Train Simulations publishes new Southern Pacific Shasta route.
Portugal '79 has been published. This provides 1775km of broad gauge track, with full detail on 91km between Entroncamento and Alfarelos.
New commercial route HSB Simulator published. This contains 87 miles of the Harz narrow-gauge railway, the longest narrow-gauge route network in Europe.
Open Rails 1.5.1 released to fix 3 bugs in v1.5.
Open Rails 1.5 released.
Three new UK routes are now available for immediate download here.
Version 1.4 is now available for immediate download here.
Wagons can now be braked individually as on the oldest railways. This can be experienced in 2 scenarios - Stephenson's Rocket at Rainhill Trials and Langley Vale Timber Tramway.
After more than a year of work the free, restored and improved Siskiyou Route is once more available.
ENG files published with accurate physics for 176 USA diesel locos.
Open Rails 1.3.1 released Download it here.
Geoff Rowlands found a way to model 3D controls so they can be grabbed by the handle as in this video.
Open Rails 1.2 released.
Open Rails 1.1 released.
The Elvas Tower forum plays a major role in developing Open Rails but has been closed to non-members following a dispute. We can now report that some of the Open Rails sub-forums are open again.
Peter Newell has just released (June 2105) the Great Zig Zag Railway, a steam route for Open Rails v1.0 (this 120MB download requires no other files).
Open Rails 1.0 released! Download it here.
Open Rails first demonstration route Demo Model 1 has been published.
Dekosoft Trains has added locos exclusively for Open Rails to its range. These are GP30 diesels taking advantage of our 3D cab feature.
The legacy graphics-heavy web site has been replaced by one based on Bootstrap which is both easier to maintain and suitable for phones and tablets as well as PCs.
You can still see an archive of the old site.
An installer is now available, so Open Rails and its pre-requisites such as XNA can be delivered in a single download.
Open Rails currently uses DirectX 9 and, although this is not the latest version of DirectX, hidden away inside is a method for reducing the number of "draw calls" which the CPU makes to the GPU. Fewer calls mean higher frame rates, smoother motion and the capacity to handle more detail.
The technique is called "hardware instancing" and allows identical objects (e.g. trees in a forest) to be combined into a single draw call. The work is transferred to the GPU which copies them as many times as necessary and usually has spare capacity.
You can expect some increases in frame rate, especially on routes with many identical objects. To turn this on, tick the checkbox for
Options > Experimental > Use model instancing.
Open Rails becomes available in additional languages, initially eight including Chinese.
A schedule of trains (or timetable) is nearly impossible to arrange in Microsoft Train Simulator as AI trains don't adhere to booked station stops. In Open Rails, the situation is better but an activity with a player train and AI traffic is still very different from a timetable.
Work has now begun on a timetable element which is an alternative to the usual activity. The timetable will contain all the details needed for each scheduled train - path, consist, booked stops etc.. Conventional activities will continue as before.
Also there is no longer any distinction between player train or AI train - any train in the timetable can be selected as the player train, the others are operated by a remote player or by the simulator.
Fog is developed from just softening the horizon into a realistic effect which users can fully control.
T1.5.1-1339-gd5ef71956
Merge pull request #989 from mbm-OR/bugfix/Fix-TrainCarOperations-crash-locales32a99613
Cleaned duplicates translations.c0ae6cdf
Fix:TrainCarOperations-crashes-localesT1.5.1-1336-gc3fcdaa84
Merge pull request #839 from Csantucci/further-cc-parametersd00beb98
CC: small fixes and code cleanupbae7132c
First phase of https://blueprints.launchpad.net/or/+spec/additional-cruise-control-parametersT1.5.1-1333-g0a8547bd1
Merge pull request #990 from mbm-OR/bugfix/Fix-TrainDrivingInfo-locales-context37d8ea6f
Update pt-BR.pobbd86261
Try to avoid Conflict pt-BR.po9a56b6fa
Revert Try to resolve the conflict: Locales pt_BR.dbdca220
New try for pt-BR Locales.0165e9ae
Locates pt-BR.b1463dfc
Try to resolve the conflict: Locales pt_BR.da5f1b8d
Try to resolve the conflict: Locales it and pt-BR.d304d6cd
Verified locales files.a1bbd344
Locales updated.68eb044f
Merge branch 'master' of https://github.com/openrails/openrails into bugfix/Fix-TrainDrivingInfo-locales-context54c4e162
Fix TrainDrivingInfo, some texts are misaligned.