Kosmos for MS Train Sim

In about 1973 I for the first time took a very primitive video camera into my hands, pointed it at a moving dancer, and experienced a virtual world... the world of videodance.

In retrospect, this was the first taste of a long-running passion, the exploration of virtual worlds, currently being played out in both Second Life and now expanding into multiple "hypergrided" virtual universes.

After many years of exploring the "fixed" worlds of dance on video (in the sense of whatever I created, once completed, was "fixed" on the then prevalent videotape), I broke into an "interactive" virtual world with my introduction to Train Sim.

Introduced in June, 2001, Microsoft Train Simulator followed on the commercial success of Flight Simulator, which held less interest for me. MSTS, as it came to be known, was immersed in "real worlds", and the train was the mechanism to interactively travel through them.

Within weeks of the MSTS release, I was deeply involved not only in the application itself, but also in the on-line community (Train-Sim is just one of many sites in the Train Sim community) which rapidly sprang up around it. MSTS had the great benefit of allowing users to create and share ANY content, from trains to timetables to buildings to entire worlds. A huge body of user-contributed content rapidly grew, provided by people from all over the world. This network, and content, is still growing, despite the MSTS product now being over 10 years old.

Perhaps because of my interest in creating environments in the dance work I had done, I became fascinated by the process of creating environmental contents for MSTS. I became one of the "experts" in MSTS environments and soon developed a primitive freeware utility which I contributed to the growing library of user-content.

Various projects in Train Sim ensued, the most significant being major environment contributions to a Train Sim world called Seaview, being created over multiple generations by Bill Burnett. Seaview is one of the true classics of Train Sim history, unlike any other world created. I'm proud to say that I contributed the default environment, most importantly the sea water appearance, to that project.

This project led me directly to Kosmos, a major re-conceptualization and redesign of the earlier primitive utility. For me, really a non-programmer, this was a huge undertaking. But it was intensely engaging and turned out to be very successful. Since being released in 2004, Kosmos has been downloaded over 22,000 times by MSTS users. The name "Kosmos" has entered the generic lexicon of Train Sim devotees. (Try doing a search on "kosmos" on any of the major train sim forums... I think you'll see.)

Kosmos was equipped with a very extensive and educational help system, attached to the application itself. Since I continue to receive help requests from Train Sim users (although being very inactive in this community for quite some time), and since my contact information in the program is out of date, I determined to update the Help System and provide it online for users.

With the incredible help of Harbinder Ghag and his great help system utility, HelpmaticPro HTML, that goal has now been accomplished. A huge thank you to everyone who has helped make this project possible.