In the last couple of days I've helped a friend install Open Rails on his computer and he is running the latest DARv3 beta. This is free and really didn't take a lot to get him set up seeing as it was also my first time setting the sim up without having Microsoft Train sim on his system.
Open Rails is free, being developed but a small group of guys who knew we had run out of options to improve the performance of MSTS. In the last few years they've started with nothing and now are easily have out done MSTS. This is now a stand alone program, no need for MSTS. For the most part the routes that were created for MSTS will work on OR unless they rely on shared files from older MS routes... older as in routes that were developed nine or ten years ago.
If anyone is interested in giving Open rails and my DAR route a try, let me know.
I'm just about to Digby but I have to say that Bear River bridge and Cornwallis base really stood out as show pieces to me. By the way, I did hit some spots where my frame rate dropped into the 90s momentarily.
It a middle of the range card but I just got it so the technology for the same price you paid last year is always doubling it seems. At least that's the premise of Moore's law.
Now I can see Blomidon from Wolfville and the north mountain from Cornwallis but my frame rate is in the teens. Have you experimented and figured out that you need 10000 to see Blomidon from the shore shore on the basin or it that overkill?
Love the bus model - to bad it helped kill the DAR! Suppose it was inevitable though <sigh>.
Yes, seeing as I was in Cornwallis I missed seeing the North Mountain in MSTS. Can see it in OR though, but now I have to add at least trees to it all the way up the valley and over to Windsor Junction(South Mountain too)!
Never was too keen on MSTS. I have been using TRAINZ for years. I would love to try the DAR route on Open Rails though. Maybe you can give me a few pointers in setting it up to run and if there are any quirks to running the route. Brian Lilly
Builder of Nova Scotia's finest ho scale shortline. The Atlantic Coastal Maritime Eastern. A.C.M.E.
I assume first of all that you can manually add in a route. Would this be true Brian?
Regardless, and we can deal with that later if that's not the case, you can still run everything MSTS you have on OR by downloading and installing Open Rails here: http://openrails.org/download/program/
and pointing it to your MSTS folder.
And that's it. It's pretty straight forward. Please note my train file are no longer in the default location now that I run only OR. Yours may be in:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Train Simulator (32 bit Windows) or
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Train Simulator on 64 bit Windows.
I'm going to put together a manual for what you need to do to get Open Rails to run without ever having MSTS on you system. I walked a guy through this before Christmas and after a couple of hiccups it was working fine, had never done this before myself. Mostly it's just a matter of setting up a simple file structure that is much like that used by MSTS and then when you download anything you'll need to change the path to get it to install in that directory. Once that's done you will be able to download any route from the Trainsim library and any rollingstock.
I wrote it out last night and posted it on Elvas Tower for the people from Open Rails to review and make sure I didn't forget anything. Apparently they sleep during the night so still waiting.
