T:ANE is here

T:ANE is here

Postby cjbarnes5294 » Fri May 15, 2015 1:28 pm

I see that what looks like the finished product has been released on Steam today. It looks quite good from the new trailer, suggesting that the preorder "taster" last year was a bit of a hiccup. I like that you can tweak the loco physics dynamically whilst the loco is running on a test track, that's pretty cool.

My concern, from the videos I've seen, is that the E2 engine seems to be a bit of a hog like the old Trainz engine, but I suppose the only way to find out is to buy it and see. I'll hold off for now but I would interested to read other people's views and experiences of what looks like a promising addition to the train sim world.

Chris
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Re: T:ANE is here

Postby BigVern » Fri May 15, 2015 3:05 pm

It's definitely a performance hog. On the main PC which is an I7 at @3.5Ghz, with 1Gb GTX650 and 8Gb RAM, I have had to turn shadows and water to low just to get anything beyond a slideshow. I had a few other issues but these were resolved by deleting the user data folder and allowing it to re-build.

I can just about run Surveyor on the development laptop (an I3) with shadows and hi-res water off and draw distance reined in to about 3.5km. However it's hammering the hardware with the fan working overtime and not sure if it could sustain prolonged sessions of route building. That said, last time I fired up the RW route editor since the TS2015 update it seemed very sluggish and switching on GE overview virtually brought it to a stand.

The good news is that the updated track system which draws proper points is very good, albeit only a select few track types are currently enabled. Superelevation is going to be a dark art every bit as confusticating as RW to learn. The problem is, despite the new graphics engine and slight interface overall so much is the same (like no ability to vary the angle when creating embankments etc), that it still feels like old Trainz rather than an all new experience.
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Re: T:ANE is here

Postby VictoryWorks » Fri May 15, 2015 4:10 pm

Must say I'm pretty underwhelmed from what I've seen so far.
Ignoring all the "new UI same as the old UI" stuff, graphically even at it's best (which is rare as a lot of older stock looks as bad as ever it did) it's still only on par with TS15 in my opinion.
And this is supposed to be the future of Trainz? I would expect it to visually blow TS out of the water if it expects to stand any chance to stand up with the next gen TS, and it just doesn't. All they've done is managed to match a sim that already exists and is now 8(?) years old.
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Re: T:ANE is here

Postby BigVern » Fri May 15, 2015 4:53 pm

Indeed Pete. with the shadows down low or off it really doesn't look much better than TS12, but with worse performance.

It seems the only person who can run the Hinton route with anything approaching an acceptable frame rate is the guy who built it (and stuffed the whole thing with Speedtrees as far as the eye can see).

To some extent the development was hamstrung from the start by retaining backward compatibility (though even that is patchy - importing routes even from TS12 is erratic) when they should have bitten the bullet and drawn a line. One hopes Dovetail can learn from that when it comes to strategy for their possible UE4 version. Keep and support the old version but don't hamper what you can do in the new product by tieing it to the past.

Although I intend to try and support TANE by building a route or two, sadly it may go down as an example of what happens when you design a product on a shoestring - both in terms of the money available (to commission new assets/routes) and technical ability.
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Re: T:ANE is here

Postby BigVern » Sat May 16, 2015 5:46 pm

Looks like I won't be doing anything route wise in TANE...

Programme appeared to force a thermal emergency shutdown of the laptop earlier on today, first time that's ever happened to me. Not prepared to risk further damage to the hardware experimenting with it. Will either wait until I can afford to upgrade to a better laptop, or N3V put some serious optimisation into the game.
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Re: T:ANE is here

Postby VictoryWorks » Sun May 17, 2015 2:40 pm

Yup, it's a fine example of what happens if you try and retain backwards compatibility I think.

Silly really, as to some extent we already have this issue with TS that they could have learnt from.
RSC having tried to right the mess that Kuju left it in over the past few years. Fair play to RSC/DTG that they have fixed and improved a lot of the problems but some of the core issues (dispatcher, signals, wheel slip physics) are buried so deep that to change them now would probably break everything that exists in some way, so they are unfixable. They've added ways to work round some of them - the timetable tools for scenario creation jump to mind, with more and more detailed feedback when "the computer says no" but to fix them outright will likely never be possible without breaking everything that we already have.

I still love TS and can get a lot of mileage from thinking outside the box and being devious but I'm delighted that for TS:UE they have made the commercially brave but ultimately best decision to start from nothing and build it how they want. And as I've said before, from our point of view having Matt P heading it up is a real boon.

Still disappointed that T:ANE isn't what it could have been - I'm all for competition driving the market.
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Re: T:ANE is here

Postby BigVern » Mon May 18, 2015 7:42 am

With a nod to Sheriff Brody, "We're going to need a bigger laptop."
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Re: T:ANE is here

Postby VictoryWorks » Mon May 18, 2015 9:36 am

:D I do love a good Jaws reference!

The thing is UE4 should be so much more efficient than the repeatedly upgraded TS engine I'm not sure it's going to demand that much more power to look half decent.
My machine is no slouch and I can just run TS with 2x2 AA. With 3x3 selected I'm down to a slide show. GTA5 looks amazing, simply because it uses a nice new efficient graphics engine.
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Re: T:ANE is here

Postby BigVern » Wed May 20, 2015 10:26 pm

I bought a cooling pad (2 x fans) and putting it under the laptop has helped with temperatures, GPU was running at @75C rather than 95C which is something of an improvement as it wouldn't sustain very long at the latter, for sure.

However Surveyor very flakey with splines morphing in and out even on an even smaller test route.

At least the cooling pad will come in handy to use with other sim editors!
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Re: T:ANE is here

Postby cjbarnes5294 » Sat May 23, 2015 10:18 am

I've had a cooling pad for the laptop for years now and it stays permanently underneath and plugged in. It's just great that it enables you to actually sit a gaming laptop on your lap, or floor, or bed or desk or whatever, without the poorly placed vents getting choked up and causing a meltdown.

Thanks for the feedback on your experiences with the new game, Vern, I think I will be holding off for a while yet then. It's really quite a shame that a game with so much potential to be really enjoyable is just in need of so much more optimisation. I think the first well optimised train sim could potentially be the DTG next gen one running on Unreal Engine 4 - in my experience Unreal Engine has always been pretty efficient and even kind to older systems, and runs like a charm on some good up to date kit. Let's just hope the game code will be as efficient as the engine running it!

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