[Lindsayts]

cjakeman, on 23 April 2017 - 12:15 AM, said:

Or to frame it as a more personal question, "How did you get involved in Open Rails? What can we learn from your experience?"

I got involved in train sims, MSTS in particular through a Victorian (Australia) railways route "Footscray to Ballarrat route". The reason for my interest was this route was done by a driver that actually drove freight tarins on this line and I was greatly interested in this Microsoft game that attracted a real live railway person. The route itself is fairly basic as it was done quite early in the piece but it accuaracy is excellent within the limits imposd by MSTS.

I became intrigued by MSTS's weakness and started a project to see how it could be improved, this lead me into much work on accuarte world modelling and detailed rolling stock physics, eventualy leading to a basic but accurate train simulator writen in C for the Linux operating system. Through MSTS I found Openrails and have done a good deal of playing around with it and looking through the source, particulary locomotive physics. I have not got directly involved in its development as both Windows and object oriented progarmming languages are alien to me all my progarmming experince being in Motorola 68K assembly language and of course C.

Lindsay

[Lindsayts]

Post Script to the above.................

Although I have studied Openrails well, i have used none of it in my own sim as I have done my sim in a completely different way. I have though used some of OpenBVE's file formats, particularly its shape, cab and animation file formats.

Lindsay

[SP 0-6-0]

I've seen the idea of having a pay by code produced scheme mentioned several times. The idea being that coders are payed by actual work done. The idea was to try and intice some of the coders from places like India to work on and speed up ORTS developement.

Another worthy pursuit is to have a couple of folks like myself crawl through all the ORTS sections of sites like TS.com and UKTS looking for both broken or non functioning features and new but missed ideas. Also the goal is to look for the tricks, tips, & hints being written and published in different discussions on getting older MSTS stock up to speed in ORTS. I think this has been a good idea but due to just two of us working on this goal it has been bogged way down due to my own constraints and computer problems as of lately.

I feel there should be a small group of non programmers working to "Watchdog" or audit ORTS to make sure the developers are staying on track and to make sure the goals setout are actually being reached with the end result being functioning contributions to the program as a whole.

ORTS has drifted somewhat from it's original stated goals and this has helped to contribute to some of the non functioning futures that still make ORTS non 100% identical to MSTS. I know we are not trying to match exactly 100% but we need to be a bit closer. Or ORTS needs to redefine it's stated goals and objectives to better match the direction the project is going.


Last, We really badly need a route editor of official origins for ORTS and a activity creation program. Without these two things we are doomed. We continue to loose interest to TS20XX and Run8 and this is not going to change without heading ORTS in the right direction towards having a working editor suite.

The issues with the new shape file format or a very good extension and improvement to the .S file needs to be stepped up in priority. I can tell you that we are loosing content creators to the newer TS programs because of the shape file format issues. The newer modelers do not like the old dated .S file format and the shaders and what all. Also the problems of modeling programs themselves is a big turn off to the newer generation of content creators.

Robert

[vince]

SP 0-6-0, on 24 April 2017 - 06:37 PM, said:

--------------snip----------------
Last, We really badly need a route editor of official origins for ORTS and a activity creation program. Without these two things we are doomed. We continue to loose interest to TS20XX and Run8 and this is not going to change without heading ORTS in the right direction towards having a working editor suite.

--------snip--------------------
Robert

With regard to a route editor, I'd like to see the Trainz approach; Editing from within the Sim.

regards,
vince

[Goku]

Quote

ORTS has drifted somewhat from it's original stated goals and this has helped to contribute to some of the non functioning futures that still make ORTS non 100% identical to MSTS. I know we are not trying to match exactly 100% but we need to be a bit closer.

Trying to make OR identical to MSTS is the most important reason why OR is dying. MSTS is bad. MSTS users are dying or prefer to use better sim like Run8.

[Csantucci]

Goku, on 25 April 2017 - 06:19 AM, said:

Trying to make OR identical to MSTS is the most important reason why OR is dying. MSTS is bad. MSTS users are dying or prefer to use better sim like Run8.

I don't agree with this. OR may be downward compatible to MSTS but may also have newer functionalities. The downward compatibility allows to use existing editors without waiting that the newer ones are there, and so to have an environment that can be used. Starting from zero would have required a much higher effort to both game developers and content developers.

[eric from trainsim]

Goku, on 25 April 2017 - 06:19 AM, said:

Trying to make OR identical to MSTS is the most important reason why OR is dying. MSTS is bad. MSTS users are dying or prefer to use better sim like Run8.

Strongly disagree with the second half of your statement, Goku. Over the years I've been around the community, half the people who leave the MSTS community in favor of "better sims" seemed to come back over to MSTS/ORTS a few years later.

Those of us over age of 30 are probably a lot more content to stick with the older formats than those under 30. Many of us have a significant investment in terms of routes and models we've collected. The new sims don't support that, and personally, I like being able to run certain equipment in places that are significant to my memories of railroading. That's never going to line up with what gets developed for TSW or R8. But it exists for ORTS.

I will partially agree with the first part of your statement --- striving to ensure 100% compatibility with MSTS held back the pace of development. I won't agree that it's "why OR is dying" because I don't agree OR is dying. It's continuing to attract new people into the hobby, and it's bringing older community members back into the fold per se.

Reverse engineering never goes faster than greenfield development does. Personally, I could care less about backward compatibility with certain aspects e.g. activities, and we're now left with some legacy debt in that the geo-projection model isn't optimal, and the shape format isn't easily supported by newer modeling & animation tools.

But... all that said... I do agree that providing a high degree of backward compatibility was necessary, and at this point in time, the right balance has been struck. Perhaps abandoning the notion of 100% and sticking with 90-95% is a more realistic approach. Nobody wants to be reverse engineering as a developer -- we'd rather be trying to expand functionality and add new features.

[hminky]

Goku, on 25 April 2017 - 06:19 AM, said:

Trying to make OR identical to MSTS is the most important reason why OR is dying. MSTS is bad. MSTS users are dying or prefer to use better sim like Run8.

Agree totally, OR is just a "front end" for a dead sim.

I like OR but wasn't the promise a new and better sim.

MSTS was never very good.

And "Train Sim World" probably killed the genre with the game's horrible release.

Harold

[copperpen]

I was beginning to make a little bit of progress in dabbling with the code, but then lots of things got moved into different files, so had to learn my way round that again. Now that SVN has nothing higher than X2175 on it I am trying to find out where the new repository is. I need an up to date set to play with in my sandbox.

[edwardk]

Unfortunately, we can't turn back the hands of time to when Open Rails was first discussed. The decision at that point was to reverse engineer MSTS. This concept at this point is not necessarily a bad concept since the graphics are better and it is capable of handling objects with more detail. On top of this, there are functions such as timetable mode which definitely places it at the top.

For every positive, you will always have a negative. This is no different from any software project that is worked on since there must be balance. The problem here is that its too easy to envision a concept in your head. When you actually see it in operation, doubts could start. One of the negatives here is that despite the fact OR is not dependent on the installation of MSTS, many of the routes use MSTS's objects which for now can never be freely distributed. This could very well be a stumbling block for OR.


Note: V1 Run8 was using XNA. I have read that as of V2 it is not. It would be interesting to know what they are using.


Edward K.