AnyRail - Would anyone be interested in a group buy?

[rpierce000]

I have noticed from the online doodles that many people here like to use AnyRail. Like any good follower I have also gotten a copy.

 

Now for the big question:

 

ARE YOU RUNNING THE FREE OR LICENSED VERSION?

 

What I am thinking, and this has NOTHING to do with my store, is that a bunch of us, and by that I mean at least five, ask AnyRail for a JNS Forum member price or a group price.

 

What do you think? Just fill out this survey and we will find out!

 

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/F6BQ7ZB

 

I will keep this thread informed of survey results. Please keep your comments, flames, and ideas in the thread, the survey is only for counting the number of people who want to, or not, do this, pick another program, etc.

[rankodd]

Personally, I'm an xtrakcad fan, mainly because it's free and cross platform. It seems to have a fairly comprehensive track library, and it's pretty flexible. I'm not too sure what anyrail holds over it that would cause me to fork over cash...

[rpierce000]

I downloaded xtrkcad this evening and spent two hours designing the same yard with both of them. Personally I feel that the interface is much easier to use on AnyRail. Pieces snap into piece more easily, selection, to me, seems more intuitive and having the entire library of track displayed in a docking menu is great.

 

On the down side the track menu does not have the option to display the characteristics of the track, so you have to float over an item and read the information off the bottom of the screen until you learn the part numbers. That was annoying after xtrkcad's showing me all the information.

 

I found that the accuracy of the result was also much better on AnyRail. On xtrkcad the two sides of an identical yard came out at least 5mm different over 3 meters. Not a huge amount, but it did have me questioning some of my piece choices.

 

For the record, I was using the Tomix track library in both cases and the SAME pieces of track. It was a complex yard with two and three way switches, a run around and double slip passenger area. To accomodate the AnyRail limits I had to design it in chunks on AnyRail.

 

I did NOT use any flex track or elevations on either design, so I can not speak to their use.

 

AnyRail uses the Office 2007/2010 ribbon menu style and a completely Windows compliant design. This makes most of what you see and do very familiar to me. xtrkcad runs in windows, but it is does not take advantage of all the latest UI bells and whistles. From what I can see AnyRail has been rewritten with WPF between versions 3 and 4. (If this means nothing to you, you just aren't enough of a geek to care.)

 

In the end, I would pick AnyRail, even with the $59 cost figured in. My time is valuable and I was able to design things in a fraction of the time on AnyRail that I was on xtrkcad.

 

This is ONLY my $.02 and is based on less than a day's use, so YMMV.

[Martijn Meerts]

I'm on OS X for most my stuff, only ever boot to Windows for the occasional game. I use Railmodeller to make my track plans, which works great, but is still lacking quite a few features. (Of course, it didn't cost much, and I get life-time free updates)

 

If it comes to track planning software for Windows though, by far the best is WinTrack. It has a LOT of great features, including calculating cross sections for open-frame table layouts, catenary, electrical circuits and it has a great 3D view.

[The_Ghan]

I already own an AnyRail licence.  I felt the fee worthwhile.  Boutique software developers usually operate on a shoe-string budget and I don't think its fair to try and screw them down for a better price.

 

Cheers

 

The_Ghan

[KenS]

I'm another Mac OSX user, and at the moment I don't even have a Windows partition (I used to, but it broke and I wasn't using it enough to bother rebuilding it). And I also use RailModeller.  I've tried xtrakcad, since it has some integration with JMRI, but the learning curve is steep enough that I put it aside and haven't gone back to it yet.

 

AnyRail looks nice, and I've read good things of it here, but without a native OSX version I'm not interested.

[bill937ca]

I also have the licensed Anyrail version already. Its not that expensive.

[rankodd]

xtrackcad does have a few interface quibbles, and takes some getting used to. The most useful shortcut, and one that isn't obvious, is pressing "shift" when laying a track piece which changes the rotation/end point that will be attached. Huge time saver over placing a pieces then using the join command.

 

As for the different sides being off, I'd have to see the layout to find out what's going on. It's possible to get manually placed pieces "fudged" together instead of tightly joined, and such connections are difficult to spot unless you zoom in. If both halves were made of identical pieces I would expect that to be the easiest explanation as to why they're different lengths.

 

In any case, I imagine both programs result in the same thing - a heck of a lot of fun building imaginary layouts :) I've got dozens of designs with hundreds of variations that I've been working on for the last year or so. Still haven't resulted in the perfect layout, but I'll keep trying...