messed up hierarchy

[CSRX]

I can't speak for how much time the developers spend these days trying to make updates "backwards compatible" with old MSTS era content, but hopefully none if that takes time/resources away from future updates.

I was more so referring to those producing content for the specifics of ORTS 1.6 and further, not updating the past. There aren't many people left doing any of this as I mentioned, not like it used to be. Then throw in the newer ways of having the coding in your engine/wagon files, and learning the ins and outs of that, takes time too. Honestly, by the time I manage to learn it, the next latest and greatest version of OR will be out and probably have much more to learn. Not saying it's like this for everyone that is still making stuff, but for someone like me, it's a bit hard to keep up with. While I may not have seen eye to eye with Gerry, he was one of the few that was able to quickly diagnose and help others with this coding. Philip is a pretty busy man and he can only explain so much at a time and I get that. Honestly, Sean was my go to guy with this sort of stuff, as is/was Erick, but I know both of them are usually pretty busy with life and other things too.
Not knocking TrainSimulations or Nash, but those guys can only do so much as well in such short time, that I don't expect them to be throwing things at us left and right every day, week, or month.

Don't get me wrong either, it's not a bad thing that seeing releases have slowed down, this typically means it will be good quality, I am just making a noticeable observation that this sim isn't what it once was with the massive group of developers we once had, I feel like ORTS is outpacing the 3rd party development of things to go along with it, is all. At least the North American content. I can't really say for other content such as the UK, India, or elsewhere.

[oper190]

Hi fleegle411,
Well said, Sir!
I support everything you've written.

If, and it's a big 'if', the intention is to cease being able to run native MSTS routes and stocks, where are the new OR routes and stock to come from? Our Community is small and there don't seem to be many (any?) younger route and stock builders taking the place of the 'old guard'!

I have tried to bring people into the OR fold before, and it is a hard sell. Why intentionally make it harder by creating a minefield of 'maybe it works, maybe you're out of luck' content? It's not always as simple as 'Go find another one.'

I agree on these points. The future of OR and this Site, depends on members feeling they have a place here, and new comes feeling they can belong and get help. If you did not come from MSTS and have rolling stock and Routes, you are lost in the woods. There is far greater amount of MSTS based add-ons then OR.

Not all that many years ago if you didn't log in here near daily you found pages and pages of new uploads to go through, sometimes exceeding the amount held in the New Downloads Section. Now we can go weeks without but one or two.

Someone seeks help and told "Figure it out like I did," or "why are you using that old stuff," isn't helping them one bit. They'll soon feel left out and lost and move on to something else, maybe not even some other Train Sim.
Let's face it, what's the first thing OR needs, the old MSTS file structure. No rolling stock, no Routes and activities, just a game engine.
Okay there's the free starter route, thank you, but that get tired fast. Okay search the library here maybe, or buy payware so you can run your "Free" Train Simulator. Good-bye new member, if they even joined.

When those that want it as real as it get, or it's TS ( and not Train Simulation ) if you don't like it, and that it, all of us that want something less will leave the community. When your Members climbs into the $100s a year to keep the site up and running, with a handful of new content a year being posted, the end is at hand, and that may not be that far off.

[fleegle411]

Now that I have had some time to investigate a little to confirm... Here's for an explanation as to why the default Genesis loco is doing what it is doing, and this is not unique to the model, I have encountered it elsewhere. The spinning bogies will occur on ANY model with things named like this.

The hierarchy nodes on the default Genesis for the wheels are named 'WHEEL11, WHEEL12, WHEEL21, WHEEL22'
Since 1.6, Open Rails only recognizes "WHEELS11, WHEELS 12, WHEELS22," etc... Previously it recognized 'WHEEL11' without the S enough to work, but now that causes spazzing. You can open the shape in SFM and manually edit it to add the S to the node names, but I will be posting about this over on Elvas so that we can get a correction.

Wheel.jpg

[dcarleton]

If issues like these can be fixed, shouldn't the corrected shapes be uploaded to the library? This is, after all, a community.

[fleegle411]

In my case, the only reason I never uploaded my fix for those roadrailers is because getting a hold of the original creator for the go-ahead can be very difficult for many of these files. That said, if there is a new understanding that I missed where fixed freeware files get a pass for the sake of the community, I will gladly start uploading things I fix in my usual course of working with the sim.

[eric]

We're talking about 15+ year old files in many cases.... Contacting the original author is a courtesy assuming they're actually here, but not what I'd consider an absolute.

This is an ORTS exacerbated issue by enforcing a more explicit shape hierarchy syntax. If there's a simple fix, let's keep it simple. I can update the original zips if you send me the corrected .S files (assuming that's the only updates being done).

[ossie]

I was more so referring to those producing content for the specifics of ORTS 1.6 and further, not updating the past....

I wasn't disagreeing Shawn and agree with your concerns about the shrinking group of content creators (and users). My comment was more a general one in relation to the expectation of some that everything ever released should continue to work correctly in each new ORTS version. I haven't installed 1.6 yet so I can't comment on issues with it in relation to coding etc but therein lies one of the huge benefits of ORTS in my opinion. The previous versions remain usable so if you are hellbent on running the default Genesis (in this case) rather than the excellent freeware model then you can continue to do that to your heart's content. I said recently that I wish I'd had the option of "rolling back" any number of games and programs I've purchased over the years to earlier (and better imo) versions. The fact that ORTS provides us with that option is fantastic.

Short of finding an anti-aging pill I'm not sure what the solution to our community numbers is. What is happening with other train simulators? Are they still as popular as they were and attracting large numbers of new players? Around the time I bought MSTS, our local shopping centre ("mall" to you folks up north) would have had at least 6 stores you could have bought games in. I was recently killing time up there and found there's only 2 now. One doesn't even have a PC games section, only the console brands, and the other had no simulators of any type in their PC section (such as it was) so in this part of the world at least, if you're looking to get into train simulators it appears you're going to need to look online. I'd love to be able to find a way to create an influx of new people into the sim although I don't think 25 years worth of content that varies immensely in quality and "plug & playability" is necessarily a good selling point.

[duke1234]

I'm in the same boat, this whole house of cards is coming tumbling down sooner or later. I'm split on the matter, as I love MSTS content, but it just doesnt have a place in the modern world. People just aren't interested in Vintage\Retro Train Simulation. I could right a whole essay on the problems with the direction the OR team and TS.com is taking.

I'll give a recent example, I only recently discovered that TSRE had a live multi person editor, and asked about setting it up. The functionality is currently broken. Now of course I don't expect the 2 people that are even actively developing to bend over backward to fix it for me, but the answer I did receive was startling, "I just don't see demand for that feature" That had to be a sad short sighted outlook on something that, on the surface wont appeal to legacy route builders, but may appeal to a huge collection of people who want multiplayer route building and are currently held captive by N3V's Trainz entries. No one that I've seen at the OR team seems to really care about attracting new users. (Prove me wrong, I'm receptive to criticism) only appealing to the existing legacy users. I'm 24 years old, I'm going to watch my favorite simulator crumble and rot before me, I am going to outlive 90% of the user base. What saddens me the most is it seems like OR is gonna die in the worst way possible, without a fight, because they wont acknowledge there is a issue, they will continue to make excuses until it fizzles out entirely. I hope something changes, especially in a world where small niche games are dominating peoples headspace, Railroader, Derail Valley, Hyce's Century of Steam, all wish they had the amount of developers OR did, and they have accomplished huge feats, not just in features and gameplay, but listening, learning and fostering communities that will keep them going for a long long time.

Prove me wrong OR, I desperately want you to succeed,
Duke

[superheatedsteam]

Have you looked at using github for group development of a route?

[pwillard]

Hmmm. I'm not convinced that having content "come with" OpenRails installation to make it behave like the MSTS Install Disks is a good thing. It's one of the things that I feel OR got right. Content *isn't* tied to your installation folder, so upgrades to the simulator won't impact your consists or routes. The default MSTS route content is actually rather sad and lacking, BUT, if you have your MSTS CD-ROMs handy, you can of course install and use them. If you don't have your MSTS CD-ROMs, well, should ORTS be supplying the content from them? We are lucky that there are actually a few good starter routes and many more we can choose from, all shared as freeware on Trainsim.com, which should make having "default content" a non-issue.

Yeah, there are still areas where the OR devs are not focusing their efforts. For example, they avoided developing content "editors" altogether and focused solely on creating a compatible simulation engine, and that still holds true today. Others have taken on the task of working on editing tools and done a decent job with TSRE, for example. But the OR devs are volunteers, and we don't pay them like we do companies that produce products like Trainz. (Even they have issues developing things with limited *paid* staff). We have to be content with what people (who volunteer) are willing to spend their time and effort on. I'm sure they would welcome more programmers, but I have a strong feeling that they already have all the available people with C# coding skills who are also willing to work on the OR project.

[eric]

I'll give a recent example, I only recently discovered that TSRE had a live multi person editor, and asked about setting it up. The functionality is currently broken. Now of course I don't expect the 2 people that are even actively developing to bend over backward to fix it for me, but the answer I did receive was startling, "I just don't see demand for that feature" That had to be a sad short sighted outlook on something that, on the surface wont appeal to legacy route builders, but may appeal to a huge collection of people who want multiplayer route building and are currently held captive by N3V's Trainz entries.

It's only broken in version 8.x and in the 18 months of development on that, you're the first person to ask about it, so the lack of demand point holds true.

You do have the option of using Goku's 7.x to try multi-player editing. There should be zero compatibility issues using different versions of TSRE at different times.

Sent from my SM-S911U using Tapatalk

[pschlik]

I don't think most people truly understand how much of a hot mess it is to do anything while trying to support 25 years of stuff. This xkcd comic is incredibly relevant for MS/OR https://xkcd.com/1172

"There are probably children out there holding down spacebar to stay warm in the winter! YOUR UPDATE MURDERS CHILDREN."

There's so much junk out there that you can do nothing without consequence, no matter how small it seems. Fix a bug? Well now you broke someone's favorite train which relied on that bug to function correctly, and you won't hear about it until 18 months after committing the fix because all of 2 people actually own said train (oh, and it's no longer on sale, of course, so too bad if you wanted to add it to your testing suite) so there was no chance anyone was going to see it during the testing phase. If you are lucky, you can "just add an option" or some workaround, but that's just trading technical debt you didn't know about for technical debt you do know about.
[Practical example: TrainPipeLeakRate was bugged to only cause a leak on the lead locomotive, not the entire train pipe. This bug was around long enough that some creators intentionally set TrainPipeLeakRate to a really big value so it felt like the leak was applying to the whole train. Fixing TrainPipeLeakRate broke those locomotives because the creators were relying on the bug to get their intended effect, so extra code had to be added to artificially limit how high TrainPipeLeakRate can be.]

It's even worse when the bug someone relied on was a bug in/quirk of MSTS because we fundamentally don't know how MSTS worked, so we can barely replicate the intended behavior, much less replicate the bugs that some content relied on. You end up with things that work one way in MSTS and another way in OR, but with no answer why it ever worked at all in MSTS and no good way forward to make it work in OR without breaking a dozen other things. Intentionally implementing bugs for the sake of compatibility is a chore you only get to experience working on a platform that wants to be backwards compatible to 25 years ago.
[Practical example: Those darn 3DTS cab forwards have nonsense physics. They slip like crazy because the values entered in the engine files mean they should slip like crazy. They don't slip like crazy in MSTS because MSTS makes no sense and does not care about sensible physics. So, a bug was implemented in OR: in simple adhesion, steam locomotives cannot wheel slip. This is wrong, but people value compatibility more than correctness so there you go. And apparently that still wasn't good enough, as we still get people complaining about those things even though there is a clear workaround: turn off advanced adhesion.]

One thing the xkcd comic didn't tell you is that even if you try to listen to the complainant in good faith and "just add an option to reenable spacebar heating" that will never be good enough, as the person used to just turning on the program and using spacebar overheating will be absolutely livid if the option is disabled by default, while everyone else will just keep writing bug reports about the CPU being too hot. Options don't really work, yet neither does a supposed one size fits all situation. We either need to decide that some old content was implemented poorly and will not work out of the box anymore (this generally is not the goal), or both old and new features need to be maintained simultaneously with the new features being strictly optional, keeping existing content stuck in the past (but functional) and requiring extra configuration on new content. Everyone wants the shiny new things without putting in the work but that's not going to happen, and it's especially not going to happen if you also want the rusty old thing to still move.


The other train sims can get so much more done not just because they are actually paying people to do things but because they don't have so much baggage. Century of Steam has no existing content; they can do literally whatever they want and there is nobody there to complain about their favorite locomotive working a bit different. They are free to improve things as much as they want, revise features as much as they want, and delete old broken things whenever they like. Cough on OR's code in the wrong way and someone's world comes crashing down.

Though not every sim is so different from OR...an example of a train sim with baggage is Train Sim Classic, and if you'll notice there haven't been any updates to the code in Train Sim Classic in ages. The last real update was the attempt to push things to 64-bit, which didn't improve much and is known to have straight up broken some content. Other updates were considered, but every attempt just broke some old content (often in ways that you couldn't anticipate), so they chose to fossilize TSC as-is. TSC certainly could be better, but not without ruining the content built specifically under the assumption that TSC was the way it was and wouldn't change, and if you still wanted those improvements DTG would just tell you to look into Train Sim World. So, Train Sim Classic gets to die a slow and unremarkable death with a trickle of content that is the same quality as you could have gotten 10 years ago. No progress, but at least you can still play (almost) everything back to the original content from Rail Simulator. That's not really where we want to end up, either.

[duke1234]

It's only broken in version 8.x and in the 18 months of development on that, you're the first person to ask about it, so the lack of demand point holds true.

You do have the option of using Goku's 7.x to try multi-player editing. There should be zero compatibility issues using different versions of TSRE at different times.

Sent from my SM-S911U using Tapatalk

Eric, this isn't a criticism of you or the excellent work that's been done on TSRE, and I agree the vocal demand has not been there, its merely commentary about the way demand is being assessed. It comes around to creating features to attract people who don't know they want open rails vs building only for the people who already use it and like it. There are people outside the open rails/msts community who don't voice any opinions here that would absolutely make the switch if tools like MP editors and better content organizations were announced. My personal believe is continuing to cater to the existing crowd will eventually extinguish the simulator as the existing crowd shrinks and shrinks. Go look at the popularity of MP editing that Trainz has a seen. They had the same adversion to it (and the subscription structure) at the beginning with alot of "who asked for this feature" babble. But it attracted a whole new group of digital modelers that started treating Trainz like a virtual model railroad club. I absolutely not saying the MP editing is the most important thing going on and that it NEEDS to be implemented, its just the example that was most readily available in my head.

[eric]

Not taking it as an insult. Just pointing out it's still an option with the earlier version.

Trainz is a different monster altogether in that they have a centralized repository for scenery assets integrated into the editor. I'm not sure how you'd do that with TSRE being an external/not-integrated-into-ORTS editor and the regional fragmentation of repositories. I'd gladly look at a way of supporting virtual file system with our repository, but there doesn't seem to be a coordinated effort to come up with a standard for how that would work on routes, consists, etc.

[EldoradoRailroad]

A comment,

This post got hijacked in too many ways.

My 4.5 cents is that the model could be edited in terms of those internal names for the various parts without too much sweat.

Yeah, why not decompile it and update it, if it comes to that. 25 years is a long time.

Openrails is NOT Windows 11. It is a hobby with a lot of moving parts and things get not just broken, but busted. Other train sims have a lot going for them, like a brand new iPhone. But they are walled gardens and if that is what you want, Openrails will never be your brand of beer. At least in Openrails there is a glimmer of hope that things can be fixed by the user, mostly. That is part of the hobby. You ALWAYS have the option of sticking with an older release of Openrails if that version has no/fewer "bugs" for you.

You might argue that Openrails is open source and you would be correct. I would argue that the platform and compiler that Openrails is built from is NOT open source and thus, it is its own "walled garden" with their own set of limitations/constraints. This is after all Windows, and you can expect things are not going to be to your exclusive advantage. There might be some things that are not working and never will again.

Steve