Good day everyone.
I'm a 26 years old developer with a passion for simulation. I've been simulating trains and planes for more than a decade and I've been lurking around without ever posting anything, but this release was a total surprise for me, looking around the internet for opinions I saw a bit of "drama" on this thread and I decided to register in order to share my quick two cents and possibly shed some light into the background of the scene and why this route is, in my opinion, extremely important.
The Italian train simulation scene is on life support - it's dieing. While in real life most endings are a new beginning, this is straight up just decades of work and collaboration slowly vanishing into the void.
There are just a couple of train simulation communities still alive, struggling to keep up with server costs relying on donations and with last posts dating to years ago.
My entire TS: Classic "career" was spent going back and forth from Torino to Asti on the SFM, because it's literally the ONLY electrified route that "just works".
There is no modern rolling stock for Italy except a few completely broken payware addons and for the E464 by Worcester-George, state-of-the-art freeware addon (the fact that the readme was compiled in LaTeX is just an hint at the amount of effort that probably went around the development of that locomotive).
Italian scenery is extremely diverse and complicated to reproduce, I've tried to create some routes and ended up spending entire weeks focusing on the same 10 square meters. Sometimes it is just not reasonable to jump into Autodesk Inventor and create a quick cuboid just to reproduce that one-story cyan house with a huge clock on the roof, even if it's right next to the railway and can be considered a "point of interest". Sometimes you JUST HAVE to find a compromise. I agree that expectations for payware can be high, but Kuju vegetation and buildings a little bit taller can work perfectly fine for me.
I have not yet bought this route because I already treated myself with hundreds of euros of flight simulation hardware, but next month this is going to be an auto-buy for me aswell.
You can tell that a lot of work was done: this is, to my knowledge, the only Italian route with working timetables, working signal repetition and working rolling stock that doesn't date back to the 90s.
If you want to drive trains in Italy this is probably *THE* route. Not going to argue with the price, it's subjective but I personally think it's fair, considering you can spend 15€ on payware rolling stock that is straight up broken. I've sometimes found myself paying 35€ for a burger and a bottle of water.
I want to thank Cast, Worcester-George, C. D'Albero and all the people I don't know who have been beta testing and working for us in order to finally enjoy proper Italian material and carrying the entire dieing scene on their backs. Congratulations.
Constructive criticism is inevitable but I believe some context has to be provided in order to truly appreciate this route. I'll try this route next months, can't wait.
Sorry for writing in English but I have a very basic knowledge of German.
Tschüss!
Ludovico.
EDIT: Couldn't wait, I just bought it. I'll try it and give you my final thoughts.