Love Them Trains
I've always loved trains: both models and the full-sized ones. One of the nicest surprise presents I've ever received was when my wife took me to the Portola Valley Railroad Association on the Feather River. When we got there, I discovered that she had arranged for me to spend an hour's time driving a real diesel locomotive on the museum's railway line. My son Erik and I were in ecstasy as we took turns driving the huge F7A, rumbling around the line and honking the air horn for all we were worth. We've dreamed of being able to do that again some day.

Since that experience isn't something you get to do very often, Erik and I were very excited when Microsoft released their "Microsoft Train Simulator" ("MSTS") software earlier this year. The features and the screen shots on the box were very tempting—perhaps we could recapture some of the glory of driving that heavy metal down the rails, even if it were only in a virtual world.

I bought a copy and we tried it out, but we were disappointed. The program has some very nice artwork, but it suffers from many flaws. The more we played with it, the more frustrating it became. It's just barely good enough to show off to other folks; I brought it to SPCUG's Davis chapter's October meeting, and Erik and I put it through its paces. Here's the lowdown.

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MSTS comes with a handful of different "routes:" two in the USA, two in Japan, one in Europe, and one in England. These routes are modeled after train lines in the real world, with some fairly good-looking scenery. The ground, structures, and vegetation have nice textures, although you would never think that they were photographs. There are occasional animals such as deer and cows, but no people. (The MSTS creators said it was too hard to do people properly. That's a shame, since the lack of people makes the routes look kind of spooky.) There are moving automobiles and trucks, crossing gates, farm equipment, and other objects in the scenery. Sometimes you only get a tantalizing glimpse of the objects, because you can't move away from the train (more about that later).

There are introductory train rides for each route; they run by themselves in a demo mode, showing off the program's features. Then there are a few simple tutorials where a man's voice and some pop-up instructions guide you through basic operations.

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There are also several pre-planned activities for each route. The simplest activity merely lets you explore the route without following any real railroading rules. You can drive your train here and there, flip switches, and blow the horn at the occasional deer or cow near the tracks. It can be relaxing to let it run on your screen while you are doing other things near your PC; if you like riding real passenger trains for relaxation, this reminds you of that. However, if you are relaxing in this mode, then nobody is really driving the train, and you are going to get a rude bump when the train suddenly runs off the track at the end of the route! That brings up a strange design flaw: routes cannot form closed circuits. The end of a route cannot connect back to the beginning. That rules out using this program for designing and testing most model railroad layouts.

The other activities have definite goals, and definite railroading rules to follow. At the start of each activity, you read some instructions that tell you your goals and your schedule; then you start off and do your best. Some activities are easy, others are hard, and at least one that I've tried seems to be flawed so that it cannot be successfully completed. At the end of your attempt, an evaluation report shows how well you have done. For example, it lists the number of times that you exceeded railroad speed limits or other rules, and how often you exceeded the passenger's comfort level. That one can be particularly annoying, because there aren't any clear instructions to teach you how to do better the next time.

Incidentally, you can crash the train into things, or run it off the end of the track. But doing so ends your current activity and forces you to go back to the menu system for starting an activity; it's a dead end situation. Microsoft's Web site says "Train Simulator has been designed to limit the amount of damage that can be sustained by its beautiful trains!"

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For some routes and activities, you may be able to choose which locomotives and train cars to use; that's especially true of the simple exploratory modes. In other activities, you have no choice, since the activity is designed to use a certain kind of train. There are a number of different locomotives and cars, but not very many: two steam locomotives, two or three diesels, and a few electric locomotives such as Amtrak's high-speed "Acela." The choices in cars are also fairly limited, with a few basic freight and passenger cars. Those aren't basic limitations of the program: it is possible to add more locomotives, cars, and other objects. They just shipped the software with a fairly limited set.

You can sometimes drive trains on routes that seem funny to true rail fans. For example, you can drive an American freight locomotive on a Japanese commuter line; or you can drive the famous Flying Scotsman express steam passenger train through the high plateaus of Montana. Incidentally, the English route modeled for the Flying Scotsman is very pretty, but it is reportedly a route that the train never really followed in the real world. Oops!

At any time, you can choose different views around your train. You can drive the train while looking at the controls in the engine cab; while looking out the windows; or while floating alongside the train. And there is also a trackside view that watches as the locomotive approaches, pans as it passes, and then jumps ahead to the next stretch of track to watch again. The scenery and the trains can be very nice, if you turn up the "graphics quality" settings. You can take nice screenshots of the train by pressing the PRINT SCREEN key.

The sound can be pretty good, especially in the diesel locomotive with a good bass speaker system. The closer you are to the locomotive, the louder it gets; and it is stereo sound, so you can hear things going by. There's even a little Doppler effect: the tone of a sound changes as the sound approaches and recedes. The sound does cut out briefly now and then, which is irritating.

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You can NOT explore the virtual world away from the train, however: there is no independent third person view. This makes it extremely hard to learn the train routes, since there are no maps that show where your train is, nor where all of the switches and sidings are. That is a major limitation of the program. It forces you to explore the route slowly and draw your own maps or write your own notes about the route. And if your speed is too high to avoid running into something while exploring, you will end that activity and have to start over. Of course, you can save your current status at any time, and reload it if you've crashed, but that takes time.

After a while, you'll find yourself longing for a bird's-eye view of the world. Or you'll want a dispatcher's schematic view of the layout, showing each siding and the current location of all the trains on the route. That data is buried in the program somewhere, but it's not available to you.

The program also requires a lot of PC horsepower: I've got a 600 MHz PIII with 256 MB of RAM and a hardware-accelerated 3D graphics card with 16 MB of graphics RAM, but the program won't run smoothly at the "best graphics quality" settings, even though I'm not using the highest resolution possible. I had to reduce the graphics quality and resolution in order to keep the screen from jerking. Even then, using the mouse to control the program is frustrating: at times, the mouse responds very sluggishly, making it hard to control things. Using the keyboard shortcuts is much better, but I counted at least 98 shortcuts (the keyboard shortcut cheat sheet takes up most of an 11" x 17" sheet of paper).

However, Direct X doesn't provide a built-in GUI like Windows does, and that can lead to problems if the programmers don't do a good job creating their own GUI. For example, the MSTS programmers had to write their own help system, and it doesn't work the same as Windows Help; that makes it confusing. Similarly, buttons, menus, and dialogs don't work quite like the Windows ones that we are all familiar with. Dialogs don't have hot keys, for example, so there are times when your only recourse is to use the balky mouse to do something.

There's something worse than those mere stylistic differences, however. Because the programmers had to develop their own GUI, they couldn't take advantage of the built-in functionality of Windows. And that means that they didn't always get things to work. For example, trying to use the print feature in their help system causes the program to crash. That hurts, when you've just spent most of an hour driving your train to a certain point, and you decide to print out part of the help file telling how to perform a tricky operation.

You don't get much paper for your money, either: merely a skimpy monochrome quick start guide, and a color cheat sheet showing the keyboard shortcuts and terse information about some of the signals and signs that you'll see along the railroad routes. The other documentation is in .PDF form, but it's not really practical to refer to it online while running the program, so you're going to want to print it out.

I suspect that Microsoft limited the amount of effort they spent on writing documentation, counting on third-party books to make up the gaps later on, like they do with their other software. The Sybex Official Strategies and Secrets book that I've seen isn't particularly good: I chose a simple topic that had been puzzling me, but the book didn't cast any light upon the subject, being merely a rehash of what the game's documents already said.

You can change the seasons, the time of day, and the weather. But some combinations crashed the program without any warning or recourse. For example, on the two different computers that I've tried, turning on snow in the winter season always caused the program to crash.

Printing the help caused the program to crash, as I've already mentioned.

At times the program changed some controls all by itself, seemingly at random. At other times, the sound didn't work properly, looping over and over until I exited the program and restarted Windows.

On a laptop, some windows and smoke that were supposed to be transparent were solid black, and there were also ugly seams in some of the artwork, such as the views inside the locomotive cab.

There were also frequent gaps in the 3D world, where white light often shone between the polygons that make up the scenery.

The scenery itself often "popped" into different shapes depending on how close it was. This wasn't merely the sudden appearance of distant features such as mountains, if they got so close that the program decided to draw them; I'm talking about the shape of nearby hills changing all of a sudden. Also, sometimes hills in the middle distance spilled over onto the track like a landslide, then popped out of the way when the locomotive approached them.

Getting back to windshield wipers, if a locomotive had them and I turned them on, I could only see them moving from outside of the locomotive; I couldn't see them from inside the cab. A document from the MSTS developers said that getting the wipers to work from the inside of the cab is just too hard to do; I think that is nonsense.

The developers also said that adding people properly was too hard to do. However, one of the third-party add-ons that I'll describe soon has people, both inside and outside the trains.

I've already mentioned that at least one activity had a flaw that kept me from finishing it properly (it prevented me from running my train at full speed). Another activity had the scheduled arrival and departure times identical at two stations widely apart; when I arrived at the second station to end the activity, I was penalized for running way behind schedule. (I didn't arrive at the same time as I left!)

I also found that I lost time in a scheduled activity when I was trying to stop at a small station to unload passengers, because it was very difficult to know exactly where to stop the train. The indicator that showed the distance to the station said there were 0.00 miles left to go, and nothing indicated that I was making a mistake, but pressing the key to let the passengers unload and board would not do anything. So I had to release the brakes, fire up the locomotive, and move the train a few yards, losing precious time, until I found the right place to stop by trial and error. Then the passengers could unload and board. Now, obviously, the program knew where the right spot was, and it already had a textual indicator that was reporting "0.00 miles"; so why couldn't the indicator report how many yards I really had left to go?

If I made small mistakes during an activity, the program listed them as "minor operational errors," but it didn't explain them until the activity ended. I thought that was very irritating; it made it much harder to learn from my mistakes. Again, the program knew what I had done wrong, and it had space and text to describe it, but it just didn't bother to show the mistake at a good time.

Sometimes when a crash happened, the program offered to report details of the crash to Microsoft via my Internet connection. It also said that the on-line report would include some private information about my system, my configuration, and my IP address, but it wouldn't show me the details of the report. I declined to let it contact Microsoft. Later on, I ran into reports on the Web from users that said that letting MSTS contact Microsoft invariably locked up their machines, so I was glad that I hadn't let it try.

My advice to MSTS users is: use the "Save Game" option frequently!

Another pure guess on my part may explain why the program was shipped with so many bugs: I'd guess that Microsoft forced the developers to ship it on a fixed date, whether it was ready or not. What's a small company going to do: Tell Microsoft's lawyers that they'll just have to wait until the software is ready? I doubt it.

To that end, MSTS includes a few special tool and editor programs that are supposed to let you create your own activities, routes, locomotives and cars. However, those programs are NOT officially supported by Microsoft (although they are mentioned in the documentation, and Microsoft has released one update to the tools as of October, 2001!)

The tools are not well documented; they are difficult to use; and they are reportedly full of bugs. There are many users and companies working with them and sharing (or selling) the fruits of their labors; to find them, just search the Web for "MSTS."

After trying the tools myself and reading the reports of others, I have decided to leave the tools alone—they look pretty messy to me.

After trying the route editor tool, I thought of one possible reason that the designers didn't include an independent roving camera viewpoint: Most of the routes are only interesting near the tracks. Far from the tracks, there is no scenery; and far enough away, there is no ground, either. That's a basic design decision, of course; they could have created an underlying "default" wilderness terrain with a little random scenery. They didn't, and so they restricted where you can go in the virtual world, and so the program is harder to use than it could be.

Some other folks have used the tools to create new locomotives and cars, and new activities for the existing routes. I've downloaded quite a few of them (it's usually a long download: some locomotives take more than a megabyte). Many of the add-ons are "beta" quality at best, with difficult installations. A few are commercial products; I haven't tried those, but I did note that some of the commercial ones had already posted patches to their products. To me, that suggests that they rushed their products to market.

A truly lovely freeware add-on is the "Empire State Express" set from Train Artisan. This add-on gives you a beautiful Hudson steam locomotive, a sleek diesel F7 locomotive, a matching set of streamlined passenger cars featuring animated people, and many new activities. It's a big download: 33 MB! But it's well worth it.

There aren't many new routes available for download; apparently, that's one of the harder things to do. One fun new route is "Cliffhanger" by Michael Vone. It's a wacky route: all spirals, switchbacks, and narrow cuts through mountains on a mythical route in northern Mexico. Even though it has a few flaws, and it has no decorations at all—just track, bare green ground, and a little water—it's well worth downloading from TrainSim Depot. It's a lot of fun just to maneuver a single diesel from one end of the route to the other (a task that will take several hours). Mr. Vone has gone on to commercially publish an electronic book about creating routes for MSTS.

For those reasons, MSTS has attracted lots of users, despite its many flaws. But it has also attracted commercial competition. An Australian game company named Auran is promoting "Trainz," to be released online in late 2001 and in retail stores in 2002. Their Website shows gorgeous screen shots and many tantalizing details about Trainz. It looks promising; perhaps I'll get to report on Trainz after the holidays. In the meantime, I wouldn't recommend Microsoft Train Simulator to anyone that doesn't have a superfast PC, a big hard disk, and lots of patience and forgiveness of buggy software.