Frank
About offering the changes to the authors, that might work if they are still active but some of the rules go back to 2006 days. Steve Forget is one of them whose contact email is not valid. Have you ever contacted him in the past?
Peter
I know of Steve, as host of the
TARL library--at least until lightning struck and killed it. I would guess Andi06 and IanWoodmore might still be able to get in touch, even if he has put Trainz behind him as a past chapter of his life. IIRC his 'shutting it down message' was in a tone that certainly wasn't down on Trainz, just that he was pursuing other interests.
However, your point is well taken, leaving the best option to do as you are doing and customizing your own local copy. It will certainly be the quickest and in the N3V way, most traditional--let the problems be solve one by one by each Trainz user. Blahhhh! Overall, perhaps what is needed in the long run is a CLEAR POLICY for handling updates of the assets of the dearly departed, the disgruntled, and the less than stellar effort by the youthful enthusiast. THAT is N3V/Auran alter their upload licensing so that if a contributor has not kept their contact profile updated such that a good faith effort to contact them over a problem-- fails over a six week interval, that N3V/Auran reserves the right to alter the uploads of any submission that is degrading the utility of the asset in their products for the good of the greater community**. I made that point to Windwalkr last summer (on the related auto-translation and self-upgrading of old asset data elements--a sorely needed lack that should be straightforward to implement!) that he was using our source code as runtime libraries, and
ought be preprocessing and precompiling in any event.
(I need to go buy a lottery ticket today! SOON!!! Amazingly I found the right area of the discussion in the first bookmark I tested--I've at least six to different posts in that thread!--thinking to just link the thread again! Wow! Gotta go see if I can fix an error I haven't been able to hack before like Unicode characters in a texture file name in the mesh indexes--see if I can strip one out in those otherwise forlorn hopes!)
There, I was talking renaming config.txt to config.org,txt and auto-translating to a new compliant run version on opening the asset or validating it on download. Here and now, We're similarly talking tweaks and fixes of a wider scale permanent adjustment to DLS content for similar optimization with the currently supported software, not theft of static prose intellectual property. Altering a few lines of source code doesn't make it yours, the copyrights are still vested in the originator, especially if duly credited.For example:
Code:
-- DOT Placard Library, A LIBRARY ASSET OF 30 TEXTURES
kind 'traincar' 'texture-group'
kuid <kuid2:45324:28900:2>
trainz-build 2.9
mass
---------- ---------- ---------- ---------- ----------
Rev-A 2014-0715 - by Fabartus - Massage description and add/change foldername of library to rename per NAMCON to unified format adopted 2014-0612.
Asset foldername:
Original folder:
*********************************************************************************************************[INDENT]"
[/INDENT]
I put a similar change record in every asset I touch during the initial edit, usually before fixing anything... and most of the time remember to preserve the original config.txt as config.org.txt. Good practices. It's far too late to hope for a change record tag in the TBS! In this bit of boilerplate I was renaming fixed asset folders to a better naming convention (NAMCON) since I never know when a fixed asset is going to be needed if I revisit TS10-SP2 or TS09-SP1, etc, to test this or that. It's better to have them ready for import, updating, or study since I'm roughly ten years behind most of you guys on asset learning curves!
So N3V just needs to add a comment about the fix in the description block out in the open in front of God and everyone. Adjustments are needed from time to time in software and a digital asset is certainly a software creation. As custodians of the community treasure chest, some good faith fixing is more than tolerable, it is necessary (and demanded!) in the long run for the business health of Auran and N3V.
My empathy is with you long term content creators, updating stuff manually that can be done well and easily automatically is a tax on all of us, but the N3V failure to auto-translate has made you pillars of the community defacto slaves to the ill-considered and inconsiderate choices the software gang chose for their own convenience and laziness. NO REASON a v1.3 asset which is fixed by adding a mesh-table manually couldn't have been fixed during preprocessing. Ditto legacy keywords like name, name-XX, asset-filename... you all know the regular list... Ditto thumbnails when an '_art' subfolder is present. Hell, I made the case to Paul Cass last night in an email they could make screenshots on the fly and insert them in all assets using and adapting code they have in either surveyor or railyard,.. that little rotating 3D asset image in the tools selection menus in surveyor is rendered that way. Figuring out the long axis of the perimeter, offsetting orthogonally to a camera location so the 240x180 frame is mostly occupied is just a bit of iterative math. Capture the frozen image and put away. Need not bother the users at all...
The whole problem is the programmers have too small a shop to be making all the decisions about what to prioritize, and Tony and Mr. Edelman are apparently totally ignorant of how simple some of this stuff would be in software by adapting things already in place and debugged. Parsing more than once being time consuming is an absolute joke (WIndwalkr's answer to me linked above). In enumerated types like this, they should parse and tokenize (code for keywords) in a forward pass-just like an interpreted language, then reparse the same array of lines bottom to top and validate the same lines yield the same tokens verifying there are no corrupt data elements--that catches all the unbalanced parenthesis and quotes and would generate a much more accurate error message (to the line range!) and shortstop the mangled list of 20 errors which are just a mislaid quote! Similarly, a end of line test for trailing whitespace inside quotes and auto-stripping of same is a trivial single line or two of C++, and can probably be implemented as a macro!
Off the soap box. Have a good day Peter and you all! // Frank
** Yes, I'm not plagiarizing, but suggesting extending the more aggressive policy they've implemented in the DLS clean-up project to any worthwhile change, such as this contrast issue. I'm surprised they take the heat for script based issues. Admittedly, they need to rescale their default medium font (Size 3 definition) to something 15-25% larger, but that's release software programming and perhaps we've raised enough gripes to get some relief this past year. Should have been fixed in TS2009-SP1 though. Tardy and unresponsive doesn't do them justice!