Megabits and Megabytes

I've been playing a bit with Trainz recently, I installed it because I figured Cameron might get more out of it given the opening doors, passengers and very simple DCC-style controls. I was right, he loves it. I bought him the Modula City add-on for it and that was worn out within a few days but since then he's tried all sorts of other things and has gone back to MSTS several times too - each one has something that he looks for, though in most cases it's the stock I think.

Trams in Modula City

Intercity 125 from Railwaves

Class 357 C2C from Railwaves (he rides this when we go to Lakeside Thurrock in real life)

District Underground stock (wibbly windows...)

Eurostar (Christrains, on Dorset Coast)

One-fast train (he rides this to go to his nanny and grand-dads, class 90 + dvt + mk3 in "One" livery)

Wibbly windows, as it turns out (took me a while to decipher), is when you're in the passenger view at one end of the carriage looking directly through the window in to the other carriage, as the train moves along and around corners you can see the windows "wibbling"...

I think if someone did Underground Ernie for a train sim i'd never see my computer ever again.

Anyway, I digress.

Since it was there for him I thought i'd see what was up in the world of Trainz these days, I've bought some payware and downloaded plenty of the freeware from the Auran Download Station. I have to say, there's a good selection of it out there to be had now, some really nice routes (though sadly most of the good ones are purely fictional) and some stunning stock like a Rebuilt Merchant Navy, and a Class 31 that i'm rather taken with.

It does highlight though, that between where things stand with MSTS now (particularly with MSTSbin on the scene) and Trainz, that the bar for a new entrant is actually relatively high, sure there's the whole graphics thing that any half decent games developer these days could outshine with one hand tied behind their back (let's face it, MSTS is pretty old technology, and there's still that something wrong with Trainz that makes it look, well, wrong) but I fear that the one place developers might come a cropper is in the simulation part, it's what happened with Trainz.

Time will tell, but there are some seriously advanced features in Trainz and a sensible implementation of them (the Trainz guys were very innovative technically but their UI skills, well, sucked) in a new simulator would be very cool.

Where I think Trainz got it wrong was the lack of interest/focus on the simple stuff - the basic driving experience for example, as a driver I shouldn't have to concern myself with changing points while i'm blasting along at 90mph, I want the computer to do all that for me.  This was one area that MSTS really got right.

In Trainz you can hop around between items of stock, which is very neat and can be very creatively used in a complex scenario / activity, indeed I noticed that the same idea is indeed incorporated in to the new FSX scripting system and is used in at least one of the included missions that i've done so far (Tokyo Executive Transport) where you change from a Bell chopper to a Learjet when you get to Narita airport.

However, while MSTS got the basics right, what they got wrong was that they didn't go any further! Trainz, ironically went completely all-out - totally confused half their users but actually provided a tool of significant power.  By creating their own object oriented programming language (stroke of genius using OO rather than trying to make it all fit in a traditional system IMHO) Trainz enabled significant access to just about all areas of Trainz to software developers... sadly not many railway enthusiasts are also software developers...  I managed to make that thing get up and do song and dances all over the place, it was very impressive.  I was able to create a primitive-backed version of the collection classes that are present in Java and C# such as ArrayList, Vector, Iterator, HashMap and so forth - and then this enabled some quite neat high level stuff to be created relatively easily.  One of the things I experimented with was an automated signalbox to look after the "approach control" for a large station.  Each entry route to a station was marked with a trigger and a signal somewhere strategic.  When any train hit the trigger the code would leap in to action - using an internal route database from each trigger to each allowable set of platforms (not all entry paths can get to all platforms of course) it would first find an available platform, lock the platform and then set the route for the train to come in.  If the route couldn't be set (something else has locked a point) then it would release the platform and hold the train on a red until it could find a way to make it all happen a few seconds/minutes later, all automatically.  It worked a treat, a superb degree of randomisation based on the fact that you came in early or late, you may get a different platform - rather than being held up in front of a largely empty station just because there's a train in the one you were originally mapped to.

Later with TRS2004 Auran came up with their Sessions system, by using a series of icons to represent actions you could set up command lists for the train to follow... so, go here, unload, load, go there, repeat - etc.  This worked quite nicely, it had a few issues and largely it only works for small scripts, it gets extremely complex to manage once you're on your third screens width of commands, and even more so when you're trying to make different services interact for visual effect etc.  That said, if you were willing to persevere, there was a lot possible.  In TRS2006 Auran really brought it home for the sessions capability, while it had all the same disadvantages, they added a whole lot of new actions that you could assign and this really blossomed the power of what was capable.  As an example, I spent a few days creating a series of command lists in a session that resulted in the following:

You're driving a 4F just south of Hawes Junction, heading for the Settle and Carlisle mainline.  You start a handful of train lengths away from Hawes so you cruise in and stop in the platform.  Your train is 5 Vent vans followed by 5 empty coal wagons followed by a brake.  As you come to a halt at Hawes, a 4F sitting in the sidings pipes up and runs to the back of the yard and out behind you, gently couples up and brings the brake + 5 empty coal wagons to one of the empty sidings in the yard.  Uncoupling the brake it takes the brake over to five full coal wagons and then brings those back to your train.  You now have 5 vent, 5 full coal and your same brake van on the back.  After uncoupling it blows it's whistle to give you the all clear and then heads back to its engine shed.  You now proceed up the branch to the mainline.  Once you reach the main line you pass another engine shed with another 4F in it (limited appropriate stock :) ).  A little way up the main line you are signalled off to the loop so you come to a halt once on the loop completely.  An express passenger blasts past you, and then the point behind you changes and that 4F from the station behind you comes trundling up and buffers up to you.  You now run with your banker up to the next loop, again you're signalled in to the loop but this time you don't stop, you've got a green, you slow down to 15mph and as soon as you're in the loop the banker slows to a stop leaving you to go on your own.

It was fantastic to drive, the sequence with the wagon shunting at the beginning is just sitting there watching the shunting all happen under AI control for about 20-25 minutes, there were some other AI trains coming down the branch while you were waiting too.

This degree of interactivity is, in my opinion, essential.  It makes you feel like you're truly a part of a bigger busy railway rather than - as things currently are with MSTS - a lone driver, even if there are other AI services, the only time that you interact with them is when the activity writer has taken the trouble to cause them to hold you up and give you some yellows and reds... and by far, those are the activities that people will keep coming back to.

The above Trainz scenario was monstrous to put together, no way would your average person be able to piece together a hundred or so actions between the various trains and get it working - it takes someone that already thinks like a developer (IMHO) to do it, even though it's in a pretty UI.  I might have done the above, but it was after lots of cussing and giving up three or four times.

What's needed is a way to achieve this level of interactivity and power but in a way that everyone can do it.  The vast proliferation of activities for MSTS is, in my opinion, one of the core reasons for its success - there are thousands and thousands of them just for UK routes, let alone the rest world wide.  Conversely there are only a handful, maybe low hundreds - if that, TOTAL, of sessions for Trainz, and I think that's one of the reasons that novices and non-techies just might well not get in to the driving side of Trainz.

Jeez I can waffle.



Matt.

Wow, that was a heck of a weekend.

 

Friday evening i'm driving up to Warwick for the Leamington and Warwick Model Railway exhibition and my boss from my old (current, but not for long) company rings so I pull over to a service station and we chat for a half hour or so.   I'm just about to head out when the phone rings again, Mike Hambly (bluearrow) is on the phone absolutely bubbling over and when I can get him to stop giggling and make sense for a minute he tells me that Microsoft just announced a new Train Simulator project - fantastic news!! I proceed to join Mike in giggling and not making sense for a while, cheering :)  We hang up, and the phone rings again a few minutes later - Ken Austin from Europeanbahn on the phone telling me the same thing, equally excited.

 

That evening it was out with the laptop in the hotel room and get hooked up with some WiFi action.  I created a new forum for the discussions of the sim to get settled in to and dropped in a new policy for the mods of making sure that we didn't get KRS vs MSTSX flamewars starting up, and to move any MSTSX threads from the KRS forum in to the new one created for it.  Very quickly the forum starts filling up, there are hundreds of posts in it now, quite amazing.

 

With the show starting Saturday morning it was a great time to find out and all through the show we were letting people know about the announcement and passing on the official Train Simulator site URL to find out more about it (at least what little has been officially said anyway :) ), everyone was very excited.

 

The show was very busy, apparently last year numbers were low; around 1400 visitors, this year they were just around the 2000 mark so the club was delighted.

 

The turn-out from UKTS members was excellent as usual with a great deal of people helping out driving the simulator on the three screens, particularly helpful as this was the first show that Dad and I had our other stand demonstrating Digital Command Control for Model Railways.  Everyone did a fantastic job with a great selection of routes being demonstrated and a lot of people getting answers to their questions - and the odd (!) freebie CD being handed out.

 

Everyone's very much looking forward to hearing more about the new simulator as it develops and we're looking forward to spreading the word even more at the two of the big exhibitions we do in the year that both come up in February - Brighton and Glasgow, both of which have around ten times the attendance of the Leamington show.

 

Just at closing time on Sunday I popped over to one of the stands and got a great deal on a Bachmann "Underground Ernie" train set for my lad (3yr old), he was absolutely blown away when he saw the box this evening, I think he stretched his face with all the smiling :)

 

Matt.

 

Since I wrote last...

 

Got that elusive Xbox 360 ages ago now, dear wifey bought one for me as a surprise, unfortunately for her she tried to "sneak" it up the stairs while I was looking and that big "Game" bag just didn't seem to be something I should say nothing about... Have to say, it's the best thing since sliced bread!  Burnout 4 came out a while back and i've been playing that one quite a bit, though more recently i've played Just Cause to death and Saints Row right after it, both outstanding games though I think for all the pretty and technical superbness of Just Cause, the failure of quality control (i.e. it has lots of bugs) lets it down... mean while where Just Cause also got quite repetitive, Saints Row has been a complete blast from start to finish.

 

I've been keeping one eye on the new generation of consoles - PS3, 360 and the Wii, and I have to say the only one that really lets things down (for me anyway) is the PS3.  I like to see real innovation, pushing the boundaries, improving or changing the way you do or think about things for the better.  The 360's biggest contribution has to be the total integration with Xbox Live, something that was great already with the original Xbox but has been made ten times better with the new version on the 360.  I can download demos and preview videos of games - and indeed I will not now buy a game unless i've tried the demo first.  I can get trailers for movies too plus all sorts of other things not necessarily related to gaming or the 360.  Initially the 360 downloading was done one file at a time and you couldn't do anything else, which always struck me as being, well, dumb; but it didn't take long before a download manager type facility was added, now I can download those 1gb demos in the background, queued up, while I get back to kicking some behind... then when i've finished being fed my own behind repeatedly, I can go play some demos while my wounds heal :)

 

Additionally the 360 integrates with Windows XP and MCE so that it can become a set-top-box of sorts, streaming music and movies to your television.  The box has really begun the whole integration process, it's by no means complete, the next gen of consoles will undoubtedly take it a lot further, but for me the 360 is a big step in the right direction already. 

 

Another aspect of the 360 that really makes me happy is the wireless controllers, it's so good, the 360 sits here on my desk right next to my PC and I can just pick the controller up and go, no wires to untangle.  Batteries? No problem - they seem to last for ages (perhaps i'm just not using it enough?) and now that i've got the Quick Charge Kit with a couple of rechargeable batteries I am never out for the count, as sooon as the circle starts flashing at me I just whip the battery out and replace it with one from the charger and we're back in business.

 

Finally, the other aspect that I think is a big innovation in at least approach and thought, is the way that independent developers can now produce their own Xbox 360 games, including testing them on the 360 itself, using XNA Game Studio Express.  Free to download and use, with a small fee to get access to running the games on your own 360 - suddenly those five and six figure developer kits that were required are no longer an issue, the indie dev can get something prototyped and shown to publishers or other team members quickly and then perhaps use that to kick start some serious funding for the real thrust - either that, or they can simply look to stay small and release 'Arcade' style releases.  Whatever the desired approach, XNA Game Studio can only be a good thing for everyone.

 

The console itself doesn't really innovate, the hardware is just "bigger and better" than the previous machine and that's a given baseline that all next gen consoles must achieve.  For me though, the key is in what you do above and beyond "bigger and better" and Microsoft have done a 'GoodThing(TM)".

 

The Nintendo Wii also gets my respect, the Remove and Nunchuck controllers will, I think, revolutionise how we view gaming.  Moving to a world with 'gestures' (other than the traditional finger-based ones!) for gaming is a natural progression and makes games so much more attractive to those who might not conventionally consider it.  Hardware-wise, the Wii is a step backwards - it's got by far the slowest CPU and most other categories it's inferior in - but then Nintendo games rarely require masses of CPU and they generally don't bill the console on the kind of graphical masterpieces that the Xbox and Playstation get pushed to achieve.  Nintendo is about fun and they always seem to achieve it.  My wife has a DS-Lite and I have been very impressed with it; hand writing recognition, speech recognition, built-in wifi with easy networking and much more - really good, with really innovative games that take advantage of these capabilities.   You can even link the DS and the Wii together - now that seems to me to be smart thinking.

 

Sony, meanwhile, seem to have no real innovations.  Their console is "bigger and better" than the PS2, it has a Blu-ray drive (360 can have a HD-DVD), the only other thing is the controller has a tilt sensor in it - sort of like a poor-man's Wii Remote... except you aren't a poor man if you can afford the PS3, it's hideously expensive... perhaps that is their innovation, trying to raise the price of consoles even further.  I fully admit to knowing only a little about the PS3 but then I've not read in to it much more than anything else and nothing is standing out about it except the massive delays getting it launched in the UK (apparently they might be out over here in the summer, six months after the states).

 

So yeah, i'm a big fan of the 360.  Keep it up folks, you're doing a grand job :)

 

Matt.