trainsimulations Milwaukee Road Trainset

[lateagain]

New Release from TrainSimulations ......and a step in the right direction?

Seems that their latest is part of a new "group" of downloads called "Fallen Flags"

Well that's excellent news for folk like me who find anything much after the 70's rather a yawn .....but it begs the question where are all the old SLI Fallen Flag sets you've withdrawn?

A quick glance at the new set shows the rather disappointing choice (correct but rather unimaginative) of GP & SD40's for Milwaukee Road. The freight stock looks good, if all rather late (?), and the price for the pack seems pretty good for those your side of the pond.

So YES a step in the right direction ......but it would be nice to see all the old ATSF, BN etc.etc. stuff updated to their latest modelling standards AND even better some new models? Some U-Boats would be good for a start but of course if they're serious about fallen flags there's a wealth of makes still missing from the library in current modelling standards?

http://www.trainsimulations.net/or_trainsets.html

[derekmorton]

I am still waiting on some Tier 4 stock!!

[qballbandit]

Very glad to see the second set of NS heritage units. Grabbing those now.

[trainman_47]

I am still waiting on some Tier 4 stock!!

Me too! ......But good luck with that one! It'll be another year (or more) before they release ANYTHING else!

[Curt C]

Probably should be mentioned that these new releases are OR only.

[ragtimer]

If OR only,then no sale from me.

[Curt C]

So, I just purchased the NS Heritage set - what the heck is up with 1074, the Lackawanna unit - no lettering on the long hood??? How in the world does something like that get overlooked?

[geepster775]

The 1072's lettering is too high and too small. It should extend into the area underneath the radiator wings.

[trainman_47]

Geez, ALL this time since they release ANYTHING new and they can't even get the lettering correct!!!! I WAS going to get that 2nd set.....but not now!!!

[TrainSimulations]

Thanks for pointing out the errors. For those who have already purchased the NS Heritage ACE pack (vol. 2), the corrected DDS files may be downloaded here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9bj4dqdgbmq6qil/TextureFixes.zip?dl=0

Cheers,
Jason@TrainSimulations

[geepster775]

Thanks for the quick fix, Jason.

[Curt C]

Agreed - appreciate the quick response!

[MsSheare]

trainsimulations Milwaukee Road Trainset

I have noticed that some of the carloads such as the auto racks and the pulp cars are not showing the animation all I have is a grey outline am I missing something? I checked the folder everything is there.

I found it seems 2 of the lines in the S files are still listed as ACE so once I changed them to dds they worked fine.

Thank you SLI for an amazing set I really love this set and it fills in a gap in railroading that was sorely needed.

[lateagain]

Thanks for pointing out the errors. For those who have already purchased the NS Heritage ACE pack (vol. 2), the corrected DDS files may be downloaded here:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/9bj4dqdgbmq6qil/TextureFixes.zip?dl=0

Cheers,
Jason@TrainSimulations

Hi Jason,

Well as you hijacked the thread I started for some customer support ....how about the points I raised about this new "Fallen Flags" grouping and the older fallen flags sets that have now disappeared? What other sets/roads/models have you in mind for this series?

[TrainSimulations]

Hi Geoff,

We know there is a wide audience out there with different interests, and while we can't always accommodate everyone's tastes, we do want to mix things up a bit. I know there were many who were disappointed by our move away from MSTS, but it was a transition that made sense for us. We need to support a platform that has a future, and I am of the belief that ORTS has such a future. They need support from the community, and we will provide that.

I thought I might use this as an opportunity to lay out the direction we want to go. We've stepped up the modelling standards for all new locomotive models, but intend to keep the freight cars in about the same range they had be for MSTS, perhaps a little higher poly yet. We experimented with high poly cars in two recent releases, but found that they really dragged performance down, even on fairly high end PC computers. We want to find a balance where performance will be fairly even for most people. I think the current two releases fit that template perfectly. In time, we will transition all rolling stock to higher resolution textures. Initial testing of higher resolution textures seems promising in terms of increasing quality without sacrificing performance.

This leads me to the next point. I know there are many people out there that like to have ACE file format textures for use with shape file viewer and other applications. We included ACE files with a few releases, but have since stopped because it essentially doubles the install package and that isn't ideal. The reality is that while DDS and ACE both use the S3 texture compression set (DXT), the ACE file container is an incredibly dated format, and the DDS format is markedly better. Perhaps its biggest advantage is that is that it is able to load textures in a compressed state directly into the graphics card memory. This is how you can use higher resolution textures without massive memory and performance hits. For those who want the ACE file format, textures can easily be converted using ACEit, which comes with Route Riter, and is also available the file library. For those who are familiar with TSRE, Goku has done a marvelous job with this tool, and it comes with a great consist editor that reads S files which use DDS files.

For those unfamiliar, this tool can be found at his website here: http://koniec.org/tsre5/

The MSTS content that we produced covered a period of the better part of 10 years, and I don't want to see those efforts go completely out the window; so for some items, train packs in particular, we will probably look at Open Rails specific content refreshes, where the locos and cars will get a working over, if you will. We will also explore doing just locomotive packs as well. We had stopped those a few years ago because of my concerns over the complications of making consists. Not every customer we have knows how to do that, but I want to try to build in a better help system to show that process and make it easy for everyone.

Finally, Geoff, to answer your question, we have a few sets in the works, some of which will include U-Boats and Dash 7 series engines. On the horizon there are Conrail, Chessie, Bangor & Aroostook (a personal fav of mine with a family history), and others. We also have new UP Heritage ACe models in the works. Then there are the routes, which we are slowly developing. If there are route developers out there who want to join the team, feel free to send me a message here on TrainSim.com, or add to this thread.


Cheers,
Jason@TrainSimulations