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Jun 08, 2011 Build And Operate The Railroad Of Your Dreams.With Your Friends!Trainz Simulator 12, Now With MultiplayerTS12 includes the most exciting new feature in the history of Trainz. The players have asked for it and we have delivered Trainz Multiplayer. Now players from all over the world can build, play and operate railroads together! Is there a demo of Trainz? 'Trainz Simulator 12 ' (for Windows XP and up) is available as a Digital Download or a DVD from our online store.
Love this simulation it has its flaws as do all games but its great. I as introduced it by a friend.
One can be quite creative in creating a sim or environment the tools are quite straight forward;its just alot of them. Tools to terriform the land, texturize it elevate your track even invisible track for other vehicles, etc and a download station or contents button that can download items you may not have in your inventory. Then once the environment or land is created then can drive vehicles on it more than just trains. There are cars, different kinds of trucks, a old west stagecoach and wagons even. Its great but one tip you have to go onto the trainz portal to register the serial number in order to use the content download station and if you want the fastest downloads you have ot buy a ticket i bought the year one that is availble on the trainz portal. I purchased this game so my son could play with the 'Thomas the train' add-ons. It took a few hours to get everything up and running (details below), but once I got past the installation he was able to run trains with ease.
He already knew how to play the iPad version previously. We have only had this app for a day and have barely have scratched the surface of all of its capabilities. I will say the user interface is not that great.
For example, when you are in the Surveyor building tracks, the list of trains is tiny and crammed in the upper-right. There is no search function I could find, just a lot of scrolling. Describing the UI design standards as 'haphazard' would be charitable: the launcher and a content manager have a very different look-and-feel from the game. Within the game itself, there are visual navigation elements on screen and a little square text-based menu at the top, so it takes some doing to figure out where everything is.
INSTALLATION: The author of this app needs to update the installation to include the latest patches!! Even discounting the initial download from Amazon, I estimate it was 2 hours of patching and waiting within the game until we were finally ready to play. This was on a new fast Windows 10 PC with SSD drives.
The program directory ballooned up to 17 GB during the patch process and then went back down to about 9 GB, so I think it was downloading and installing version by version in sequence. Another issue with the installation was video - my PC was running at 1080p (1920 x 1080), and TrainZ threw it into some cropped resolution that didn't take up the whole screen and hid the menu. To resolve this, I went into the options and switched from OpenGL to DirectX, and selected 1920 x 1080 resolution. After doing this, I've had no further display problems and the Island of Sodor looks great on a 60-inch LED TV! TROUBLE WITH THOMAS: I found a web site and imported some 'cdp' files to try to get Thomas the train working. Unfortunately, the new trains I imported were 'invisible' in the Rail yard. After fiddling with the content manager, I realized the cdp files I had downloaded were too old.
I found another Web site with newer Thomas downloads (si3d.co.nr) and they showed up in the rail yard. I purchased this game so my son could play with the 'Thomas the train' add-ons. It took a few hours to get everything up and running (details below), but once I got past the installation he was able to run trains with ease. He already knew how to play the iPad version previously. We have only had this app for a day and have barely have scratched the surface of all of its capabilities. I will say the user interface is not that great.
For example, when you are in the Surveyor building tracks, the list of trains is tiny and crammed in the upper-right. There is no search function I could find, just a lot of scrolling. Describing the UI design standards as 'haphazard' would be charitable: the launcher and a content manager have a very different look-and-feel from the game. Within the game itself, there are visual navigation elements on screen and a little square text-based menu at the top, so it takes some doing to figure out where everything is.
INSTALLATION: The author of this app needs to update the installation to include the latest patches!! Even discounting the initial download from Amazon, I estimate it was 2 hours of patching and waiting within the game until we were finally ready to play.
This was on a new fast Windows 10 PC with SSD drives. The program directory ballooned up to 17 GB during the patch process and then went back down to about 9 GB, so I think it was downloading and installing version by version in sequence. Another issue with the installation was video - my PC was running at 1080p (1920 x 1080), and TrainZ threw it into some cropped resolution that didn't take up the whole screen and hid the menu. To resolve this, I went into the options and switched from OpenGL to DirectX, and selected 1920 x 1080 resolution. After doing this, I've had no further display problems and the Island of Sodor looks great on a 60-inch LED TV! TROUBLE WITH THOMAS: I found a web site and imported some 'cdp' files to try to get Thomas the train working. Unfortunately, the new trains I imported were 'invisible' in the Rail yard.
After fiddling with the content manager, I realized the cdp files I had downloaded were too old. I found another Web site with newer Thomas downloads (si3d.co.nr) and they showed up in the rail yard.
Love this simulation it has its flaws as do all games but its great. I as introduced it by a friend. One can be quite creative in creating a sim or environment the tools are quite straight forward;its just alot of them. Tools to terriform the land, texturize it elevate your track even invisible track for other vehicles, etc and a download station or contents button that can download items you may not have in your inventory. Then once the environment or land is created then can drive vehicles on it more than just trains. There are cars, different kinds of trucks, a old west stagecoach and wagons even.
Its great but one tip you have to go onto the trainz portal to register the serial number in order to use the content download station and if you want the fastest downloads you have ot buy a ticket i bought the year one that is availble on the trainz portal. Bought this the other day and aside from some lag and crashes this game is fairly good so far. I like the attention to detail that they put into this compared to even TRS 2006 and the sounds have been updated as well making it a fairly good sim for train enthusiasts of any age.Of the routes I've played so far in the two or so days since purchase I have found them to be rather long so if you're going to attempt running one of them expect to be at the computer controls for quite a while because it will take you that long to complete a run. I've played Trainz and Rail Simulator for awhile now.
Both have features that I like. What I've always liked about Trainz, is the ease with which you can build worlds. At one time, it had so much content that it took me several months to become comfortable with it all.
Having said that. This version of Trainz leaves a LOT to be desired. I run a solid gaming rig, but despite that TS12 seems to get choppy.
I've adjusted my graphic settings a number of times within the app, as well as fine-tuned my video card settings. The best fps I can seem to get is around 30. This game either needs to be optimized somehow, or I need a $4000 rig to run it. Either way, it's irritating. The built-in routes are also extremely boring as compared with the older versions. This is probably because they wanted to invest more in the DLC.
Still, I feel like the developer could have went a bit further with it. The Mojave route does have the weird circle through the tunnel, but that's about all that was interesting.
Despite having new commands for the Driver AI, the AI hasn't gotten much better than it was in Trainz 2006. It's still difficult to get the drivers to do more complex things like hooking up to a particular consist and dropping it off somewhere.
Of course, most of those problems can be solved by editing the triggers on the routes themselves. But for all of that, I'll just build a new route. All in all, it's still a fun game, if you can get past the choppiness. I would rate it higher if it weren't for that. By comparison, Kuju's Rail Simulator 2013 has much better graphics, more realistic sounds, and in general runs much smoother than TS12.
Even so, Rail Sim ca't hold a candle to the world-building capabilities of TS12. I have had train simulators before but, without a doubt, this is the grand daddy of them all. I can't imagine what more you could do with train simulator software and it seems to be forever improving.
I have not learned all the functions yet; it is quite complicated. I am one of those train nuts who travels to the ends of the earth for train rides. This software takes up quite a bit of hard drive space and requires a fairly good computer.
The scenery on the train rides is quite good. The directions say you can develop your own railroad and it provides access to other train enthusiasts. It also says there are on-line games that I have not had time to use yet. For a true train enthusiast, this software could keep you occupied for hours on end.
I have been playing this almost every day for about a month now and enjoy most every minute of it. The only down fall I wish the developer would address is the lack of scenarios that are pre set up, and on the ones that are set up very few of the industries are set to interact correctly with each other. I find most you have to go in on the surveyor mode and change and tweek the specifications on what that company produces and what it needs.
This should not be the case. The developer needs to address this issue in my opinion. I do enjoy building new scenarios and trying to make something that works, but when the ones that are pre set up are limited on the correct interactions you can do I find that highly frustrating especially when there is little easy to read documentation on how to do this correctly. Most of my success with the game happened by simple trial and error, not from any help from the developer. I updated to TS 2012 from TS 2006 and earlier.
From what I see adding new add-ons is easy using DLC but there are problems users have encountered from reading reviews and forum postings. Unless you have a first class ticket I have run into problems trying to download free content, it times out and does not complete.
Consider the ticket for access to downloads if you plan on changing the core program. I purchased a few of the specials from SimulatorCentral and now have to create links to be able to use them.
I rate myself as a computer expert but these updates are complicated to novice users. As a long time MSTS user there were many sites to get content and install to the game and configuring for use was easy. As I get more experienced with version 2012 modifications will be easier and not take extensive reading and creation.
Overall a good product but as I have seen do not expect to be making changes without research and testing.