We've Been Pretty Busy at Train Artisan.......

We definitely have been busy, not only with the work for Kuju, Microsoft, and Union Pacific, but also in technology development, reference gathering, and high-quality content development.

Our work on Microsoft Train Simulator has put us in contact with many locomotive restoration groups and museums. Through our relationships with these groups, we have amassed a huge library of reference media(over 50 Gigabytes).

This library includes tons of 5 megapixel photos of locomotives and rolling stock interior and exterior details, over 10 hours of progressive-scan DV footage both inside operating cabs and outside locomotives, 6 hours of high quality DAT recordings of locomotive cabs, locomotive exteriors and isolated sound recordings of specific parts during operation.

Basically it's a model builder's dream reference stockpile of diesel, steam and rollingstock.

Technology-wise, we developed a new way of modeling locomotives and rollingstock by converting geometry into procedural primitives. These modeling plug-ins allow us to create various pieces or even whole locomotives by dialing in specific parameters in a simple user interface.

These pieces are created automatically with 6 Levels of Detail and UV coordinates which can be automatically arranged to fit inside bitmaps used by many different pieces. We also developed our own model file format and custom conversion tools to support this new advanced mesh and texture workshop.

Our creation process for locomotives and rollingstock changed dramatically - what used to take 1 month and a half to create, now took less than a week. We were even able to create some locomotives in just one weekend. All of this, while maintaining the highest quality models and textures.

We also developed a new type of copy protection for simulator add-ons to protect assets from piracy, content theft and plagiarism. While highly sophisticated, the copy protection remains transparent to the consumer.

We have the copy protection working with MSTS1, MSTS2 and FS2004. We have tried this copy protection against the known .s and .mdl disassemblers(stand alones and MAX plug-ins, MAXscripts) as well as viewers. Unless we write specific code for these programs, they will not be able to load or view the .s or .mdl files.

With our large reference library and new content creation technology, we have begun building a sizable fleet of locomotives, rollingstock and 3d cabviews.

The procedural nature of the parts also allows us to reconfigure the texture map to fit varying texture budgets for different simulators.

We are not limited to just creating content for MSTS with this system.