I guess it's time for another rave about V-Scale and its advantages over other scales in model railroading. This won't, however,. be the usual rant about physical models and their expense, although I will have a short comment about that. No, this epistle will cover some items that have come to my attention in recent months. Most of these are related to the so called "necessity" for a new train sim, and a kind of renaissance, if you will, occurring among MSTS devotees.
First off, my tirade on the expense of model railroading in any of the "real" scales. Specifically Broadway Limited Imports new economy series locomotives. It seems that BLI has noticed that the average modeler has rather limited resources when it comes to purchasing motive power for the typical miniature pike. Their contribution to resolving this dilemma was to develop their "Blue Line" series of "hybrid" models to suit limited budgets. The "hybrid" refers to the fact that the models combine diecast metal with brass construction. One of these beauties is a New Haven I-5 4-6-4...One of my absolute favorite steam engines....
I'd like to say "Bravo fellows!", but that's not going to happen. Granted the new series is MUCH cheaper than the typical BLI product. Thank you very much for the thought. Yet even at half the price of their conventional products I believe these critters are still too expensive for a sizable segment of hobbyists. Please don't misunderstand me...$500 is definitely cheaper than $1500 or even $1000. It is not however, going to encourage me to scrap virtual modeling to any degree whatsoever. $500 is a large sum of money in this neck of the woods. I would rather invest that kind of cash in a newer dual core PC that would allow MSTS to run the way it's supposed to. Besides, North American Locomotive Works has just released their MSTS version of the I-5.
It has smoke, full sound and I can actully run it from the cab.
To top it off it comes with a
complete train of Phil Mobergs excellent New Haven "American Flyer" cars...
I believe that the entire set would cost over $1000 dollars from BLI, but only if I purchased the Blue Line I-5. The brass I-5 would add another $1250 or so to the price. On the other hand, the NALW version was absolutely free of charge. Can't beat that with a stick.
On the plus side...I was glad to see a large and rather obvious ad for 3DTrainStuff "Tehachapi Pass II" for MSTS on the Trains.Com site. We may not be generally accepted by our "real" scale brethren, but with an "in your face" advertisement like that they will at least know we ain't goin' away anytime soon.
Now that I got that off my chest, I want to turn the subject to the new Kuju Train Simulator and its nearest competitor, MSTS X. For a long time we discussed amongst ourselves that it might be great if the graphics capabilities of TRAINZ could be combined with the more realistic operation of MSTS. Perhaps we grumbled enough that Kuju and Microsoft heard us. We definitely have enough purchasing power to make them think it might be profitable. Especially since the two previous contenders for the MSTS segment of the market dropped out and vanished without ever producing more than bad feelings. Somebody had to jump in and snatch up all that disposable income. Hence, Kuju and Microsoft to the rescue.
The problem for me personally is that MSTS-BIN came out in the meantime. BIN fixes a lot of the issues we all had with MSTS. This opened a whole new range of possibilities for our favorite but "aging" simulator. Another factor is the present generation of affordable hardware. For the price of one of Broadway Limited's new I-5 4-8-4 "Shoreliners" I can purchase a decent dual core CPU and mother board (if not the entire PC). Throw on a Gigabyte or more of memory and a decent graphics card and you've got a rig that will run circles around my current desktop. Combine one of these machines with MSTS and you're playing a whole new ballgame. In fact, I have a business laptop that can and does run MSTS without a quiver. It's an HP 7300 with "two" 1.66 Ghz processors, 1 Gig of RAM and an Intel GMA 950 video adapter. Basically an off the shelf machine, it has more than enough horse power to run MSTS, TSM and Shape Viewer at the smae time. Rather than thinking of MSTS as old school, I'm beginning to think it was ahead of its time. We just had to wait for the world to advance to the point where we could take advantage of what MSTS and BIN has to offer.
It seems to me that these factors have triggered a renaissance in MSTS modeling. Several modelers have already taken advantage of MSTS BIN's capability and are producing magic. The textures are running to the higher resolutions now, averaging 1024x 1024, and commonly going as high as 2048x2048. The poly count is also up (wheels can actually look round now). The latest series of 1948 Chevrolet models from Wayne Campbell is clear evidence of how far we can push the envelope.
There are also more modelers interested in what I'd like to call "comprehensive modeling". The success of modelers like Wayne and Tim Muir are encouraging others to model entire periods. Like "real" model railroaders, we are starting to model ALL the pieces and parts of our favorite era. We no longer want to run our Hiawatha's thru grade crossings full of mid-80's Cadillac's and Cavaliers because we now know we can model 53 Caddy's and 36 Ford's and a whole universe of shapes we never thought possible. Since the hardware can handle it, more and more modelers are moving over to this "fine scale" level of MSTS. We're pushing the MSTS graphics engine to its limits, and it seems to work just fine.
Paul Gausden has shown us that you can have reflective surfaces, and Mike Sinclair and others have taught us that you can have realistic forests and fields. To top it off, George is still not finished exploring what BIN can do.
Yes, the new simulators will have better graphics engines and yes, their route editors will be more like TRAINZ. The problem for me lies in the fact that I prefer MSTS. Had I wanted TRAINZ, I would have purchased it.
That’s about all for now…Thanks for listening.