RailUnion.net

Hi all, Matt kindly did a first pass at codifying some of the questions for us. I must say the process has been very helpful for us. A number of issues we can still address, and a number of things we can look to include. I will answer some questions now and may come back to answer more at a future date.
First of all I suppose I must set out the “Official” situation, as I did in my original post. We are talking here about RS.com’s new technology, I am happy to discuss it as it develops. But at this time we are making no promises about it at all… its still in development ! Given that, of course, our aim is to use the technology in our products or what would be the point in all the hard work! Those of you who know about software will know how this works.

Q. Will this be a free upgrade the same as RailWorks 2 was? Will this be RailWorks 3? Are we looking at technology for a number of stages releases? Or one big update? What kind of timescale roughly?
A. Our current plans are for the technology we finally release to be a free upgrade, we see it as one big upgrade and I haven’t announced timescales or marketing plans for it yet.

Q. Is backwards compatibility a priority for the next major update? Will new stock features be back-ported to original stock such as the Black 5, HST etc? Should someone about to embark on a project hold off for the update? Are there any areas where there *may* be issues with existing rolling stock?
A. Backwards compatibility is always a major consideration - we have a large amount of existing material of our own! However, we need to balance the preservation of compatibility with the need to improve the quality of the experience we provide. So our intention is to ensure that existing material will work, (in fact, a lot of it will work better). However, we can't guarantee that everything (especially third party products) will work. However as long as you haven’t done any fiddling around under the hood, then you should be in good shape and need to make minimal, if any, changes. But we think that many of you will want to enhance your content to take advantage of the new features, but we do not want to make this mandatory.

Q. What does this new version mean for users of hardware that runs RailWorks ok now but may not have the capabilities to run more advanced lighting and so forth? Will the simulator run as well as it does now on the same hardware, or will there be an impact for those who do not have machines up to current standards? What kind of spec machine should be able to take advantage of much of the new features?
A. Settings and options mean that you should not have an issue with seeing what you currently see, however the experience will improve with higher spec machines. If you are thinking of buying a new machine in the next few months, we'd recommend at least 3 cores, at least 2GB of memory and a 512MB graphics card.

Q. Are there any improvements coming to the Dispatcher such as not ramming loose stock, AI shunting / coupling, dynamic slot allocation for early/late trains, dynamic routing, event triggers for scenarios etc?
A. We are working on the Dispatcher and it will be aware of loose consists but this is complicated, have to see how testing goes before we decide on final release. You will start to see Event triggers within scenarios and that will be an increasing aspect of the simulation experience.

Q. Are there any plans to modify the wagon physics and brake systems to allow Fly / Hump Shunting?
A. I am not announcing anything on this at this time.

Q. Any updates on progress with Multiplayer?
A. Multiplayer is a key aim for us and I see it as a separate technology at the moment. Frankly it’s not hard to ram it into existing technology and give everyone a rubbish experience. I think we have seen too much of that in the videogame industry. We are taking the time to craft a plan that will work for Rail fans and I think we will have some very exciting things to say about that later. But I see it as a separate stream of endeavour if you will.

Q. Are there plans for a better asset filter? If you have lots of items installed and activated it can make the scroll bar so small it's value is somewhat diminished.
A. We are looking into that yes.

Q. What new facilities can we look forward to for route builders, for example, items such as more advanced terrain painting tools? The ability to combine object sets in to saved groups?
A. We are working on Curved gradients. We are looking at grouped assets as we have stated.

Q. What improvements to game play can we look forward to, including improvements to the way Career Scenarios are handled?
A. I have not made any announcements about this at this stage.

Q. Signalling on real-life railways is becoming extremely centralized and complicated. When signalling products are sold to companies, the products are usually controlled by one centralized piece of interlocking, which then controls not only the points and signals, but also passenger information systems, instructions to drivers on speeds, and in some cases, train control itself. What improvements are you making in this update to create a more realistic simulation of signalling? Is the intention to keep with the existing lua script system where signals react to what is around them? Or is a better system of more direct control over signals being produced, whether that be with lua scripting, or with another language?
A. The way the RS dispatcher works actually lends itself rather well to this type of rail operation, but the scripts will need to be set up in a suitable way.

Q. As part of the physics updates, are there plans to give AI slightly more prototypical performance, ie no 100% throttle from standstill so the train takes off like a rocket?
A. We are working on the underlying issue, but changes to this aspect of the AI will be the subject of later work.

Q. Are there any plans to address the performance of loading both RailWorks itself and Routes? - Specifically, currently when the launcher starts it goes through a labour intensive process of scanning and cross checking all the items you have installed against the .pi files so that it can build up the relevant information for the "packager" and "package manager" tabs. Until this is done (and it can take minutes) loading RailWorks is very slow because the launcher is hammering the disk - most users won't care about this as they just want to get in to RailWorks, so its wasted effort. Once in RailWorks, loading some routes can take 10 or 20 minutes which seems excessive, again are there any plans to optimise this?
A. Yes

Q. Any progress with Super Elevation?
A. I have no statement to make about this exciting possibility at this time !

Q. Can we expect any improvements to sounds? The sound system?
A. The sound system is actually very powerful, however, we need to spend more effort on setting up the sound definitions. It’s a classic case of the underlying software is great it just needs some more love. I want to see louder locomotives, further away. But we need to work on our set-ups to see that.

Q. Will we see support for refilling steam locos from a water trough?
A. No sadly not this time.

Q. What kinds of updates might we see in relation to loco drive system simulation?
A. Key for us here is multiple consists. Individual loco simulations are running in multi headed consists on my PC right now, we are still improving it but its looks and feels very real. A 4F/Black 5 double header now feels like just that!

Q. What improvements might there be relating to the HUD, particularly in relation to the performance hit it currently incurs and also in relation to supporting those locos which are different to drive (e.g. the Class 86), also relating to the ability to turn bits of the hud off or move them around to alternative locations?
A. We are looking at the performance issue. The HUD is more complex, I hope we are able to make more bespoke HUD’s going forwards but that may have to stay in house.

Q. Might we see a fix for the long-standing "shaky cab" bug?
A. We hope so! Then we hope to include our own shaking ! I just tested the cab jolt when buffering up to a freight train and the feeling of immersion is incredible.