I read a lot of criticism of prices for DLC, which in many cases is completely unreasonable for what is obtained. Not so much in this forum, but elsewhere, probably mainly on Steam forums . If you were a railway modeller in 00 guage, the cost of a loco would be the TSC DLC price with a zero added to it. Same with rolling stock. With O guage and larger, probably two zeros added! With TSC you can build a 'layout' that railway modellers could only dream about, for a tiny comparative price. Not to mention having somewhere big enough to put a physical model railway. Building TSC content and assets is a highly technical skill set and it should be respected and valued. Doing so will encourage more development. I bet some of the complainers are beer drinkers, and smokers, etc. How much do these cost? A few pints in a pub would compare to a DLC cost. Even a Macca for a couple these days would be a comparable price. The DLC is for keeps, not just for a few minutes.
However a model railway gives you a physical model you can appreciate, touch and even smell. A bunch of pixels working on a 2D monitor driven by a string of ones and zeros is not the same. You also can’t sell on a computer game whereas model railway equipment can be sold on and may even appreciate in value. Neither TSC or TSW for that matter is a cheap hobby. You need a decent gaming PC which is going to set you back a minimum of £1k probably slightly more following recent hardware price hikes. Plus a reasonable monitor and speakers to watch and listen. A PS5 for TSW is going to run you around £400 then you need a decent TV to watch it on. I firmly agree the model railway hobby has priced itself out of the market. Yes it’s a long time ago but I still remember the days when you could go into Beatties and buy a Lima or Hornby OO loco for around £20 or a passenger coach for £4, which was a reasonable proportion of the average person’s spare spending money. These days, very few towns even have a model railway shop.
Haha:: "However a model railway gives you a physical model you can appreciate, touch and even smell. A bunch of pixels working on a 2D monitor driven by a string of ones and zeros is not the same." By the same token, a Rubens is some daubs of paint on a canvas... I agree that the model railway hobby does need deep pockets though, compared to TSC or TSW, beyond an entry level layout. I have a friend who has built a magnificent 00 guage model railway over a couple of decades, that fills a double garage. He has 87 locos and loads of rolling stock.. The locos and stock are worth over £20K. Of course, as well as the models, not too many people are wealthy enough to have a double-garage sized free space in their home. BTW, Rod Stewart shipped his model railway from the US to the UK and that cost him £70K just to ship it (according to the Daily Express). The cost of building it was well into 6 figures though. I think I'll stick with my TSC running very well on my 16 year-old I7 PC!
You’re not alone there. My PC is a PC Specialist build, around 11 years old now. I7 4770 (the motherboard can’t take anything higher), GTX 1650 4 Gb (the PSU could probably just about do a RTX 3050) which was a replacement for the original GTX 1050, 24 Gb of RAM and several mechanical hard drives. It actually still works quite well and got a stay of execution last year when at the last minute MS offered the 12 month security update for Windows 10. It will probably need to be replaced in the next year or two and,while money isn’t an issue, SWMBO has yet to be convinced why I need to replace something that isn’t broken!
The other big advantage of train DLC is its multiplying effect. Buy one wagon as DLC and you have 10,000 wagons to place or pull. It's not quite like that with model railways!
And you can repaint them, if you make a mess it costs nothing (but your time) to delete and start again.
I also have a PC Specialist rig. If your CPU is 4GHz or more, then the GTX 1650 will be good enough and youi probably wouldn't see any improvement with a RTX 3050. TSC is CPU single-core bound, so raw clock speed is what is needed. What you could do, if I read the above correctly,is to replace the TSC host hard drive with a quality (Samsung?) SSD drive of 1-2TB. That would do more to help TSC than a faster graphcs card. I know because I can compare two systems - a 4.4GHz I7 16GB with a GTX 1080 which easily matches a 4 GHz I7 with an RTX 4060 for framerates. Both Win 10 and both have SSDs. Personally, I wouldn't ditch your system for a new one if it still works, just for Win11. I won't shift to Win 11 for the TSC system, until tthe Win 10 system becomes unuseable due to motherboard failure. If I need Win11 for other reasons like office apps, email, web etc, then a cheapo Win11 system will do all that. Win 11 is not really building market share over Win 10 as many users revert back to Win10. Many large corporates are ditiching Micro$oft and Win 11 and moving to Linux based systems. SWMBO is wise and protects you from yourself :
Think my I7 runs at stock speed, 3.5Ghz, never got round to overclocking it. So as you say, debatable whether a stronger GPU would reap much benefit apart from more VRAM. I have toyed with the idea of fitting a SSD, ideally I would want two - one to clone as the C drive and another for TSW and TSC.
I have both a TSC set-up, don't bother with TSW. and a OO Gauge Model Railway In the model world are some locos and units that are missing from TSC. A class 70 (Electric), Class 71, Class 74 and an 88 I have but they are not in the game (I like Electrics) A very nice BRCW Class 104 DMMU, a 4TC Southern unit.
Ooh. you have just woken me up! Not only a Class 104, but perhaps an example of a Cross-Country and an Inter-City DMU of the sixties . . . An area sadly lacking. J
Years ago I bought a MTK kit of the Class 120 DMU, using a Triang MetCam power bogie. A work colleague kindly put it together for me. Sadly it never ran very well, the MTK unpowered bogies were awful and prone to derailment and with pick up only on the 4 wheels of the power bogie it was prone to stalling on points and diamonds.
Think of it as a "virtual" train set. You lay your tracks, add the scenery and buy trains to run on it. What is the difference? John
A while ago I saw that someone had uploaded a route to the workshop which was a TSC implementation of a model railway layout. I kid you not! Still, look on the bright side, the scenery wouldn't have to go far into the distance...
