Review of Trainz—A railroad simulator
Posted by Jon Peddie on December 8th 2010 | Discuss
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Software Review
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review
trainz
simulation
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Simulators for airplanes, ships, cars, and even spaceships are what people usually think of first when the word sim is mentioned. But for folks who like trains, a railroad simulator is a fabulous entertainment tool.
When I was younger and seemed to have unlimited time I built model railroads. And then when my son was old enough to appreciate them, we built one together. Model railroads have one major problem, available space. Clever schemes of hanging the platform from the ceiling or folding up sections into the wall to reclaim the space when not in use are the stories of legends. But usually it only a successful model railroad club with at least two to four garage bays of open space that were the most satisfying.
Tiburon is an old railroad town and we have a model of it in the station master’s old house, it’s open to the public.
People like trains for the construction more than the running. They like to build the engines, cars, and bridges; to lay the track, and build small towns and railroad service buildings. Switching cars and engines is fun, but like flying simulators, just letting time go by getting from point A to point B is pretty boring.
Unless you can build some interesting terrain, hills that the track has to wind through, tunnels to get through the hills, switchback grades, and bridges, I especially liked building trestle bridges (there’s still an operational one just south of Seattle near the highway.)
You start the simulation with a mesh
The PC Trainz simulator lets you start with flat sheet of grid lines, shown in perspective. You then can grab any vertices and deform the plane to create hills, or depressions - truly deformable mesh. No chicken wires and plaster or papier-mâché molding.
Like any good simulator, the Trainz program from N3V Games Pty Ltd (Australia’s biggest independent game publisher) has large libraries of stuff – trees, houses, engines, cars, etc, and atmospherics and seasons. You can populate your world as a forest, or a city.
Available on the PC for ten years, Trainz is now available on the iPad – OMG, what a great app to have with you on the road or stuck somewhere.
The iPad version doesn’t give you quite as much setup control; you get a few basic routs, and some rolling stock, and you can run around on the layout, which is quite large.
It has six degrees of viewing control and perspective and views from inside the cabin, or from outside birds-eye view.
You get three routes, and you can create your own, or edit the pre-created ones.
You can select from several engines, and train configurations (local passenger, freight, long distance passenger, etc.)
So the combinations of routes, rolling stock, view points, and controls give you thousands of combinations to try.
What do we think?
This is a train lovers delight. It’s more fun on a big screen powerful PC, but the iPad version is totally satisfying. It’s a 20MB load, which isn’t much.
The software is very well designed and behaved. First released for the PC in Britain in 2000, the code has been steadily refined and improved.
