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Rail Simulator - Initial Thoughts

There are lots of people that want to know how Rail Simulator is, what are its strengths and weaknesses, in order to make a decision about purchasing it. I'm going to hold off doing a *full* review of the product for now simply because I don't have the time. However, I have put some thoughts down in the forum and thought i'd expand on them a bit here.

Rather than just list things I like, and things I don't, i'm going to go through various topics and comment on them since in general there's lots to like and lots I don't like about all the individual areas, so it puts things more in to perspective if I mix them a bit.

Sound - Not bad at all, some bits are great, some bits are a bit poor. I feel sure that most of it can be improved and I generally don't mind of content-related things are wrong as long as the community can replace them. Steam sounds seem to chuff correctly with the wheel rotations - four times per rotation on the Black 5 and 7F as they should (2 Cylinder units chuff four times per revolution). The Deltic sounds superb.

Graphics - Fantastic, routes are exceptionally well detailed out to a great distances away from the track to a large degree of detail. Rail Simulator routes average about four times the detail seen in most MSTS routes, and apparently the product can cope with more, it's just up to you to have a fast enough computer. Models are very well done, trees and foliage are superb. I can't comment on whether every blade of grass is in the right place, but the routes look and feel outstanding to me. Track is modelled much as it was in MSTS - a pair of square girders with a flat track texture underneath. I still prefer it to the default Trainz texture though and of all the aspects that might be wrong with Rail Simulator, I have much less of an issue with the track, to me it does the job nicely; only exception to that is the junctions sometimes have very crazy check-rails on them, but at least it's a start and it is fully animated. Seasons and weather are all handled in the sim, so you can make a winter version of the route or a summer one - just as with MSTS, which is superb.

Cab Views - Amazing, they have a wonderful feel to them. Unfortunately many of the controls are not clickable, and I didn't really get on well with the way that you interact with the controls via the mouse; they seemed to require a degree of finer precision to grab them and then didn't move very quickly. Still, it's not a great concern for me as I never really liked the idea of clickable controls - having to move the view point all the time to look at a control and then back to see where you are going or to see a dial is just not much fun for me. I use the keyboard, and when it's supported no doubt the Rail Driver.

RailDriver - Not supported out of the box, latest word is that it's coming soon.

TrackIR - Not supported out of the box, latest word is that it's coming soon.

Passengers - A minor novelty in my opinion. They're there, if sporadically, but they materialise on to the platform when you open the doors, disappearing in to the coach and reappearing off it again before disappearing somewhere else on the platform potentially having walked through benches or other things on the platform. There's also no way to say whether coaching stock starts out empty or full, or to indicate that opening the doors this time should empty the coach because it's the end of the run. This results in sidings full of coaches full of passengers - which is almost as odd as coaches and stations permanently devoid of them. It's good to see a move in this direction and I do prefer the moving passengers in Rail Sim to the stationary ones in Trainz, but to me it's still minor. My son on the other hand thinks they're the best bit, he'll happily drive in to a station and open the doors, then when they close he'll move forwards two foot before opening again - and only when he's run out of station will he move to the next one!

Loads - You can fill up the tender with coal, and you'll see it go up. You can load the tender with water. You can fill wagons with minerals, or flats with containers. Great stuff for that extra bit of immersion, however there's no other real point to it. That might sound bad, but to me that's actually just fine - I never really got on board with the Trainz "Industries" idea which to me turned it in to more of a resource management game rather than a Train Simulator. Still, I mention it in case that's what you're looking for. Coal emitters are constantly spewing coal sadly, which does look a bit odd.

Turntables - Turntables and Traversers are both present in Rail Sim, and imho they've done a very fine job on both. They could possibly both do with being slowed down just a tad but overall, they do what they say on the tin. Smooth movements controlled easily with the G and Shift G keys. I realise that Trainz has had this since day one, but for those MSTS users it's going to certainly be a big plus.

Physics - Fantastic in general. loco physics feel really nice to me, very heavy and requiring much more thought and planning to drive successfully. One complaint is the way wheel slip / slide are (not) handled. I did see a wheel slip warning come up in the F5 view but the wheels don't reflect it. Also, crash physics - why oh why did they get it working like this, so graphically? You can tilt trains over until they fall off the rails in gory detail. The wagons crash and bang around. It's bad enough they didn't just stop it with a "crashed" error, but it's not even remotely realistic, in one crash that involved a 7F going in to some buffers at around 15mph (brakes full on) with some full wagons, the resultant crash saw a bunch of wagons go airbourne and ultimately one landed hanging in a tree. With the sensitivity from ToC's about crashes and the depiction of their vehicles and logos in them, I just cannot imagine what posessed them to make it so vivid. TBH i'm furious about that aspect, the only possible outcome from this is people posting spectacular videos of crashes on YouTube and the ToC's coming down like a ton of bricks on the community. Thankfully they haven't simulated the deformation of the units, they just bang, crash and float around. At this point i'll just remind everyone that such things are not welcome in any form on the forums or the file library. Moderators react swiftly and sharply to anyone posting such things. Last rant on the topic; there is a very unwelcome effect when you couple up. First thing to note is that coupling can be done manually in Rail Simulator, which I think is superb. You back up (or pull up) to your train, press CTRL-SHIFT-C and if you're close enough it couples up, fabulous. You can switch it to auto-coupling (as it was for Trainz and MSTS) if you prefer however. So what's wrong? Well, there's no slack modelled, so if you are not exactly in the right place when you try to couple, everything needs to move to make the coupling fit. This can result in a gentle nudge, or even in one instace it resulted in the whole train of 15 BR Vent Van's exploding everywhere after the first wagon catapulted itself in to the air. For me, this makes the manual coupling capability unusable, it's too unreliable. Switch back to auto coupling until a patch helps this issue and then we can re-enable one of the neater new features.

Performance - Just to see how good it was on the worst machine in the house, I installed it on my sons Acer desktop PC. It's one of those insanely cheap (190 pounds sterling including VAT) things you can buy from Ebuyer, Acer Aspire T180 I think it is. It comes with Vista Home Basic, 512mb memory, 80gb disk, a Sempron processor and onboard graphics and sound. I chose this one originally mostly because of price, but also because its onboard video is nVidia Geforce - so it's not some oddity that most definitely won't work. MSTS runs on it great, Trainz is quite choppy depending on what you're doing. Rail Simulator? Well, with the settings turned all the way down (it still looks good, better than MSTS or Trainz imho, even at these settings) he can achieve a steady, comfortable 25fps on all the routes. I was very impressed and is a good testament to the tuning that must have gone on to get Rail Simulator running well on a wide range of hardware. There is a tester over at EA's site - it'll tell you whether your machine will run Rail Simulator. My sons machine couldn't complete the test because it couldn't work out how much video ram the machine had, every other aspect passed and I already knew it had enough video ram anyway.

Youngsters? - My son is four years old, he is already a dab hand with MSTS and Trainz on his machine (hence why I bought him his own machine, I'd lost access to my own!) and has very quickly picked up Rail Simulator. With the proper coaching i'm sure that most kids can easily pick it up and run with it. Oh, and he drives with Expert controls so don't be afraid to have a go!

AWS / TPWS - The Advanced Warning System and Train Protection and Warning System implementations are present to varying degrees. The AWS implementation isn't bad at all, you get a bell if the signal is green, buzzer if it's red. It only occurs when you actually go over an AWS ramp too, not for every signal, which is great. TPWS doesn't do so well, none of the cab instruments seem to work for it - e.g. on the HST there is a digital read-out which is supposed to indicate the speed limit, this always says 000. Similarly, while TPWS will trip correctly in many cases (running a red light at any speed for example) there are some flaws such as not being able to request permission to legitimately go through a red, you'll always get the emergencies applied and a suitable penalty in the final summary. Still, it's a start and hopefully we can see either the developers or the community expand it.

Scenarios - Awful. Awful, awful awful. Some set some of the paths for you, but many require you to set some or all of the path yourself, and none of them clarify which. You're in a yard with a red on the exit road - do you change the point to the main line yourself or sit and wait forever? What scenarios there are, are generally boring and simple runs with very little AI traffic. There's only something like 15 of them across four routes. Free-play scenarios have no rolling stock anywhere. This part is a serious let-down, and out-of-the-box there is no way to make your own scenarios with AI traffic; all you can create are more free-roam scenarios, but at least you can put some extra stock down to make things a bit more interesting. Of course the problem there is that it's actually quite awkward to make your own scenarios - or at least, it's not obvious, once you know the steps it's very easy but nothing tells you what those steps are and the natural flow of the product doesn't lead you to find it.

Route editing - There is a huge amount of potential here, what i've played with thus far has been very interesting though far from intuitive (a common theme in the product imho). I think that once people get the hang of it the resultant ability to create routes will be far greater quality in far less time - I feel this is one area that RS has really excelled. Already the community are showing screenshots (yes, three days after release) of some great looking routes. Very excited by this, top marks to the team for their work in this area.

Intuitive - since i've mentioned it... I think there are a great number of counter-intuitive aspects to the product. Swapping the A and D keys while keeping the rest identical to MSTS. I know the reason is "A for Accelerate, D for decellerate" but come on, the WSAD key combo are a common set for up, down, left and right - and naturally one expects to use right to increase. If they wanted to impose their philosophical views then they should have provided, out of the box, the option to switch it back; to me it's a pointless exercise that will result in frustration and confusion for people until they get used to it and what you really want is to get people on board quickly. The number of times i've shot in to buffers frantically hammering "A" and wondering why it isn't slowing down is getting old! A second key set mapping to match Trainz would probably have gone down well also; why not pander to your userbase and encourage them to like the product?!? Creating your own free-roam scenario, juheeeesus that's hard work. Yes, withing a couple of clicks you can be in and driving - but without any point, aim or other direction. Your free roam scenario will have nothing to do in it, nothing in the yards or stations at all. So in order to do anything you've actually got to work out how to place wagons, coaches etc, which requires you to unlock the route and agree to a dialog warning that the world might end (or words to that effect); sorry, but... HUH? This is where MSTS wins big time, pick your consist, pick your route and start point and drive - can't get easier than that (excepting the caveat that you must have a consist for stock you want to drive, still, most add-ons come with a healthy selection!). There are numerous aspects that are just obviously not thought out well at all and clearly highlight that the product has only really been well used by people far too close to the development, people who are used to the way things work. Testing should always be done by well informed people completely apart from the main development, because those kinds of people will always ask "yeah but why? That's just odd".

Being able to create routes but not delete them or otherwise manage them shows a lack of forethought - apparently only the initial use cases were considered, none of the subsequent ones. Being able to create scenarios but not delete them, again shows same.

Someone was clearly paying a lot of attention to the initial out-of-the-box experience, when you first install it what you are going to do with it and what's your path through the product going to be - but they lost interest or just didn't have the vision to foresee beyond the first day.

Overall, I'm still up-beat about the product, believe it or not. I still think there's huge potential here. What works well, works exceptionally well - I think my top three things about the product in no particular order would be the route editor, the graphics and the train physics, all of which I think work really really well, are crucially important, and have far surpassed my expectations. Unfortunately, those things which don't cut the grade fail abysmally.

I'm going to score it 6/10 in this "initial thoughts" review because the three things that work well are actually pretty substantial. However, some of that score is based on the idea that many of the other issues (e.g. scenarios) can be rectified in a patch in the not too distant future. The best sim in the world is no fun if you have nothing to do in it, IMHO it is activities that made MSTS what it is today - a lack of them will ensure Rail Sim's place on the shelf. I am looking forward to raising the score as patches come out, but prepared to lower the score if the patches do not fix some of the more substantial issues.

Fixing the scenarios with the release of the dev kit could bump it to 8/10 if it proves interesting scenarios can be put together.

Fixing the gravitational physics so things don't bump and bounce around when coupling, or fly in to the air, and something done about that awful crash sequencing - that could take it to 9/10 or even higher.

I can live without chuffing steam, but it would be very nice, at least the sounds are in sync now. The front coupler on the 7F is easily fixed with the blueprint tool in the dev kit. Swapping the A and D keys around likewise. Things not being intuitive - well, we will get used to it and then we'll help the newcomers get used to it, in short, we'll get used to it, it's not the end of the world. Deleting routes? Deleting scenarios? all that stuff, if not done by the Rail Sim team will be easily do-able by the community with a tool, it's far easier to write stuff to edit the XML files in Rail Sim than it was to do things for the bespoke format in MSTS, and deleting a route is a relatively trivial process once you know how.

To end on a positive note, i'm still enjoying it and as I say - I see enormous potential in the product if the Rail Sim team can help the community extract it.

UKTrainSim