Trainz 2010

Anyone have comments on this edition? Plus what locomotives from North America come standard on this edition?

It's pretty much identical to TS2009, but with somewhat better performance. It also has a feature called "Layers" where you can place objects and textures in sessions, this is great as you can have a winter session where the ground is white and the trees and buildings have winter versions. I even have a route I'm working on where I have a session where there's an MOW crew working on one area so it's not there all the time, just in this particular session.

It's also advertised as having a thing called "SpeedTree". This is kind of a false advertisement as it doesn't actually come with it, it comes with trees made with it. SpeedTree is a very expensive program for making realistic looking trees, the developers at Auran used this program to make a bunch of new trees that come with TS2010. These new trees are very texture-rich, with animation so the leaves and branches are moving in the wind, and they look very realistic. They also use more memory, so I mainly use them close to the tracks or cameras and just use the regular trees and tree splines for the background.

It also comes with some really high-quality example routes that are a lot of fun to play with.

I'm not sure what locomotives it comes with as I didn't install a fresh copy, instead I installed it as an upgrade to my existing TS2009 installation. There's plenty high quality rolling stock on the Download Station anyway.

Speed Treez is a joke! Sure, the treez are much more realistic, but on my 5-1/2 yr old single core P4 system, I cannot afford the luxury of having treez move in the breeze. I would rather dedicate all available CPU and memory to running Trainz.
I have been using the treez I purchased with the Treez add-on pack, and some free ones by JVC that are great looking and don't use as much resource as Speed-Treez.

I'm not much into the art of creating content, so even a "lite" edition of SpeedTree would not have done me any good. I am a coder (Trainz Script, C++ and Java) and a surveyor, and yes; I do have fun running trainz on my large route every now and again.

CPSK

So the feature is a "joke" because you don't want to upgrade your computer to handle the more powerful graphics that are implemented in almost everything these days? That's almost like saying that HDTV is a joke because it doesn't work on your '60s era TV. If you don't keep your equipment up to date, the performance will fall behind.

I would just like to pop in and say - my modest system can run TS2009 quite well, but didn't really cut it with 2010. I can vouch for the fact that this version is visually a bit more stunning, but do make sure your PC has the horsepower. I'd personally note: at least a Nvidia 6800 is the bare bottom on desktops - and for notebook computers, Nvidia 8200ms won't cut it. (For whatever reason, my notebook with the 8200m runs 2009 pretty well.)

well, i can't access the download station. is the aurans site down