How to Load Assets

[crisger]

OK, i am going to be adding assets to both 2004, 2006 and 2012 and need to know what we have to do to be sure an asset is correctly intstalled all the way. The question came up for me when i loaded up a Model T with the Content manager into 2006, it loaded fast, and i was able to open it to edit but i did not see the cdp folder in the World/downloads folder anywhere. Then I remembered reading about committing a file, so do we have to commit each new resource individually for it to be placed into the assets folder?

As the process is highly automated I want to try to understand the steps needed so i get it right as i proceed to add things.

when we have it open for edit is that when we ask the CM to look for dependencies? I am eager to be sure I have all of the needed files, i see in the Load Window they have them listed but i wanted to see if there is a faster way to gain them all say for instance if we load a large new route that needs 100s of dependencies. thanks for advice or if you know of a tutorial for this i will be very appreciative. thanks.

....i am downloading some assets for a route called 1880s Old West and once i picked one item a template content manager looked for and found the dependencies and says it is installing. Where can i find the CDPs the downloaded originals? are they stored somewhere special or will they end up in the usual Download location for my browser?

 

[JCitron]

Hi Chris,

You're thinking too hard on this.

I can't recall too much about TRS2004 since it's been about a decade since I've used it. With TRS2004, I think the downloads go into the World/Downloads folder, or some iteration of it. Starting with TRS2006, the assets are downloaded and installed via Content Manager, aka CM, or in the case of TRS2006, it was CMP for Content Manager Plus. The stuff now comes down into Cache/Internet folder. The filenames are not that of the assets you looked at, and are in a hex format which makes finding out what they are difficult, however, they do have a .CDP extension so you can save them if you want..

With a fully patched TS2010 and up, the data is now in a User Data/Cache/Internet structure, however, the filenames are the same. The older versions don't have the User Data folder setup.

Keeping this in mind, there really isn't any reason to save these CDPs as the assets are unpacked and installed into the User Data/Original folder and User Data Local folder. These folders contain subfolders that being with Hash-00 through Hash-FF, and the assets underneath are in their Kuid naming, albeit, with spaces instead of colons.

Keeping this in mind again, I highly suggest backing up the complete User Data folder periodically as that contains your whole Trainz world, content and all.

Committing assets can be set to occur automatically when downloading and is recommended. This will add the content immediately to the assets.tdx database, and make it available for use. Sometimes, it is necessary to commit assets manually, like when editing them or if you have an option set to overwrite something when installing. In this case, you highlight the assets that are open, you can actually filter on Open for Edit to display just these, press CTRL+A to select all, and then press CTRL+M to commit them.

I hope I got these details straight, since I'm working blindly from another computer without TS12, or any Trainz version installed, so this is all from the old noggin.

John