According to DadRail (at 11:00 in the video below), the driving physics and some features of Open BVE are ‘far, far better’ than in TS and TWS (although obviously the graphics are very dated). He says if TS and TSW were able to take these features on board, they would be the ‘perfect simulator’. The sounds of the 323 are pretty good, eg flange squeal and going over points at 30:00, but still watching and looking to see what he specifically says about driving physics. Presumably acceleration and braking: he also comments on cab sway over points.
So basically "the driving physics and some features of Open BVE are ‘far, far better’ than in TS" And some of the features in TS are ‘far, far better’ than Open BVE And after looking as some screenshots of the trains I'm not impressed Open BVE Taurus HRQ Taurus
There's no perfect simulator. Each has their advantages. And the more they focus on one region/system the better they are for that specific aspect. Run8 V2 for US, Zusi3 for Germany, TS for everything (but with less simulation depth), OpenBVE have yet to try. Although the scenery objects are not on par with TS, I love the lighting in Run8, that's whats giving me more immersion than anything else. Of course knowing your train works like it should gives me a very good feeling.
Yes. You're free to do what you want. Work in the yard, shunting and coupling trains, driving them, processing local industries or taking the role of the dispatcher. Trains can be spawned in automatically (configurable in the options) or manually in realtime without ever stopping the simulation. There's nice videos on YT. It's like an ever growing neverending freeroam scenario for Multiplayer. So for me this is an addition, not a competitor to TS, to my whole simming experience. For getting into it as there is no tutorials but a good manual, I recommend this:
Having seen a few videos of Open BVE, despite what DR has said about it, I’m still not yet tempted to try it. The sounds on that Birmingham route were great (clanking and flange squeal), but the graphics are a bit too 2D for me. Besides limitations such as some routes you can only do in one direction.
The physics in Diesel Railcar Simulator feel very good to me, like openbve. The swaying and bobbing motion feels spot on. By the way, it looks as if Diesel Railcar Sim is getting a foliage upgrade soon, looking good. Simrails demo feels pretty good regarding physics as well.
TS is not about great realism (still it's not a simple toy, I would say it's somewhere in the middle) but about huge amount of real life content not available anywhere else.
