American Content or Lack Thereof

[Rich_K]

For quite some time now new additions to the MSTS file library here have been overwhelmingly Indian in nature. I wonder if this is the result of very little interest in creating new American routes and rolling stock or if perhaps there is somewhere else where these items are being uploaded?

[daniellouwrens]

How about this for very good recent American content

https://www.trainsim.com/vbts/tslib.php?searchid=10533426

Cheers

Daniel

[NorthernWarrior]

Many route builders who produced content for MSTS myself included - although I never produced anything based on North America - have either retired from the scene or perhaps moved on to Trainz or TS20xx. Even there I am now finding some difficulty motivating myself to start anything more involved than a model based project which is impractical in MSTS anyway unless you find a way to eliminate continuous run circuits or return loops.

Then there is the whole level of politics which seems to surround MSTS and its spin off Open Rails these days. There is considerable hostility from some quarters to anyone who perhaps prefers to stick with MSTS rather than using OR or the new TSRE editor. At the end of the day it's a hobby and we should be free to do what we want. Putting a route together in MSTS then getting criticised for it is not exactly the kind of feedback one would prefer after three months of eyestrain in the editor. That said I still have MSTS installed and not ruling out perhaps doing another one at some point, but right now at this stage I would prefer to spend those 3 months flying from Sagittarius A to Beagle Point in Elite Dangerous!

[sumitsingh]

Most of the users have moved to other Train Sim games after MSTS like RailWorks or Trainz.

But why Indian still prefer MSTS, I got no clue of it.

[dforrestc]

How about this for very good recent American content

https://www.trainsim.com/vbts/tslib.php?searchid=10533426

Cheers

Daniel

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[ossie]

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Given the thread title, oh, the irony....

[Literalman]

I've finished building the Washington (DC) & Western, a fictional route from Alexandria, Va., to Piedmont, WV, 170 miles as the train flies. I started to create activities this week. It will include rolling stock repainted for the Washington & Western and should be ready for beta testing in both Microsoft Train Simulator and Open Rails in the spring.

[pwillard]

Here are some of my random thoughts.

1) MSTS is like a Senior Citizen and many early developers (or dabblers) have left for greener pastures... or just moved to the city... who knows? (Or forgot about it for a while, like me)
2) MSTS historically had a barrier to entry... Microsoft "retired it" and new CD copies became somewhat harder to come by though obcurity or just a lack of marketing it once had.
3) OpenRails changed that. It meant you didn't *have* to have MSTS (though it helps) This new option was able to generate interest in markets that might have been historically missed.
4) TrainSim.com is still here... unlike most other sites...
5) Combine item 3 and 4 and you see why people want to place what they do here at train-sim
6) India *is* one of the countries that still relies heavily on rail systems, especially passenger traffic, which in the US seems reserved to only a few coastal regions.
7) Believe it or not... there are a lot of people who live in India and see trains they can model every day... So many of us in the USA need to look back to the PAST to model railroading in its glory days.

Hopefully this is just stating some facts that should be obvious. The developers of Indian content are really in the "development" curve the USA content makers were in around 2003 or so. So much still left to "create the first time"... fertile ground. Not so with American content. Much of it HAS been done... though truthfully... a lot of it is from 2002 or so and they show their age... (I'm looking at you... single face 2 dimensional bogies)

[hminky]

MSTS is economically more accessible to more people worldwide.

Can run MSTS on my $65 dollar refurbished XP computer I bought to run MVP Baseball 2005.

There are many foreign sites still actively using MSTS.

Harold

[chilla]

truthfully I think we have alot of good American routes to use for Msts but what we lack are activities for alot of routes.if we could get more activity builders to make activities for the routes that don't have any or barely any then I don't think alot of people would complain about all the Indian routes train sets and so on. because in the end it's all about trains no matter what country they are from. maybe it's just time other countries Msts users to show what they can do there is nothing wrong with that.

[chilla]

also sorry if that came out like one big long sentence it's a pain writing on my cellphone.

[wwhall]

Pete makes a lot of good points. Sadly, interest in railroading in the US among most of the public is in pretty rapid decline. That translates into shrinking interest in train simulations, too. MSTS has essentially been an archaic platform for years now, especially if one compares it to a lot of non-railroading games and simulations, so attracting users with only a passing interest in trains is getting more difficult. OpenRails has breathed some new life into train simulations, but much of what it has accomplished has been in the areas of better train operation physics and more realistic "dispatching" and train operations options. That has been a great addition for those of us who like to run a train simulator as that--a simulator--but it doesn't do a lot for the folks who just want to run the simulator as a game.

All of that gets into a "chicken-egg" discussion. There has been a long period of uncertainty as to what platform, for example, route builders should be aiming for--MSTS or OpenRails. I think the scale is tipping toward OpenRails, but that uncertainty remains. Same with content and activity creation. The scale is tipping toward OpenRails there, too, I think, but a lot of content developers have likely just found it easier to move to other platforms until the dust settles about what platform will be dominant. Harold may be right--Indian and other users outside of the US may still be using MSTS because it will run (as well as MSTS is capable of running) on older hardware. That said, though, I'm seeing even some Indian content coming out that is "OpenRails-only" content.

One point that I will disagree with some about: There is no shortage of stuff that has not been modeled for MSTS/OR yet. Some examples: I could list at least a hundred different models or renditions of US diesel locomotives that have yet to be modeled. Maintenance of way equipment--there's practically nothing out there and a lot of what's out there is very crudely modeled stuff. Scenery objects? There is lot of crude stuff from back in 2002 that is still being used because there hasn't been anything better modeled.

But, back to the chicken-egg thing. Once OpenRails becomes the de facto post-MSTS simulator (and I think that is inevitable--it's just a question of when), there will likely be more interest in creating OR content, activities in particular. However, if extremely well-done OR-only models or routes get only a few hundred downloads, at best, in several months, will that be enough interest to justify the volunteer OR developers to continue working to get OR where it needs to go? It's a fair question, I think.

[sumitsingh]

Most of our Indian friends were making Modern Stocks
I am more interested in British Legacy Trains based on Meter Gauge.
I have modeled some passenger cars also with a locomotive for RailWorks.
You can see them here - https://digitalrailways.wordpress.co...01-izzatnagar/
The point is - Here also in India people have lost interest in Railways Simulators, I had seen many new comers specially school going kids are playing MSTS/ORTS. Most of the old model makers have just walked away and model only now for personal use as those new fellows upload every nasty repaints they wish to.
Although most of the activities were good when I used to play MSTS.
I also lost interest in MSTS. It was a great game, I still remember the first activity I played, it was a thrilling experience.

[Don6218]

I have to agree with Chilla, "what we lack are activities for a lot of routes". Activity building has been put on a back burner, except for a few new good ones with Open Rails in mind. The New Blackfoot for example, Conn River, DAR, NEC, Mactier, Bala 2.0 are a few that come to mind that could use some updated or new activities. These are all very fine routes that are complete as such and great to run on, and there are others.
BLW has done a fine job of producing period correct trains that need some activities to operate on these routes. I may try my hand at some activities when things get back to normal here at home, or at least when I can concentrate a bit on what I am doing.

[asteph627]

I agree. It seems it is no longer practical to keep a $30 first class membership when I don't do any Indian routes.