Combination of two post ideas today. First, a few more shots from Iron Mountain Pass, then I’ll give my impressions on Trainz: A New Era’s current released actual version.

The railroad and the river diverge here. There will, eventually, be a town here of to-be-determined size.

The weather starts to turn nasty as we head up the pass.

Now: T:ANE impressions. I like it. I like the game very much. Importing content from Trainz 12, the previous game, is remarkably tedious, but not entirely onerous and the game can either look or run like a dream. I say either; I’m sure that on an extremely high-powered computer, one could get acceptable framerates with the gorgeous graphics that the new engine lends the game. However, I’m beginning to realize that my computer is probably in the higher middle range, not the high end, and so if I turn up post processing (which makes the game look its best), I get a slideshow. So I intend to build my routes with low graphical settings, and do screenshot runs with higher settings. But, even with these and a few other minor problems, I find I like the game very much. I haven’t played around too much with this version (all these Iron Mountain Pass shots were taken on the pre-release version), but I think it will be a very worthy successor to the Jet engine-based Trainz series, and an excellent platform for the next generation of Trainz games to be constructed upon.

Yes! It has officially been two years since I first purchased Trainz Railroad Simulator 2012, and embarked on this epic journey I have designed myself. To commemorate this special occasion, I thought I would compare my first ever route from when I first created it to its current state. Unfortunately, I don’t have any screenshots from that now long-distant time, so suffice it to say it was pretty horrible. The trackwork was uneven, the texturing was atrociously uninteresting, and the scenery, while existent and not too bad, was bland and rather boring and most certainly not what I had intended, which was the warehouse district of a large city. The earliest screenshots of the route in its former state I have are actually from this very blog, I believe (see post #4). Below are screenshots of the route now. As those of you with good memories and eyes may have noticed, the route is now included in my largest route to date, the Yazhtan Peninsula. The work done on it to this point has, I think, truly captured the goal of the original route; it looks like a large warehouse district in a large city. Because the city is near the equator of Gardaka, I have also taken the liberty of planting tropical plants and shrubbery. Please do note that this is still very much a WIP, as most of my routes are. Still, though, I think it looks really good. But don’t take my word for it; see for yourself.