There are probably other ways to implement this and hopefully someone at Auran can work it out. Their original design worked well for the early versions of Trainz, but we've since outgrown this design except for packages which I'll detail below. TRS2006 and above has helped somewhat with CMP and CM2 however this is still an awkward, slow, and still sometimes an overpowering proces.
One of the biggest problems is with how DLS handles and displays the uploaded content. Instead of keeping sub-packages in groups, it displays each individual item that is in the package. As a result a gazillion little road bits, or even hundreds of trees, that have been uploaded by the content creators in packages, get displayed as individual items.
When one of these individual package-members gets clicked on, it can be downloaded seperately (no problem), but it is alo listed as part of the package along with the other members of the package in the description. When the package is opened, the same individual items are listed again.
I've complained about this before over the past 5 years. It would be nice if at some point we can revise the DLS. I am not a programmer so again I'll sit on the sides and make complicated suggestions.
The DLS should be laid out more in a tree-like fashion like a file manager such as Windows Explorer for example. The main category is at the top i.e. Buildings. which includes interactive industries. This could be sub-categorized again so that interactive objects are seperate from placed objects such as houses and commercial buildings.
Keeping this tree design in mind, packages should have a plus-sign next to them. If someone needs to display the contents of a package, they'd click on the plus.
Downloading directly off of the 'revised' DLS could be simple. If something is seen, click on it and send it to the Dowload Helper in the normal fashion. Packages could work a similar fashion. The complete package could easily be downloaded by clicking on a download package button instead of the plus-sign.
This revised interface would make browsing online for content a lot easier. For one thing, pages upon pages of wasted space wouldn't be taken up by individual package members. The last time I browsed, shortly before Christmas, there over 10 pages of trackside objects that all belonged to packages of German catenary components. I didn't need these, nor was I interested in them, and spent close to an hour bypassing the pages until I found what I was interested in. By arranging these individual items in a closed package, the display would have been less cluttered and the process would have been a lot faster.
This is something to think about hopefully for the new DLS 200x whenever that comes out. Does anyone else have some ideas on this?
John
), I don't know if it's me or something, but browsing for content is rather difficult. It's setup in a way if you know the item's kuid or the author's kuid or something you can get it very easily. However I can't seem to randomly browse through content or sort by downloads and popularity.