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- Hacker News
- Microsoft used to have "Microsoft Train Simulator". It was being shown off at E3 in 2001 in a dark little corner, by this older gentlemen who for I know may have been the producer or main developer.
I'm not into trains, but I felt bad for this guy so I spent 15 minutes at his booth and let him show me everything. It seemed to have made his day.
by nsxwolf - I have almost no appreciation for trains and I’m incredibly interested in trying this.by ofjcihen
- I like this one, too : https://alexanderperrin.com.au/paper/shorttrip/by mlok
- The game in question is https://store.steampowered.com/app/4630570/RUNNING_TRAIN/by derdi
- Link added to toptext. Thanks!by dang
- One person made the best train sim. Meanwhile AAA studios need 400 people to make the same game twice.by zftnb666
- including patches to make "it stable", and do not forget DLC additional updates!
- I think Elder Scrolls Oblivion was like 80 person core team and 4 years of development and New Vegas was like 70 person dev team and 2 years of development.
But starfield, which was widely criticized by fans, was over 100 people and 8 years development. With the most common criticism from former devs being about the additional management structure and difficulty of communication.
I can’t help but feel there is a lesson there for tech companies where engineering orgs for products are 200+ people when a 20-30 person startup is your top competitor in the vertical.
by faizshah - This is a 1 person job?! It looks practically photorealistic. That's absolutely wild.by arjie
- Not to dismiss the effort by dev, but all Unreal engine games look photoreal these days. My point is that photorealism does not show effort these days.by smusamashah
- > It looks practically photorealistic.
what has improved a lot recently is the physically based rendering - specifically, the lighting. Looking at the steam page, this train game has that type of lighting.
Another game that uses similarly realistic lighting is https://store.steampowered.com/app/2406770/Bodycam/
by chii - I own it and played it. It's good, very pretty, but highly repetitive. It's one 40km track, two trains, and most of the scenery is the same. It is one step above a Unreal Engine tech demo (e.g. the matrix demo from a few years back).
For one person it's impressive, but it won't knock the major players down any time soon.
- In my region of the world this title (and also the title of being "the worst ever made") was reserved for the unnecessarily detailed electric locomotive simulator MaSzyna:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1033030/MaSzyna/
Turns out that such a vehicle, even though simple in principle, has quite the startup procedure and a layman would have trouble making it go.
by Tade0 - From the screenshots MaSzyna looks much better than I’d expect from a game released in 2001!by ku1ik
- Reminds me of when I was younger and tried the F1 cars in Live for Speed racing simulator. Turns out it's actually really, really hard to keep an F1 car on the tracks.by zdc1
- Game looks amazing from a solo dev but this article is terrible, like the journo didn't even play the game they just watched the game.by whywhywhywhy
- >like the journo didn't even play the game
That is industry standard
- All journalism is terrible these days. They just want a catchy headline for the ad view and nothing else matters, including whether the headline is true or not.by dmix
- The job of a games journalists isn't to play games or explain games to gamers. It's to explain the social context of a game to a general audience.
If you want a review service or consumer guide then pay for it.
by casey2 - Yeah, it’s a classic bystander’s assessment.by mikeaskew4
- The author is "not exactly a train enthusiast" as they say, and nor are the vast majority of the audience . Yet the article presents the game in a way that sounds appealing to such an audience, potentially exposing it to more people than just the train fan niche. I think that alone makes it better than "terrible"by monadgonad
- You make it sound like they didn’t even buy and run the game, but that’s not accurate.
> While the game encourages you to master the reasonably simple controls of its range of perfectly crafted engines, you can also just set it to play itself and then take over the free camera as it does.
That seems like a perfectly valid way to experience the game to me.
- > including support for the Zuiki MASCON, a bespoke peripheral for train driving sims.
This just makes me feel so glad to be alive today!
by dash2 - I'm on the fence because I have a TSC-X controller and it's unclear if it's supported. Somebody on the forums posted a tool that converts generic joystick axes to keypresses, but not sure how well that works.by busfahrer
- Yeah, love that is just works.
I'm working on a bit of a hobby project to rebuild a beefier Mascon. Mainly inspired by how much I enjoyed Running Train
by theatrus2 - I always wonder how a solo developer can source high quality assets like these, plus develop a full game with them. In this case did the dev create the assets or did they purchase them from a freelancer? How much would purchasing this many assets cost?by f3408fh
- Nowadays a solo developer could use AI to generate some of these assets.
- There are lots of assets to purchase or even for free. majority of small devs will buy them, if they have money then will freelance. It’s very rare for one dev to do everything but do exist.
Assets are generally cheap, unity asset store itch.io
Unless you commission someone for work 1-2K would cover many small games easily.
- I thought it was kind of commoditised these days - there's an Unreal asset store I think? Probably one for Unity as well.
- It wouldn't surprise me if Japan has its own market for train assets. There's a big community of train simulators! Go to the Kyoto or Tokyo train museums, they have dozens where you step into a replica of a train cab and then drive a photorealistic simulation (sometimes also just film) - the ex-keyboarder for Casiopeia runs a train simulation game company that makes those since the 90s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoru_Mukaiya). There are some Nintendo Switch train simulators like Densha de GO that are only available in Japan.
I'm sure there's a treasure trove of already-built high-quality assets of Japanese trains.
by a_bonobo