Railmaster Matrix Track Designer.

[Anton Stedman]

Hi all, 

I was looking at the new Hornby App based analogue controller and noticed that the Track builder section is considerably better looking than the Railmaster one and more user friendly. Is there any way that Hornby could update the Railmaster track designer to be more user friendly? Sorry I am probably being fussy but I have a quite big layout that is taking a long time to draw up on Railmaster. 

Thanks in advance.

[Chrissaf]

There is no marketing cross-over between the two products. RailMaster is now completely outsourced to a totally separate from Hornby 'software house' developer. So no, there is very unlikely to be any update to RailMaster that will take on-board any application methodology from the Analogue APP that is marketed in-house within Hornby.

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RailMaster is Hornby in name only and I mean this quite literally.

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Hornby do not now sell RailMaster directly (other than it being bundled with the eLink hardware controller). If you want to purchase RM on its own, then you buy it as a 'within application purchase' with monies going direct to the software house. Barring, of course, any retailers that might still have old 'RailMaster on CD' stock still on their shelves, and this type of stock availability is getting rarer these days.

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Yes...it takes a reasonable amount of time to draw a track layout in RM. But for most users, it is something you only do once and then forget about.

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[Anton Stedman]

@Chrissaf.

Thanks for the quick response. 

I was only really wondering because the trackplan you create shows on the main screen and to me it doesnt look good whatever theme I choose. I was more just seeing if anyone else preffered the Analogue App layout to Railmasters but I can see what you are saying about Railmaster being totally seperate from the new Analogue APP. 

Thanks again,

Anton

[96RAF]

You can still operate RM after deleting all straight and curved bits and piling the points and signals in a corner or in any jumbled order on screen, as RM has no concept of screen geometry, only addressing.

 

You ask RM to switch point X or signal Y and it does. The fact that it also does this on a screen that is laid out lgically is for your benefit only.

 

There is no reason (apart from effort and cost) why the RM code could not be modified to screen a scaled track plan such as seen in the old Trackmaster or the new analogue app, but this would be purely aesthetic for you as an operator and would have no affect on how RM operates. The RM screen plan is a simple graphic mimic panel not a scaled replica of your layout, as has been explained many times before on the RM forum.

 

[St1ngr4y]

So Anton,

 

I guess your main "complaint" is the not-so-user-friendly layout designer, and as a secondary, that it doesn't look too good when displayed on the main RM screen. Only the "software house developer", as described by Chris, can change the way the layout is displayed in RM itself. However, it would be possible for another third-party to develop a more user-friendly layout designer, which would produce a file in the correct format for Railmaster. It might even be possible for a third-party to create a conversion program which could take a layout designed in, say, RocRail, and to convert it to RM format.

 

Ray

[96RAF]

Given that the track pieces in RM are simple icons then there is no real reason why you couldn‘t turn a scaled picture of a track piece, point, or curve, etc into an icon for call up by RM, after all you can design your own icons to use in RM for other purposes so why not to add to the track parts library.

 

I think a smart chap could also write his own version of RM. If fact I still have a developers copy of a similar railway operating application written (not by me) in C+, originally to see if voice control could be made to work with model railways. My contribution was to write a track-plan in XML which involved defining and placing the track library icons. E.g. curve 45 pos 6  loc X=*** Y=***, etc. The position is simply a clock rotation of the basic icon. X and Y are the screen coordinates. No rocket science involved.