October 08th 2010
The screenshot pages have been updated to show our recent progress. The pages now also show how the routes look during the hours of darkness; making use of the openBVE emissive brightness, day to night texture swapping and glow techniques. Pretty much most of the scenery and overhead line equipment is now complete; we're currently spending time rebuilding the diagrams from the last release and adding some extras. The routes have been modularised using openBVE's $include pre-processing directive which allows much more rapid construction of new diagrams. Route files which share the same stretch of track now use a common route module. The route files themselves just contain the object index, station and pretrain timings, and objects which differ for each diagram, such as passenger volume and passing trains. We're sorry we can't give an estimate for release, but NWM 2010 may now become Q1 2011.
Can we take this moment to ask BVE4 users to give openBVE a try? The lastest version gives astounding performance increases, whereas the extra features and improvements in graphics quality is well worth the effort it takes to initially set up the program. Just to repeat that we are no longer developing for BVE4, simply because it will not run on our present PCs, and the extra features in openBVE have radically changed the way we code routes, objects, and textures.
Other news: We've never denied anyone permission to re-use any of our objects - but to make the whole thing simpler from this day forward any object/texture by 'TSC team' or by Anthony Bowden of Railsimroutes are now free to re-use and re-distribute without the requirement of asking for permission. We haven't changed any of the object headers or readme's on the present downloadable release of NWM, but the next version will see a distinct lack of copyright symbols. We've always considered it quite an honour if other developers choose to use any of our objects in their own routes. The 'free to re-use' clause should hopefully encourage new developers who don't want to re-invent the wheel by building an object they need, and is already available from the NWM suite. Of course, we have used some objects built by some other authors, and respecting their wishes at the time of borrowing those objects, we have to keep to the developer's original copyright request.
And finally.. Many thanks to Jordy Allen for the replacement NWM map to be seen to the left.