T2012 looks like someone just piled some additional features on it (extensive scenario scripting, much larger maps, physics - basic, but still expanded over original, etc.), but never bothered to test and optimize any of it. The original Trainz ran much better on hardware which is comparable to today's cheap mobile phones. To me, it looks like the devs tried to push the engine way further than it could take, with few - if any - optimizations. Again, this applies to sounds as well, the scenery assets, the scenarios themselves (for example, some may have faulty scripting which does not switch signals properly, etc.). The quality of exteriors mostly varies between good to great, but interiors are quite different, and quite literally varies from fantastic to craptastic, and this is not even consistent - you will have locomotives with great exterior model with interior being literally unfinished mess with missing textures, etc. The quality of the scenarios and vehicles present varies greatly.
I had to mess around with setting for quite some time to get it to actually recognise where my mouse actually was. The GUI is, pretty bad honestly, very imprecise - both the train controls and the game menus, and do not work well in widescreen. Then again, from what I heard of the newer games, they are not much better despite having considerably higher listed HW requirements. I suppose, considering the minimum requirements, a lot of sacrifices were made to make it run even on, even at the time, terribly outdated hardware. It's pretty poor, honestly, and pretty unrealistic even on realistic stability settings. The physics - well, there is some, there wasn't almost any in the original game, so that is an improvement, as much as having a slice of apple while starving is an improvement over starving and not having that one slice. They are okay, overall, some of them are low bit-rate or not mixed properly, but there is a bunch of ambient sounds available, and for the most part, the world does actually feel lived in in most scenarios with solid ambience in stations and strewn about the maps/tracks. A lot of scenery is 2D / sprites, not 3D, everything is low poly / low pixel count textured, lighting is very very basic, and there are barely any improvements over the first game in the series, though overall, at least the train vehicles look decent, albeit individually the quality is inconsistent - I will get into that a bit later, though. 2001, but they are really bad for a 2011 game.
The graphics were okay when Trainz first launched, which was Oct. Ran the game on multiple different PCs to try and figure out the problem, only to conclude it's just the game being crap. I bought this as I played the original Trainz waaaaaay back when it came out and trains / model trains are fun, and this is definitively a cheaper alternative to building a proper model railway, but unfortunately, it also turned out way less satisfying, mostly due to really really really bad optimization, and I cannot stress this enough - the game is optimized absolutely terribly, to a point where the framerate is 80% of the time barely passable, and the remaining 20% of the time single-digits slideshow.
It crashes sometimes when you try to quit, but that hardly matters at that point.
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