Hi there, Ex-pat living in Alberta near the Rockies. Ive been away from the train sim scene since 2014 (No i wasn't in jail or anything nefarious!) and recently noticed I bought TS-2014 I think and had MS train sim. I notice on these forums theres train sim and train sim world.... whats the difference and which one is better? Thanks in advance!
Welcome. As a fairly new member myself I’d suggest TS2018 (as it currently released as) is the legacy 32 bit game. It’s pretty well developed and there’s plenty of DLC for it available from Dovetail (principally through Steam) and some other providers. The downside is that the 32 bit format has limitations - for example weather representation TSW is a newer 64 bit game developed by Dovetail. There’s not a lot of DLC for it at the moment and while it’s progressing it’s probably not moving as quickly as it should do. Ultimately 64 bit should be a big advantage and the way forward. I’m using TS2018 and have been very happy with it. At some point no doubt I’ll try TSW but at this point I’d want to see far more development before switching over. I’m probably not alone. On TS2018 despite it being an older program it needs a reasonable PC to use it with the graphics sliders to the far right - that is for maximum effect. Because 32 bit doesn’t make full use of modern hardware (like multi cores) you’ll need a pretty good PC to compensate.
Train Sim 20x has been around for a lot longer, and there are a lot more addons of varying ages, completeness and graphical development out there from a lot of developers because it has that capacity. Train sim WORLD is a very young product and there is no 3rd party development channel at the moment, but even if there was there would be much less content. Whilst the graphics in TSW are much better than TS this means you need a much better GPU to run it smoothly at similar graphics intensities. There are also other differences in that you can "walk away" or "through" the trains in TSW which you don't get in TS
Hello PGEE and welcome to the forum. All the main points as regards the differences between TS20XX and TSW have already been covered above, so I guess there's nothing more to do than "fly the colors", and I'm definitely a TS20xx devotee due to vast number of DLSs available for the game, which really bring nice added value and variety to the gaming experience.
