Trainz/Trainz 1.3

=Original Trainz Releases=

What would become the stable Trainz 1.3 or the Trainz Passenger Edition after a series of s, began first as a downloadable release in October 2001 like the early circulated copies of the Beta test version, then in December 2001, was, like the boxed Beta test version, released as the original rare published-only-in-Australia boxed CDROM release. The first widely disseminated international release wasn't until the latter part of February 2002, when Auran engaged publishers with regional expertise in the applicable international copyright laws.

Trainz 0.9 (Beta test)
/>especially Model Railroading clubs'' Development of Trainz began in October of 1998 per a radio interview with Auran chief programmer Greg Lane. It was an on again, off again effort as design had to address various how-to questions, and while that happened, Lane and other train enthusiasts contacted the train-enthusiast-communities of model railroading clubs and railroad interest groups to hear first hand what was desired in such model-oriented communities in a railway simulator product. One of the participants was local railroad enthusiast Tony Hilliam, N3V Games' CEO, according to the credits of the boxed Trainz 1.1 release. Many of those contacted began to help on a regular basis via a web chat room and one of Auran's officers used the experience to write a masters or PHD dissertation about the formation of an online community from the coalescence of Auran's community. In the summer of 2001 Beta testing began using a mix of software downloads and a rare boxed CDROM release for those lacking high-speed Internet, the circle of testers gradually widening to include more and more members of the train clubs rapidly increasing the membership of the growing world-wide community, and a stable Beta test version was rapidly attained. 'Trainz 0.9' was almost exclusively a downloaded version with an eventual small production run of CDROM based software.
 * Public Beta release, :''Broad trial amongst disparate groups with Railroad interests, <br

Trainz


The Trainz Community Edition aka Trainz 1.0 was the name given the original Trainz released mainly by software download in October 2001, and like the Beta test version, in a very limited boxed version.

Subsequently, having a product roughly working and being looked at critically by the many eyes of an highly motivated and interested clientele, Auran proceeded to further refine Trainz with a succession of new major upgrade patches &mdash; service packs &mdash; individually released almost regularly some months apart culminating with what is best considered the final installment of the original Trainz and it's last and fourth service pack, the Ultimate Trainz Collection, whose principle difference from the SP3 release was as the title somewhat suggests--a lot more additional content resulting from the Trainz communities interested efforts. It is by today's releases standards, a sparse product with just three Auran authored routes and only partial capabilities of what was to come in the next three–four years of rapid development, but unlike Microsoft, Trainz was clearly aimed not at a general gaming player community, but designed to give the hard core train enthusiast the abilities they needed to model a virtual digital railroad. Unlike Microsoft's focus on players, Trainz was bundled complete with Discreet Computing's modeling software to satisfy this group of high-interest users, the very community Auran reached out to embrace and involve in its design plans from the outset.

These s were all generated in 2002 in a improvements synergy with a rapidly growing expansion of an online community. It was first published and distributed about five months after Microsoft Games released the, with a better  graphics engine. The North American distributor was.



Developed over three years beginning in 1998 by Auran Technical guru Greg Lane, a train enthusiast himself, it was meant primarily to give those trains hobbyists a leg up on route building with it's powerful Surveyor and to give those users much interested in Driving a taste of the upcoming Trainz experience with it's more ambitious far seeing design finally realized in TRS2004 and TRS2006. Lacking both sessions and scenarios, users had to Drive in a free play mode which first required building a (or loading a saved) consist and manually 'mounting' it (or them if several s were mounted onto a trackmark (these 'invisible-in-driver' arrow-like guides are still in the game with the same name and appearance&mdash;but are now used to act as a route-determining destination point (like a GPS waypoint) for the games AI Drivers)

The product didn't contain Content Manager, any ability to download additional content, nor the Surveyor run-time GUI, so consisted solely of the Railyard and Driver modules with the bundled software.

Trainz 1.1
CDROM Title: TRAINZ... Virtual Railroading On Your PC Trainz 1.1 more commonly called the Trainz Retail Edition was released as a boxed CDROM set with a printed manual in the North American markets in February 2002, with  (SP1) already installed by Strategy First. (February ).
 * Two retail builds (retail versions releases) existed; the English/USA version is commonly known as Trainz 1.0. (Box for V1.1 North American release, February 2002, which included  as an accessory is shown at right in lower left corner of the first image above.)
 * Follow on software, each update released in 2002 was quick in coming: SP2 (April) and SP3 (June), as was the successor product Trainz UTC (November).

Trainz 1.2
Trainz with two service packs, or Trainz 1.2 had no really widespread colloquial name, since it was so quickly supplanted by Trainz with the third Service Pack, which was also released as a CDROM, service packs installed boxed retail version.
 * These service packs progressively updated the Community Edition, Trainz 1.0 in succession to TBV versions 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 respectively.

'Service Pack 3'
Trainz  updated both the Community Editions to version 1.3 and was released in early June 2002. While service packs 1&2 both added polish and smoothed out graphics, they were primarily bug fixes software updates in contrast to SP3, which introduced GameScript and TrainzScriptTM software, which allowed run-time software interactivity between modeled assets (ultimately leading to interactive industries and triggered animated effects&mdash;which is to say Trainz vaunted interactive realism, despite consistently losing the glamor campaign with second- or third-best graphics versus various competitors. For this reason, many old-time Trainzers consider Service Pack 3 or Trainz1.3 to be a separate Trainz release altogether. Thus all USA versions are commonly known as Trainz 1.3.

Trainz Retail Edition
Trainz Retail Edition was released in June 2002 aimed at the United States and other North American markets with a different distributor and featured pre-installed and two of additional routes or layouts &mdash;one a small 4 baseboard route, 'Highland Valley' worthy of a good basement HO scale model train layout and was used to demonstrate the new Scenarios software capabilities (TrainzScript and GameScript) with three included scenarios and features the first bundled map of more than 150 map boards ., and one very long route.

Ultimate Trainz Collection

 * Main topic: Trainz: Ultimate Trainz Collection, with detailed list of improvements added in it's several months of development.

The successor product, Trainz UTC was assigned a value of v1.5, and assets created for UTC will have that value as the TB tag value. It is best considered a stable software version with many and varied slight upgrades as things jelled and stabilized in the Trainz community. It is effectively a fourth service pack with added content; improving on Trainz 1.3 in many small ways, but not different enough to be a true new product. The largest benefit of owning UTC, is the excellent set of word processor formatted *.doc files included in the release.''

The Ultimate Trainz Collection, or UTC, was released on 26 November 2002 in North American as a 3-CDROM set including extra rolling stock, and included six new maps (most user community generated) with eight or nine TrainzScriptTM based scenarios. UTC's additional route map content is based on Trainz 1.3 tech, and expands scenarios to 8 That is, Trainz UTC (aka UTC) is a Trainz release with all service packs applied, additional 'tweak improvements', plus extra (non-map) content UTC was the first edition to include the formerly separately retailed PaintShed program and support, as well as the first incorporating developed  content as part of the release, some of which became Trainz staple content in TRS2004 et. al. through current releases.

Minimum requirements

 * System Requirements
 * Minimum: Settings Menu Adjustable details:
 * no shadows, low draw distance, low draw detail, low train detail.

Intel Pentium II 400mhz processor 128 megs RAM Nvidia TNT2 16mb videocard usable settings: 640x480 display resolution 32 bit color depth


 * Recommended Median performance: Settings Menu Adjustable details:
 * shadows enabled, medium-draw distance, medium-draw detail, high train detail.

Intel Pentium III 733mhz processor or equivalent 256 megs RAM Nvidia GeForce2 32mb videocard usable settings: 800x600 display resolution 32 bit color depth