A U R A N . C O M

Trainz Community Express Archives

10th July 2002

Hi everyone,

The big event for the week is of course the release of Service Pack 3. We appreciate your patience with the download time and please feel free to mirror SP3 or make CD copies available for your friends (who of course have a legitimate copy of Trainz). A huge thanks to the beta-testers; their effort with the testing has made a massive contribution to the quality of service pack 3. Over the coming week significant new features will be unveiled for Download Station that will assist with integrating third-party content with SP3.

On the issue of custom content and Service Pack 3, guidelines for the integration of new content will be available shortly. We will also be holding a chat session this coming Monday (15th July at 7.30am Australian Eastern Standard Time) to discuss with custom content creators the important integration issues arising from the release of SP3 and setting out our plans for supporting your efforts. We would greatly appreciate it if as many content creators as possible can make the chat, your feedback on our plans will be very important. For more about the chat please see my post here. The chat will be held in the new channel, #Trainz_Content_Creation

Website in the Spotlight

This week's website is wewain's Trainz Fan site, which offers some great tutorials on using Trainz. The tutorial coverage includes Driver and Surveyor and is a great resource, particularly for new Trainzers. So if you're looking for some tips and tricks check out Wewain's site.

You may also like to drop by MonsieurMax's MaxTrainz and catch the latest edition of the new MaxTrainz Newspaper.

Screenshot of the Week

This week's Screenshot is more a collection of Shots from Johnda1237's fictitious railway, Gotham Central. Superb work John.

Download Station Report

Work continues on updating Download Station with new features to support SP3, you're in for a treat!

In the meantime, here's this week's report:

Currently available from Download Station:

Buildings / Structures 141

Layouts 75

Locomotives 132

Miscellaneous 30

Road 18

Rolling Stock 340

Textures 8

Track 15

Trackside Accessories 26

Vehicles 16

The Download Station current hit parade of top five all time downloads are:

1. Sagatukett
[Downloaded: 2713]

2. New River Rail
[Downloaded: 2517]

3. SAR Passenger Station 2 Tracks
[Downloaded: 1718]

4. Rail Ale
[Downloaded: 1520]

5. SAR Passenger Station 3 Tracks
[Downloaded: 1478]

This Week's Top Five Downloads

1. P10_Union_Pacific
[Downloaded: 427]

2. P10_K4_Tender_Union_Pacific
[Downloaded: 302]

3. 50ft Boxcar Route Rock 300888
[Downloaded: 251]

4. Goodhue railway
[Downloaded: 212]

5. SNCF PACK12 PICASSO X3800
[Downloaded: 207]

The Current Top 5 Uploaderz are:

1. majekear 166

2. tafweb 47

3. gjvh 41

4. RailroadKing 21

5. tony-meredith 19

The Trainz forum waffle of the week goes to the recent outbreak of poetry. Take a look at "Intermission I think I Shall never see" from Boxcar and Stormscape's effort "hmmmm, funny rhyme" Hopefully the release of Service Pack 3 will divert your skills back to creating layouts :)

However, outbreaks of waffle poetry have been spotted in the Trainz Chat recently. To check it out, stop by and say hi ;) I would like to thank the community Trainz chat moderators for their excellent effort over the last few days of keeping 'order' lol! and welcoming many of the new comers who have been dropping in and partaking in all of the SP3 excitement (thanks to Hentis Rc1166, Barney, CeeBee, Rebes, ChileanLlama and our new moderators K3nn7 and BadTrash.) Stay tuned for more Express next week........

Cheers,

John Banks