Announcement: PRR Eastern Division Route

[chucksc]

Pennsylvania Terminal Railroad Co., Eastern Division Civil Engineering Department in partnership with Broadway Limited Locomotive Works, Island Electric and North American Locomotive Works, have shot the civil engineers and gone into preproduction. We now invite the train simulator community to join the public beta test of our new mini-Route, The Pennsylvania Railroad-Eastern Region.

We originally started building this route as a labor of love for our own personal use. However as we got closer to completion, we have been hearing a clamor from the Train Simulator Community calling for us to publicly release it.

Because of the size (4Gb installed) and complexity (over 3,000 track miles) of the route it is still only a release candidate (Public Beta Test). Even with our extensive testing of 6 internal beta tests/builds, we have no illusions as to it being thoroughly debugged at this point.

Scenery and documentation development will continue and with the public’s help in debugging we anticipate releasing fixes and upgrades via TrainSim.Com in the future.

Applications will be processed beginning on 24 March 2008. Because of its huge size, the route can only be practically distributed on DVD+r discs.

Unfortunately, even though this route is non-profit/freeware, our costs for the DVD media, duplication, labeling, shipping, and handling are substantial and we will require a $10 donation to help us defray these costs.

At this stage of development, for the install to be successful the mini-route and MSTS must be in their default locations on the hard drive C:\ and the end user must have installed the latest version of MSTS-bin in the default directory of MSTS.

After extensive private beta testing, we have determined that the minimum system required to run this route is a computer with a Pentium4/Athlon64 class processor that runs at 2 Gigahertz or better, 1 gigabyte of ram, and at least 128MB of video ram. The route has been tested on both Windows/XP and Vista. Obviously, the more your system exceeds these minimum requirements the better the performance of the route will tend to be.

To order the route, beginning 21 March 2008 email Maia T. Katz (maiatcat@hotmail.com). She will send you the necessary forms/releases to sign and then send your order to one of our distributors who will contact you for mailing information and payment through PayPal. Your order will be sent once payment is confirmed.

[chucksc]

Just a small observation from beta testing is that this route is not for light weight machines...

The real minimum practical configuration, in my testing, is 2.5 GHz CPU and above, 2gb of memory and a 256Mb video card in order to get "easily playable" frame rates...

I have been running it on a Athlon64 X2/4800 with 4GB of memory, Vista 64, a Nvidia Geforce 8800/GTS-640 and striped disks and have seen the frame rates dip to the low teens in the really heavily scenic-ed areas. Although I have generally seen them at 30 plus (sometimes in the 50s)...

[maiatcat]

Announcement: PRR Eastern Division Route

I should indicate in follow up to Chuck's comments and stress that the role of Island Electric, Broadway Limited Locomotive Works, and North American Locomotive works in this project has been limited to providing various types of motive power and rolling stock for the project and to help with the beta testing. The route itself was the work of the Pennsylvania Terminal Railroad Company and its various contributors. The PTRC is solely responsible for the route so direct all complaints and brick bats at me or Chuck.

This work would not have been possible without the ground breaking work of Vince Cockeram on NEC 4.0, Chris Helfrick on the Strasburg Railroad, and Bill Aukamp's Middle Division 2.0 which essentially a rehabilitation of Mike DiMaio's old Middle Division in light of constructive criticism from various corners of the train-sim community. George Meyhoefer and Bill built the remaining infrastructure. Although Mike in N.E. did much of the initial scenicking, most of the credit for the wonderful scenery has to go to Ronald Picardi and Kyle Ortiz both of whose work makes this project what it is. I am responsible --much to my chagrin-- for the megamerge. You all know most of the people involved and you can find their names in the specification forum under our route.

Chuck Schneider has been a wonderful director of beta testers and will remain so. Although I won't officially begin taking orders until the 21st, feel free to request the paper work necessary to order the route. We hope you will help us test our humble offering. Pictures of the route are available in the Screen Shot Forum.

Pennsylvania Terminal Railroad Co., Eastern Division Civil Engineering Department in partnership with Broadway Limited Locomotive Works, Island Electric and North American Locomotive Works, have shot the civil engineers and gone into preproduction. We now invite the train simulator community to join the public beta test of our new mini-Route, The Pennsylvania Railroad-Eastern Region.

We originally started building this route as a labor of love for our own personal use. However as we got closer to completion, we have been hearing a clamor from the Train Simulator Community calling for us to publicly release it.

Because of the size (4Gb installed) and complexity (over 3,000 track miles) of the route it is still only a release candidate (Public Beta Test). Even with our extensive testing of 6 internal beta tests/builds, we have no illusions as to it being thoroughly debugged at this point.

Scenery and documentation development will continue and with the public’s help in debugging we anticipate releasing fixes and upgrades via TrainSim.Com in the future.

Applications will be processed beginning on 24 March 2008. Because of its huge size, the route can only be practically distributed on DVD+r discs.

Unfortunately, even though this route is non-profit/freeware, our costs for the DVD media, duplication, labeling, shipping, and handling are substantial and we will require a $10 donation to help us defray these costs.

At this stage of development, for the install to be successful the mini-route and MSTS must be in their default locations on the hard drive C:\ and the end user must have installed the latest version of MSTS-bin in the default directory of MSTS.

After extensive private beta testing, we have determined that the minimum system required to run this route is a computer with a Pentium4/Athlon64 class processor that runs at 2 Gigahertz or better, 1 gigabyte of ram, and at least 128MB of video ram. The route has been tested on both Windows/XP and Vista. Obviously, the more your system exceeds these minimum requirements the better the performance of the route will tend to be.

To order the route, beginning 21 March 2008 email Maia T. Katz (maiatcat@hotmail.com). She will send you the necessary forms/releases to sign and then send your order to one of our distributors who will contact you for mailing information and payment through PayPal. Your order will be sent once payment is confirmed.

[chucksc]

Bump!

[OTTODAD]

At this stage of development, for the install to be successful the mini-route and MSTS must be in their default locations on the hard drive C:\ and the end user must have installed the latest version of MSTS-bin in the default directory of MSTS.

This severely limits the number of more advanced Computer and MSTS / MSTSBin users, who like me have the installed from CDs MSTS on other than drive C: partitions, some also still not using MSTSBin and others are baulking at the reasonable distribution cost of $ 10.00 !

This still being a BETA, the final version will again have to be distributed on DVD and charged for.

The INSTALL.EXE + INSTALL.BAT installer I supplied you with can install the required by the PRR-MINI MSTS files from any nominated Train Simulator drive folder into the expanded into any drive partition PRR-MINI and then update it with MSTSBin 1.7.102222.

Hope you get some applicants, but thought that your existing testers working on the BETA you let them and me have before and lately would be better qualified to know what this route is all about and what to look for !

O t t o

[rpicardi1]

Original plans was to release the route as a complete standalone that could be installed anywhere - until - we found out that the mini route could be run without a main MSTS install. Therefore, in order to satisfy the EULA, it was necessary to require the end user to supply the executable and other files which included the bin patches.

The easiest install is to require that a bin patched MSTS be present in the default location. However, this does not limit the end user to that install as the more experienced MSTS user, who has already installed their program in locations other then the default, can still unpack the mini route to the desired location and manually copy those files needed from their bin patched MSTS to the mini route.

The bin patches themselves are not required to run the mini route, but, you can expect dark signals, the GWV in two locations, and memory issues that bin has corrected.

Likewise, if you have the resources and the required X-Track, Scale rail, New roads, etc... you could just drop the route itself, along with the added consists, into your main install of MSTS. Just don't be surprised if you have to spend some time debugging that install as some X-Track sections, that were available in early releases, are no longer supplied in the latest release.

As this route may never be finished, plans are to make future updates available in the forum library. They will also be added to future orders for the route.

Current work involves smoothing track along the Reading commuter line and gantry cleanup from Harrisberg to Philly.

[maiatcat]

Ron, pretty much, has covered all issues. We were concerned with the eula of MS and the licensing for another addon and therefore took the approach we did. On one issue he may be wrong. There are a number of world files which contain in excess of 1800 objects (mostly all in downtown Philadelphia); I have been told that, w/o bin, these world files would fail. If some one can verify this point, I would appreciate it. They run fine with bin. Maia

[OTTODAD]

On one issue he may be wrong. There are a number of world files which contain in excess of 1800 objects (mostly all in downtown Philadelphia); I have been told that, w/o bin, these world files would fail. If some one can verify this point, I would appreciate it. They run fine with bin.

Your assumption is correct, Maia !

Not only that, but there is much more the PRR-EAST-REG will benefit from having the latest MSTSBin 1.7.102222 installed, at all times working couplers front and back, extended views, being able to switch to other locos driver cabs and rear cabs in locos and trainset which have them, more than one passenger view per consist if provided for in individual cars and much, much more, making it a truly terrific route !

O t t o

[chucksc]

This severely limits the number of more advanced Computer and MSTS / MSTSBin users, who like me have the installed from CDs MSTS on other than drive C: partitions, some also still not using MSTSBin and others are baulking at the reasonable distribution cost of $ 10.00 !

This still being a BETA, the final version will again have to be distributed on DVD and charged for.

The INSTALL.EXE + INSTALL.BAT installer I supplied you with can install the required by the PRR-MINI MSTS files from any nominated Train Simulator drive folder into the expanded into any drive partition PRR-MINI and then update it with MSTSBin 1.7.102222.

Hope you get some applicants, but thought that your existing testers working on the BETA you let them and me have before and lately would be better qualified to know what this route is all about and what to look for !

O t t o

OTTO I would expect someone of your talents to easily navigate around these issues. However the rest of us have to make do with default installations. You can't engineer for everyman just those in the middle...



FWIW I've been testing with 102222 since it came out..... by decoupling the install from a specific version we also allow the user to select his own version of bin and don't violate George's EULA by redistributing his work.

[OTTODAD]

I would expect someone of your talents to easily navigate around these issues.

Correct !

However the rest of us have to make do with default installations. You can't engineer for everyman just those in the middle...

Running my INSTALL.EXE / INSTALL.BAT, which was designed to make installing the PRR-EAST-REG MINI MSTS fool-proof for all, after is has been extracted into a specific for it drive / folder and could not be made simpler.

Not supplying the Train Simulator root folder system files and then copying them into the MINI root from an existing MSTS root folder will satisfy Microsoft, no financial gain being made.

I have been working with their UK piracy unit for many years and am aware of their attitude. They only pursue those they can get a lot of money from !

George and others, including myself, have had no problems distributing the MSTSBin train.exe and he does not mind this being done, not being any different from telling users where to download MSTSBin from and having to install it themselves, frequently forget to install it's Language *.dll files too !

My installers will also supply Carlo Santucci's maximum memory soundcfg.dat and my default.wag for MSTSBin couplers, as also supplied by the donationware Route Riter.

O t t o

[van2001ko]

Folks, this is not the thread to discuss EULA policies. While packaging the disks we made sure, that an existing installation of MSTS exists on the user computer. To ensure there's no type of EULA violation!!

Although Bin is not required to run the route, the patch does make this route run better given to reasons stated above; but not limited to issues such as correcting memory leaks. We appreciate to have excellent software to work with. Any discussions within regard to MSTSbin should be discussed in its relative section of the board!!

This still being a BETA, the final version will again have to be distributed on DVD and charged for.

Given to the size of the route, the route may not ever reach Full version status. At least not for awhile!! The route is freeware, however, since this route is simplify too large for online distribution. We have no choice but to distribute it via DVD.

As for the future, we have some pretty interesting things planned for our future updates, and once completed they will be made available in the file library. So stay tuned!!

[OTTODAD]

Folks, this is not the thread to discuss EULA policies. While packaging the disks we made sure, that an existing installation of MSTS exists on the user computer. To ensure there's no type of EULA violation!!

We are not discussing EULA policies, we are discussing how to best distribute stand-alone MSTS MINI routes without upsetting M$$$$$$$ or getting those who install it into a tangle !

You are assuming that everybody has MSTS installed in it's default C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games folder, many have not !

As for the future, we have some pretty interesting things planned for our future updates, and once completed they will be made available in the file library. So stay tuned!!

These updates will of course be of use only to those who have obtained a DVD of the route !

O t t o

[AcelaHHP-8]

I hope you guys do know there are methods of distributing a large file such as the PRR Route via online. Decompressing a file down to 1 GB each and using a software program like pando.

http://www.pando.com/

You would be able to split the files per gig to everyone who has this program or something like it without the users having gone though the task of paypal charging fees to use there service. plus what about those who don't have paypal and want this product? Surely they have to be considered. do you have a mailing address for people to send in money orders or such? I'm just sayin! I learn my lesson after having dealt with facing point (no mean to bring that name up again). I like most people might be a little "hesitant" to go though this again.

Not to discredit you guys from the hard work you done, i'm sure you guys are honest people, but it maybe to soon even if it is $10.00.

Well i'm just saying my piece on this matter! Good Luck and Great work!

[OTTODAD]

Hi Stephen !

I am lucky to get at best 60 Kb p.sec off-peak average download speeds with my Broadband connection here in the UK.

Even if split into smaller zipped files, all of the PRR's zipped 1,855.218 Kb would take 8.5 hours to download with no guarantee that some of these large zips would not get corrupted in the process, the cost of the bandwidth used on the File Library server bankrupting Nels !

The PRR team are a bunch of well respected members of the community. In particular Chuck Schneider, who is one of the leading contributors of Freeware rolling stock and would trust any of them with more than just $ 10.00 !

O t t o

[rpicardi1]

Very few of us have the ability to download, 60meg file in 12 seconds from Symantec, quickly. Not many servers will send the information out that quickly. In addition, many ISP enact download limits if they think that users are hogging high speed bandwidth with lots of large downloads. (Thank you greedy recording industry leeches.)

Assuming that we could find the time to upload 19 spanned 100meg files to the forum library, it would be a nightmare for anyone to download this route, paid membership, high speed connection, or not.