quote:Originally posted by Tommys_Trains:Why on Earth is there not already a Polar Express game?! Its screaming for just such an application (jumping from car to car, treking across the roof tops, hanging on for dear life through the Glaciaer Gulch) Again, content is king. Time to think outside the basketweave Box already.
There already is, it's been available for years. It's been made for consoles like the Sony Playstation & X-Box, and Warner Bros. has online versions of the game to play as well.
You're starting to make it sound like expanding into being an app developer and provider is cheap and easy and that they have infinite resources to make it happen. Lionel and the others are model/toy train manufacturers/importers, not software gaming companies. I seem to recall that both have less than 50 employees that work stateside, if that helps indicate how small they actually are. And as already has been mentioned, Lionel is keeping Legacy proprietary for it's own business reasons. Ditto for MTH with their DCS system. Neither are going to be open-source for the foreseeable future. So armed with that information, the reality is any further suggestions that they do is, as they say, p***ing in the wind. To add further, some would make compelling arguments though that nowadays with the electronics used today that making them more reliable and robust would be more desireable and a higher prioroty than controlling them with a smartphone.
That all being said, there already are hints being dropped of leveraging Legacy to provide train layout detection/positioning that can open itself up to some interesting train interaction and operations. There has been an app run off an iPad that was demonstrated to control their trains, and one guy that goes by the name of Skylar on this forum has been developing his own program that allows him to operate trains from a computer that interfaces with MTH's DCS system. So there's clearly indicators out there, just got to keep in mind of the old saying that Rome wasn't built in a day.
