American Content or Lack Thereof

[Rich_K]

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

I am leaning the same way as you. I most likely will not renew my first class membership when my current one expires.

[charland]

I've been building routes for about ten years now. With every route I try to include about a dozen or so activities. Each activity take maybe a half hour to write then you have to actually run it to make sure it works and take notes on what cars you placed in the activity editor that need to be adjusted and also what times you are at certain places so you have an idea when to run AI traffic. Some activities like the first one for the Springfield Terminal route took six hours to run, and the rest of the activities that were with the route took about four and a half hours to run... so we're talking a lot of time to create activities for a route, not to mention a couple of thousand hours to build a route. In all this time I've wondered why nobody who knows a bit about programming wouldn't have come out with a free activity generator.

Paul

[longiron]

I have to agree with Chilla, "what we lack are activities for a lot of routes".

If you haven't created an activity, please be aware that for every minute the activity lasts, it takes anywhere between 5 - 10 minutes in testing. I know ... after creating 1/2 dozen for Michael Stephan's Allegheny route back in 2008.

[ossie]

I am a huge fan of ORTS but the problem as it stands is that if you're not already a member of the ever decreasing MSTS/ORTS community, how do you find out about it? The guys have done an amazing job with it to this point, but if you're contemplating trying a train simulator for the first time, you're not going to find ORTS on amazon or at your local supplier of computer games. I can only guess at the legalities etc involved, but in my opinion, the only chance for longevity of any sort for what started as MSTS is for ORTS to reach a stand alone point free of Microsoft content and become payware with appropriate advertising. Again, I have no idea about the how/when/if factors involved in that, but as we stand now, our numbers aren't sustainable with or without ORTS in the picture.

Part of that is that a lot of people have made the decision to stop sharing reskins and/or new models but a look at download numbers of the past couple of years shows it is a supply AND demand problem and gives more evidence of the rate at which the community is shrinking. I noticed Rory's comment a few days back that his amazing Blackfoot remod had "only" attracted 500 downloads. That's a very healthy number these days, but compared to 10 or even 5 years ago....

FWIW on numbers, there's been a lot of discussion on Indian content, but when you look at their download numbers and consider their population, it's even more of a niche "market" there than it is anywhere else in the MSTS world.

As a guy who (hopefully) has another 20 or 25 years simming left in me, short of a massive influx of new members somehow getting involved in the hobby, I think MSTS/ORTS will run out of steam well before I do.

[chilla]

not wanting to be a member cause to much foreign product is coming into the site is kinda sad it's a site for all railroad lovers not just Americans if this site disappears you will wish you had kept supporting it you never know what you have till it's gone.

[NorthernWarrior]

The guys have done an amazing job with it to this point, but if you're contemplating trying a train simulator for the first time, you're not going to find ORTS on amazon or at your local supplier of computer games. I can only guess at the legalities etc involved, but in my opinion, the only chance for longevity of any sort for what started as MSTS is for ORTS to reach a stand alone point free of Microsoft content and become payware with appropriate advertising. Again, I have no idea about the how/when/if factors involved in that, but as we stand now, our numbers aren't sustainable with or without ORTS in the picture.

I would imagine most newcomers to the hobby regard TS20xx or even TSW (no editors yet if indeed ever) as the entry level product, closely followed by Trainz in its latest iteration, love it or hate it. They may not even be aware of MSTS or its would be successor. Most of the times I get drawn back to MSTS are either for reasons of nostalgia maybe to run a route that's not in any of the other sims, or thoughts of doing a valedictory route project. Most of the time I drop it after a day or two as even with the enhancements OR can bring, still doesn't compare with the contemporary products. Purely IMHO I sincerely doubt OR and/or combined with TSRE would be successful as payware. Where is the target audience to make it viable - they are the ones playing the latest "ooo, ahhh" route from DTG or bickering over Thomas The Tank Engine reskins on the N3V forum. And that's assuming the team behind OR would want or even could break their open source principles and backing to go commercial.

TS20xx is also largly plug and play, no faffing about with files or folders or spanned zip files if all you want to do is jump in and run a train. It even has a Quick Drive feature so you can, within certain parameters, mix and match your favourite route and traction and be driving in two or three minutes.

And don't forget for the American scene there is Run 8 which, although it doesn't have any editors (yet), has more than enough mileage to satisfy the craving of the guy (or gal) who just wants to jump in the front of a heavy freight train and drive it aways.

As regards this site and the file library, there was a debate a couple of years ago instigated by Nels about ongoing funding. At least one proposal was to build a "community" route which could have been sold at a modest price to boost income. However it came to naught with squabbling about whether it should be for MSTS or OR, the scorn from certain quarters over use of "old" assets or building styles came out. The bottom line being a veteran group of train simmers could not really agree a single item of common ground to go forward and any projects died stillborn.

Nels would probably have done better trying to commission a route for Trainz or TS20xx. The site is still here but have to admit my minimal use of the file library other than a few upload contributions has never really justified an annual subscription and enduring the embedded ads seems enough return at this stage. Perhaps if there was a monthly or quarterly subscription (like UKTS) might be different.

[Komachi]

not wanting to be a member cause to much foreign product is coming into the site is kinda sad it's a site for all railroad lovers not just Americans if this site disappears you will wish you had kept supporting it you never know what you have till it's gone.

Actually, no, it's perfectly reasonable and good. If you hate Chinese food, are you going to go spend your money at a Chinese Restaurant? It comes down to personal taste, and if one has no interest in say, Indian Content? Well, with what is being 99% of what is uploaded here, it makes really no sense to pay for something you neither like, not want. I myself have tried to get into Indian content, and it just don't strike my fancy, and neither does Freight. I'm a predominantly passenger guy myself.

[qballbandit]

Membership dues also support the forum, not just the privilege of having faster download speeds, yes? If so, at least figure that into your decision prior to withdrawing from member contributions - unless you don't see visiting the site much, if at all, in your future.
The site itself is still THE central information & communication portal for us all.

[wwhall]

A couple of comments about activity building: I build some activities, primarily for my own use. I took about a 2 year hiatus doing that when I quit using MSTS to run activities and when some of my rolling stock and routes flat would crash MSTS. I hated the drill of using TrainStore to store away all the stuff that might crash MSTS so that I could run the MSTS RE and AE--especially after TrainStore decided to crash in the middle of an "unstore everything" move and several hundred .wag and .eng files disappeared into the vapors. Thankfully, I had a backup, but it still took many hours to restore what had been lost.

Finally, in the last few months, I can use the very good "add-on" OR path editor to easily create paths and I can use Goku's TSRE to create activities, though the latter still has a way to go be completely friendly and useful.

Now, to the problem that a lot activity creators have. When I create an activity, I use the stock from my collection that best fits the activity. Problem is, most other simmers won't have everything that I have, and I have a lot of personal repaints in there that no one has. So, people who would use one of my activities would have a lot of changing out of stock to do. That can be done pretty readily in Conbuilder, but its very time-consuming (I know, I do it when I get someone else's activity where I don't own all the stock needed to run it). Some advanced simmers might be OK with doing that, but I suspect a lot of the simmers here just want a plug-and-play activity.

Then there is the issue with activity complexity. It's true that making a simple activity, with few loose consists, few AI trains, and simple paths, can be made pretty quickly. I do it for myself all the time. But, if one makes a complex activity, the creation itself can take hours, then many more hours to run in testing. I built one activity not too long ago that takes 8 hours to run if you run it as it would be done prototypically. I'm still not completely happy with how it runs and I've run it 4 times now. Even run at accelerated time speed, the hours spent in testing add up quickly.

The other issue in activity creation is that OR and MSTS run activities much differently. In MSTS, for example, an activity run where a train has to switch through "automatic" switches pretty much requires the path to "choreograph" a run through those switches. In OR, it's much simpler. Just build an "A to B" path and have the player take the operation to "Manual" when making switching moves through those switches. It's much simpler for the activity creator to build the activity that way, but it likely won't run properly in MSTS. And, in OR, an activity designed in that way requires the player to essentially set up his/or own switching moves according to the work order. For casual simmers, that's not "plug and play." So, it's back to the question of for whom the sim (and activity) is being designed for--casual gamer or serious simmer.

All of that said, without good activities to run, most simmers will tire (and often already have tired) of MSTS or OR pretty quickly.

[daniellouwrens]

No Search Results
No Files matched your search criteria.

Clearly it did not work the way I thought it would.

Search for file "lirr_install.zip" no quotes

[NorthernWarrior]

Membership dues also support the forum, not just the privilege of having faster download speeds, yes? If so, at least figure that into your decision prior to withdrawing from member contributions - unless you don't see visiting the site much, if at all, in your future.
The site itself is still THE central information & communication portal for us all.

Possibly for MSTS/OR but that seems to largely be the same few faces posting - even the Indians seem to have given up, not surprising given the outright hostility they are sometimes greeted with.

The rest of the boards see even less traffic, Railworks I post occasionally but if/when I get back into route building the focus has largely moved over to RWA or for the UK scene UKTS (where I am still in self exile from having been a bit of a malcontent ). World Of Subways, BVE etc. seem pretty much dead.

Would imagine the bulk of the bandwidth comes from the file library not the forum and ISTR Nels pretty much said that during the funding debate. The matter hasn't been raised again since so presumably the finances are in reasonable shape. Besides, there are ways to and means of being creative when it comes to raising funds not least, as already suggested, offering something more flexible than an annual membership or some sort of content incentive to join.

[CNW 5099]

I think this is the least hostile I've seen one of these threads. Kudos for maturity? Anywhoodles, MSTS/OR India is in it's prime. It has the benefit of years of work and progress on the American/UK side and they are adding their own spin and expertise on that and have absolutely RAN with the ball while on this side of the world most content is produced for screenshots and trading between a few in the know members or cliques. I mean, that's their prerogative but it will only bring about the demise of the community faster.

Sad what's happened with activities. We have some of the best routes we've ever seen but no activities for them. And with OR we can do more than ever with activities but a lot of this development may have come too late. The people who can produce do not seem to want to do so anymore. Not for the community anyway. Unless it's for screenshot props or as a bargaining tool for some other "private" or "modified" content. Hell, not even for money. I think I've offered to PAY for activities to be produced for me on ET one time and no one took me up on it. There's no desire from this community anymore.

[ThatSolitaryGuy]

In regards to the lack of activities available:

From personal experience, one of the factors that affects my willingness to try out a new route usually depends on either the number of activities available for that route, and, in specific cases, whether or not those activities require payware that I plan on investing in at some point. The longer that I find myself engaging with the sim and its content, the more aware and interested I become in learning the prototypical operations for that particular route. There have been a couple routes that caught my interest and I eventually download, only to find that not a single activity was available for that route. I could just run some trains in explorer mode, but that gets stale pretty quickly.

I will admit that I'm kind of lazy and unwilling to do some research for operations over a particular route, and I prefer to learn from the activities of others who have been around here for much longer, and, in some cases, have had first-hand, real-life experience on the route being modeled. I've only had two activities of my own published here: one for a fictional route and another for a route that I'm convinced is long past the point of being a topic of interest here (I'm also leaving my wording purposefully vague, so that this doesn't come off as some off-handed self-promotion). Unless I'm thinking to deeply about this, I've gotten the impression that most activity writers here are pretty seasoned towards a particular route or region, with a certain degree of knowledge of the in's and out's of any given route, and I try to uphold those same standards before I put my ideas for an activity into practice.

Of course I understand the need to expand one's comfort zone and expand on their abilities, and I respect it when someone from another country wants to tackle something outside their field of expertise. However, I realize that I'm pretty late to the game in this community, and the demand, motivation, and inspiration for new content has dropped alongside the overall activity here.

Again, I'm only talking from personal experience here, and I hope I didn't just contribute to having the discussion drift away from its original meaning (no moderator has made that complaint yet).

[rufuskins]

To paraphrase a well known song:-

But oh simmers my love of MSTS is here to stay
Together we're going a long, long way
In time the rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble
They're only made of clay but my love of MSTS is here to stay

It's true there is limited scope for new "modern" stock, but it seems to me there is a vast array of "old" stock available to model. In my own case I model Lancashire & Yorkshire and London & North Western carriages and wagons here in the UK. This has in part been stimulated by the creation of two relatively small routes suitable for running them, and has also stimulated a few activities.

[MsSheare]

I think what most people have forgotten is the issues with he who shall not be named. Also some people became pushy and too demanding to those who did create stock and locomotives. I still paint stuff for the community I am just relearning on a new program so it's been a hit or miss option. I never could figure out how to make any activities so I gave up trying I even struggle to do changes to a route cause i am so nervous about breaking something.

I will keep painting as long as I can cause it is what I like to do most of all.