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TrainPlayer 3.0 takes another bold step forward in armchair model railroading -- now you can program your trains! Develop a script to carry out a precise series of operations, then click a button, sit back, and watch your railroad as it runs itself through its daily schedule.
Version 3.0 features the TrainPlayer Script Language, a compact, readable language for driving trains and operating layouts, plus a new collection of gadgets and options to help you develop, record, debug, and play back scripts. Programming skills are not required! Using the Script Recorder, you can simply run your railroad while the program captures your moves into a ready-to-run script. For complete details of scripting and related devices, see the 3.0 Scripting Page. For version 3.0, we completely redesigned and overhauled the graphics machinery to give you better performance, smoother scrolling, and best of all, infinite zoom! Now you can zoom in until you see the rivets on the boiler, regardless of the size of the layout or horsepower of your computer. Here is an example from Ed Avetta's great Inland Belt:
Auto-scrolling now goes much more smoothly, without jitters or flashing. Tracklaying on large layouts is more precise. The program is more conservative of memory. It was a lot of work. Sounds are much improved and more plentiful in TrainPlayer 3.0. Steam engines sound good at any speed, from slow chuff to rail clack. There are more engine horns and steam whistles to choose from. And now you can now introduce sounds at locations around the layout, so when you pass a dairy farm you can hear the cows mooing! Layout sounds are connected to "stations," areas on the track you can specify and name. When you connect a sound to a station, you hear it whenever the train passes through.
We provide a collection of sounds you can use for layouts and engine horns, and more are available by download. Or you can provide your own -- just drop a wave file into the sounds folder, and it shows up on your list of choices.
For a dynamic look at this feature, see the video demo. Clipping regions and tunnel portals are defined in 3.0 by special sections of track. To create an invisible region, you draw its outline using a little polygon of track, and mark it as "tunnel" track. When a train passes underneath, it hides cleanly.
There are many fine new layouts available for 3.0, and more on the way. It is now easier than ever to browse them and download the ones you like -- just pick from a dialog, the same way you choose one from your hard drive. A new command on the File menu, Import from Web, brings up a dialog showing all the layouts available for download. Click one and you see a little preview. Double-click and it is downloaded, installed, and opened automatically. The layouts you see in the web import dialog will vary depending on your license. We are charging for some of our new collections of high-quality layouts. The preview window is also in the regular Open Layouts dialog, making it easy to browse your collection and locate the Westcott classic of your choice. Spotting car numbers is necessary when developing scripts, so we improved the way they look and how you choose to show them. Car numbers are now "painted on" -- they align with the car top and rotate with it. You can turn numbers on or off for the entire layout, or just a specific train or car. The choice is saved in the file, so you don't have to keep turning it on every time you open the layout. Version 3.0 has been under development for many months, and we have been fixing bugs and making small improvements the whole time. Such as:
We have a lot more improvements in mind. Enjoy 3.0, keep an eye out for your free upgrade to 3.1. |
Until
now, trains have not looked quite right when passing under and over each
other, or when entering tunnels with angled portals. This is no
longer the case. New devices in TrackLayer allow you to define
areas of invisibility and angles of track clipping, so top-down views
look right even at multi-level intersections.
