TARDIS - A Trainz Asset Repair Management Tool - Part 1

ianwoodmore

Active member
TARDIS - Trainz Asset Repair Development and Information System

Edit: Still updating TARDIS and testing as of 1 FEB 2016.
The goalposts keep moving. This blog will be revised when it is released to incorporate latest improvements.
Target hopefully 1Q 2016.


Introduction


At last I have almost completed the next version of the TARDIS scripts. TARDIS is an adjunct to Andi06's AssetX Toolbox and uses Peter's PEVTools extensively. When TARDIS is released it will be hosted at Shane Turner's website. This version is compliant to TANE SP1 and is able to repair assets from Trainz version 1.0 upwards. The percentage of fully automated repairs to legacy assets (anything less than Trainz-build 3.5 (<TB 3.6)) has significantly increased . This has been ten years in the making. For the history behind the birth and adolescence of TARDIS and the philosophy behind the development of Trainz Asset Repair Management read articles in this set of Trainz Community Newsletter (TCN) that is hosted at our most favourite Celtic Galitian's website. I refer of course to Zato. TCN was John King's brainchild and he was a magnificent editor. Unfortunately he has had to retire from active Trainz participation due to health limitations.

Here is the link:

http://www.zatovisualworks.com/trainz/tcn/tcn_volume_1/

This is an ebook by the way and you can turn the pages online. You don't need to download. This link is also available, along with many other useful internet URLs to Trainz related items, from within the TARDIS version of AssetX. There are interesting tips and articles by other authors and well known creators.

TARDIS is the big brother of Steve Forget's Project TARL. This was website based and had made significant progress in taming the Missing Dependencies issue as well as listing fixed asset config's and repair schemes on-line. It came to an untimely end due to severe storms in Canada that resulted in a direct lightning strike that fried everything including the backups.

Several attempts to resurrect TARL suffered other trauma almost as bad. The trouble was that any web based repair scheme was fraught with difficulties due to copyright issues, and even worse the lack of active support from the community to help solve problems and fix faulty assets. The solution to this was to bring the repair capability into your living room and integrate it with your Trainz version's Content Manager. AssetX and PEVTools were the vehicles to harness, but it would be necessary to automate as much of the repairs as possible to ensure consistent compliance to the latest Trainz validation. What a gigantic task that has been, but here we are and just in time to assist you to clean up your downloaded assets for both TS12 SP1 HF4 and TANE.

Credits:

To all who gave their time or moral support with especial thanks to:

Steve Forget for getting me started;
Pencil42, BWeber and Spruce who started this journey with me and provided a solid base to work from;
dmdrake and Project Talltreez. Dave I fixed them all at last;
Andi06 and PEV, twin geniuses and mentors who made TARDIS possible.
Dinorius Redundicus (Deane) for his unswerving and enthusiastic support plus rare feedback on TARDIS scripts.
John King and Zato for the Trainz Community Newsletter experience.
Paul Cass for Wiki Help function in AssetX.
N3V (Auran) and the beta teams from TRS2009, TS2010, TS12 and TANE.
The Trainzdev team.
Shane Turner for hosting TARDIS scripts and future support.

No doubt Murphy's Law will prevail as soon as the NEXT Trainz version is released despite the thousands of batch runs I have done on 275,000 assets containing 9.5 million files, but never fear hotfixes will alleviate.

In good trekkie fashion

Warp 9 Mr Sulu. Make it so. Engage.

TARDIS coming to a PC near you SOON!!

Part 2 - http://forums.auran.com/trainz/entr...-A-Trainz-Asset-Repair-Management-Tool-Part-2
 
Thank you, Ian, for your kind words. It was my pleasure to collaborate with you and dear John.

Ashtoning job, Ian!

The link to TCN will keep running on as long as I am sane! And my neurons seem to be working as fine as always... ;)

Take care.

The still running well neuron side of Alberte :wave:
 
TARDIS 3.7

Murphy No.1 - Never promise anything by a certain date.

In the spirit of what they used to say over the station announcements:

"We regret to inform you that the imminent arrival of TARDIS 3.7 has been delayed by a points failure in a worm hole in the Outer Quadrant. As we are not sure how long it will take to repair we advise Trainzers to continue using other forms of Asset Repair. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible."
 
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