First of all, thank you to all the many, many hundreds of people who took 10-15 minutes to complete the survey and provide us your feedback. It has been very helpful, and we've read every single one of your responses.
We will now continue to process the mountain of feedback and turn that into real outcomes that will make a difference to your Trainz experience.
We'd also like to congratulate our 5 winners of the $100 Trainz Gift Vouchers. We've listed the Trainz usernames of the winners below - so if your name is on the list, please check your email. :)
And now onto a summary of the quantitative results...
When comparing the ratings for Trainz 12, TANE and TRS19, the trend is looking very positive.
Only 1 in 5 rated TS12 as Excellent, increasing to 2 in 5 for TANE.
For TANE vs TS12, 20% of people moved from Average to Good and 20% from Good to Excellent.
For TRS19, 3 in 5 now rate it as Excellent, and overall, 9 in 10 people rate TRS19 as either Good or Excellent.
The route quality ratings showed that perception of quality varied widely. There's no doubt that regional differences play a big part in the ratings, and with USA being the biggest market, it was no surprise to see the USA routes do well in each section.
A reasonable percentage of users were unable to either find their GPU details or their VideoBenchmark Score. We suggest you review this news post from a few years ago which provides some important information about getting the most out of Trainz.
For those who provided their scores, the median card among users was a GTX 780 (Passmark G3D score = 7958) or R9 390 (Passmark G3D score = 8088).
The following table show how many users fall into each category for the suggested TRS19 Settings:
To find out where your card rates in the list, visit this website. To find your hardware specification, run "Dxdiag.exe" and look at the Display tab, then enter that into the search field. There is nothing to install, and you'll find out how well your card will run the latest version of Trainz.
Your comments provide a wonderful insight into the minds of our Trainz Community. Obviously there are lots of very positive comments, along with a variety of [generally] constructive criticisms of various aspects of Trainz.
This comment pretty much sums up the majority of users: "I like to build my own routes, and make my own sessions and drive them automatically and just watch the traffic and scenery."
One area of contention is the subscription model introduced recently. It is important to point out once again that this is purely an OPTION, and in no way affects the store purchase option that has been around for almost 20 years now.
Another theme is that TANE and TRS19 are for high end machines only. It is worth noting that in like-for-like tests, TRS19 outperforms TANE which outperforms TS12. This is true for both performance and stability. On the flip-side, obviously you can't turn on the new graphics features without any performance penalty.
Other recurring themes include:
We're hard at work ensuring that we address the needs of our community. Many of you have been with us on this journey for almost 20 years now, and things are heading in the right direction.
We're listening to you, and we'll keep on improving the things that matter most. TRS19 is without doubt our best version of Trainz ever (no matter what your hardware spec) and for just $10 you can actually find out for yourself by trying our Gold Class membership option for a month.
Thanks again to everyone who let us know your thoughts on Trainz, and we look forward to delivering improvements to you all for many years to come!