents and translations, and some of the cabs were, as the phrase was back then "photo-realistic." Just not the trains and the routes :-) The signaling is so good that DB used it for training drivers, and I remember reading that an American fellow played the sim, learned German signals, went to Germany and applied for a job and is now a DB driver!!

And it was programmed by one guy, Carsten Hölscher.

Dave

[seagoon]

V..... have had Zusi 2 for years now......

I'm pretty sure that, like myself, Vern dabbled with Z2.
At the time I made mention on my website (long since folded) that it represented a railway operation and the dynamics of trains better than anything available then.....2005.

Here's the Introduction to a 3-page write-up I did............

INTRODUCTION & OVERVIEW.
Zusi is not a German version of Microsoft Train Simulator - there is no switching, no freight-car drop-offs or pickups.
Neither is it Trainz TRS2004 - there are no animated industries, no drag-and-drop splines, no sunrises, no moving water effects.
The closest cousin to Zusi is BVE but, as you will see, what Zusi offers the enthusiast goes beyond even that excellent cab-driving sim.
In fact, Zusi is unique and owes its ancestry to "Railsim", evolving from that product in the late 1990's.

And so it went on.

[SurvivorSean]

RailSim yeah I had that was lots of fun back then. Amazing how far things have progressed. SimRail and Railroader are the ones I'm keeping my eye out for now. Though I may have to look into this again.

Thanks

Sean

[NorthernWarrior]

I'm pretty sure that, like myself, Vern dabbled with Z2.

Many hours spent running it Bruce. I even got to the point of trying to design timetables for some of the routes, though the route editor itself went over my pay grade. At the time it was essentially an upgrade to Jens Schubert's original Railsim in fact some of the routes from that were incorporated, if I recall.

[SurvivorSean]

As I mentioned I gave RailSim a try and then later RailSim US as there was at the time for some reason enough information (possibly through websites not YouTube as it wasn't a thing back then) to pick-up the program from Europe. I remember receiving the disk from Europe from Jens Shubert.

Now like SimRail (man it's easy to confuse that one with RailSim) Zusi 3 I'm having a hard time finding recent YouTube videos in English. In fact most are 3 years old which is not a good sign.

For someone like myself who actually enjoys streaming play throughs that makes me rather uncomfortable in considering it. The screenshots alone from 3 years ago (I don't know what has changed) doesn't look that great in my opinion. So if I can't tell what the game play is like this doesn't give me much confidense in considering.

At least SimRail has not released yet so I'll give that the benefit of doubt as hopefully some English content comes out for this soon. Railroader is of course the big one I'm keeping an eye on but when in 2023 this is going to release I really don't know.

Thanks

Sean

[seagoon]

Many hours spent running it Bruce. I even got to the point of trying to design timetables for some of the routes,.....

I was pretty sure you'd been keen on it...as was I, Vern.
Like you, I also tried my hand at creating a timetable but I think I was a bit underwhelmed by that....I tended to operate the trains more than any other aspect.

[mstsbe]

My trouble with Zusi (but which can also be passed as an advantage) is its too German-centric nature and closed architecture. There are some creators that want to create routes outside of D-A-CH, but eventually give up because they can't properly simulate it.

For now the only supported safety systems are the German ones (all forms of Indusi, ranging from the DB original version as well as the DR one, LZB etc) and ETCS in a somewhat limited fashion (used on the VDE8 i.e. Erfurt HSL route). There's a guy who wanted to make a route in Luxembourg and then just emulate the MEMOR2+ system (which is now not needed anymore, since Luxembourg has switched to all ETCS Level 1 operation in 2018) by using PZB..

Also my critical questions about future-proofing technologies (ditching DirectX9 for DX11, multi-threading operation etc) were poorly answered, or at least not by the people that should have been answering (Carsten himself).

Progress of Zusi 3, both in features and content has evolved in the same disappointing speed and wrong priorities as OpenRails, so I now rather stick to TS Classic than to venture in yet again another failed sim.

SimRail is going into the same trap if they don't start releasing a road map, a route/scenario editor, and customisation. They should have looked at ETS: even if it's already 10 years old, they keep making decent DLC and the architecture is open enough so anyone can make their own improvements if needed. Not so with Zusi, where his so-called Zusi-Prüfamt must put his stamp on it before it's released in the next add-on pack..