Archive of content from Trainz Pro Routes?

By the way, I know this thread has long since died down, but who was Johnwhelan refering to when he sarcastically mentioned some people might just "die without warning"? I'm assuming that's gotta have something to do with the TPR situation if it was worth bringing up.
 
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So the TPR content wasn't even backed up? The guy's hard drive crashed? At least John downloaded most of it and if anybody has any missing assets in routes that might be TPR, he could probably look up the kuids in his Trainz and maybe even privately send you them. Bendorsey's stuff is public domain now since he passed. I have some stuff in Trainz 12, but not all of it. I don't even think there is a way to at least look at the list of the assets on TPR through Wayback Machine. I think not all pages were archived and you needed to log in to download when the site was active. I have a bunch of routes and content (like gfisher USLW routes) and other things from third party sites that went belly up. Maine Central and Muskanippee Valley from Control Point Simulations, you can't even get those two routes anywhere anymore but some other content is on other sites like Approach Medium. I have those two CPS routes. Sometimes it's a wild goose chase finding unknown dependencies of a route when they disappeared from the web and they can't be obtained via Wayback, either.
 
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The TPR site was taken down by the owners. That was their choice and it should be respected. At least two of the members are still active in this community and if you visit the Freeware Announcement forum, you will see that their old routes are slowly being updated for TRS22 by them.

Abandonware is a legal fallacy whereby the thief seeking to justify stealing and distributing copyrighted material claims since the owner is no longer supporting it, declares it is "abandoned".
 
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wreeder said:
The TPR site was taken down by the owners. That was their choice and it should be respected. At least two of the members are still active in this community and if you visit the Freeware Announcement forum, you will see that their old routes are slow being updated for TRS22 by them.

Abandonware is a legal fallacy whereby the thief seeking to justify stealing and distributing copyrighted material claims since the owner is no longer supporting it, declares it is "abandoned".
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This seems like a very harsh statement to make, no? Moving aside from the Trainz side of things for a bit, abandonware is very much an accepted term for the distribution of software that has not been maintained for a long time without an intent of profit.

If an interactive piece of software has not been officially supported for its owner for a long time, was not payware to begin with, has no official stance on how it should be handled and is not being outright sold by a third party, how can you call it 'stealing'? No one's going around saying "hey I made this actually". In fact, not doing so is the whole point of the term "abandonware".
 
Hectorama501 said:
This seems like a very harsh statement to make, no? Moving aside from the Trainz side of things for a bit, abandonware is very much an accepted term for the distribution of software that has not been maintained for a long time without an intent of profit.

If an interactive piece of software has not been officially supported for its owner for a long time, was not payware to begin with, has no official stance on how it should be handled and is not being outright sold by a third party, how can you call it 'stealing'? No one's going around saying "hey I made this actually". In fact, not doing so is the whole point of the term "abandonware".
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So you proposing that content I made in 2004 and hasn't been updated since becomes abandonware? I don't agree. I've seen content creators reappear after a break of years so you can't assume. Copyright exists in these items and should be respected.

Cheerio John
 
johnwhelan said:
So you proposing that content I made in 2004 and hasn't been updated since becomes abandonware? I don't agree. I've seen content creators reappear after a break of years so you can't assume. Copyright exists in these items and should be respected.

Cheerio John
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Fair enough, I understand your position, though I wasn't really refering to Trainz itself in my comment
 
Hectorama501 said:
This one
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No just quite a few content creators have died over time, sometimes we can find the executors and ask nicely for permissions sometimes they leave permissions themselves but it takes time and effort to contact the relevant person and gain permission. Nawlins is one we managed to gain permission for recently but we didn't find out he'd died until some months after the event.

John
 
This kind of stuff makes hunting missing assets in routes a pain. Sometimes googling a kuid turns up nothing or a link to this forum asking where can it be found and no answer is given. And now with the kuid index gone it will be harder to find those missing assets. Auran/N3V didn't make it easy to bulk replace missing assets with something else, or identify what kind of asset they are if all you have is the author ID and kuid and no thumbnail picture of the asset. I just redownloaded gfisher's VT-NH Loop route from the archived USLW files page and I'm missing five assets. One of them, <kuid2:33404:502361:2> dmdrake has no match on Google and only hit is this forum, someone asking for it. It could be something from the defunct TPR site in which case I'm out of luck because dmdrake put a lot of assets on that site and they didn't go on the DLS. It's probably a building. I might have to ask JCitron if he knows what it is. He has a lot of content from TPR. I just found the other four assets on Google, they were all on the two .ru sites. I probably also have them in Trainz 12, but I didn't check. I could check Trainz 12 for that missing dmdrake asset. It wasn't in Trainz 12. Now I hit a brick wall. I guess I have to ask somebody what it is, or just leave it go and delete missing assets to get rid of it.
 
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It's probably not important and I can do a delete missing assets. Does the workaround work for missing assets where you clone something then put the kuid of the missing asset in the config, then bulk replace in surveyor? It worked for faulty trees.
 
The Trainz Pro Route Download Depot was dynamic so a webcrawler would not have been able to rake the files. As far as I know, it crashed and could not be recovered by them. Everything was lost. Now there are versions of their routes on the DLS, some with permission, most without. You can use the DLS website to search the description for any asset that has TPR in it. That brings up a lot of the routes if you filter to layouts. Leave the filter on All and you get lots of stuff that the TPR crew uploaded that was reskins of other people's assets.
 
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