Hi all,
The new DLC system tries to strike a balance between several ideals:
* We don't want people to easily pirate payware content. That hurts our content creators, and by extension, it hurts N3V.
* We don't want compatibility issues to be accidentally introduced by our end users. Since Trainz content is heavily intertwined, changes to one piece of content can result in problem for other content. This can, and often does, reflect poorly on N3V and our content creators through no direct fault of our own.
* We do want it to be in a position where our end-users can download content- both payware and DLS- and have it "just work."
* We do want to provide maximum flexibility for our users. The ability to customise and build entire railways has always been a strength of the Trainz product line and we don't plan to back away from areas where we are strongest.
That said, this is a very new system and it will most likely take us a little bit of tweaking to get the balance right. We do have to make compromises- give too much in one area and it can start to hurt the other areas- but overall I think we're pretty close and we should be able to resolve any remaining niggles pretty quickly. As others in this thread have already pointed out, while things might not always work identically to how they have in the past, there are often ways (and in many cases: better ways) to achieve what you want.
Somebody was throwing around comments along the lines of "a majority of content has been broken" earlier in this thread. As it stands right now, less than 4% of content on the DLS is flagged as faulty by TS12 SP1 standards. We expect this number to continue to drop over the next few months; we're seeing over a thousand new uploads to the DLS each week. I can't speak for any third-party content distribution sites- they don't answer to us in any way, and the relative quality of content on their sites is something that they would have to answer.
kind regards,
chris
The new DLC system tries to strike a balance between several ideals:
* We don't want people to easily pirate payware content. That hurts our content creators, and by extension, it hurts N3V.
* We don't want compatibility issues to be accidentally introduced by our end users. Since Trainz content is heavily intertwined, changes to one piece of content can result in problem for other content. This can, and often does, reflect poorly on N3V and our content creators through no direct fault of our own.
* We do want it to be in a position where our end-users can download content- both payware and DLS- and have it "just work."
* We do want to provide maximum flexibility for our users. The ability to customise and build entire railways has always been a strength of the Trainz product line and we don't plan to back away from areas where we are strongest.
That said, this is a very new system and it will most likely take us a little bit of tweaking to get the balance right. We do have to make compromises- give too much in one area and it can start to hurt the other areas- but overall I think we're pretty close and we should be able to resolve any remaining niggles pretty quickly. As others in this thread have already pointed out, while things might not always work identically to how they have in the past, there are often ways (and in many cases: better ways) to achieve what you want.
Somebody was throwing around comments along the lines of "a majority of content has been broken" earlier in this thread. As it stands right now, less than 4% of content on the DLS is flagged as faulty by TS12 SP1 standards. We expect this number to continue to drop over the next few months; we're seeing over a thousand new uploads to the DLS each week. I can't speak for any third-party content distribution sites- they don't answer to us in any way, and the relative quality of content on their sites is something that they would have to answer.
kind regards,
chris