Trainz/Trainz Railroad Simulator 2004



Trainz 2004, published and distributed in 2003 was, in the eyes of many (after four service packs of growing pains!), perhaps the perfect Windows version of the Trainz Simulator product line. Even at this writing (April 2015) with the 64-bit TANE on the near-horizon as a viable product release, TRS2004 still has its fans, adherents and supporters creating content. It was a revolutionary product with capabilities and abilities never seen before: the ability to control world environmental parameters, introduction of sensible interactive industries and complimentary traincars, along with the capability of making multiple sessions happen on the one and same route without the fuss and bother of external (and blind) scenario generation and its session capabilities, and improvements over the tedious task of scenario writing, truly opened floodgates allowing content creator's to give users a taste of the Trainz experience on truly large routes and with complicated switching scenarios so beloved of the tournaments of physical model railroading clubs with their monthly dues and expensive club houses to maintain.

The product contains Trainz UTC style file structures, Content Manager and dispatch manager giving an ability to download and upload additional content, but advances the Surveyor and Driver modules, and included the renamed Railyard (was 'My Collection') with the addition of new bundled software content, including all nine scenarios bundled with UTC.

New in TRS2004
A list of the major new features you will find in TRS2004 :

• A new free-roaming camera view (the same as was present in World Building Mode) allows Drivers to depart a train and navigate around the virtual world, regardless of where the trains are.

• You can now allocate AI Drivers to each locomotive

• Drivers can be given orders to carry out tasks

• You can switch from cab to cab between up to seven locomotives

• New Drivers Hotkeys using the left cross: ASD+WSX keyboard area

• New Interactive industries demand and supply goods

• Work orders or ‘Waybills’ are automatically created by the new interactive industries

• Steam engines including 3D cab controls better based upon real world physics data

• Consists are now placed in the 3D world of Surveyor, manually marrying a trackmark and a consist when ready to Drive is no longer necessary or possible.

• You can name and save your consists for rapid placement on new routes or layouts

• Trains/Consist selection can be filtered in Surveyor using “Favorites”

• Support using extended GameScript introduced for animated unloading/loading of goods and resources

• You can now create multiple Sessions for one route with different consists, starting points, industry outputs etc.

• Unlimited number of Saved Driver Sessions.

• A session editor, a New GUI mode popup, can be entered in surveyor to apply scripted “Rules” to objects, trains or drivers while concurrently allowing you to see and navigate using the surveyor minimap popup.

• Signaling has been improved and now supports animated semaphores.

• Improved graphics cards support

• New graphics engine (Auran Jet V2.0) adds features such as bump mapping, specular highlights and vertex shaders.

• Variable water model including wave height, color and reflections.

• A lot of new content and useful 3rd Party Utilities come bundled with Trainz.