Is this all a mess or no?

[novastorm2000]

Sorry for the negative tone of this post, perhaps the vets here can help me get sorted out.

When I think of trains as a traditional hobby I would think of Locomotives, Rolling Stock, and then layout materials. IE, if I walked into a hobby store in the old days, I'd see stuff organized and easily locatable.

I understand that the DLS is akin to your hobby store, but it just seems clumsy in many regards. Auran itslf doesn't seem to do a lot with this either.

I realize that one can hunt stuff down, and find everything they need.

Has anyone written a Content manager replacement or Website that is the unofficial master database of Trainz assets where active hobbiest can go and upload and or update their cataloge entries and others can fo their as an online Database and find and or access stuff?

It would be nice if as a community we had this and that there was a santizing mechanisim built into it to validate the links and then update the database to warn you if you are accessing a route or package for example that will have missing assets. I know DLS and Content manager does this to some degree, I guess as a tool I do not like it all that much. Are their alternatives?

I think that an Online database and store would be awesome!

Having a better desktop tool to review your assets and see actual pictures of them in world would be very helpful as well. I do not like the rail yard much either, not very friendly in my humble opinion.

Maybe the TRD can help us have a hobbiest view of the world where people want to buy stuff to add to their collection and we also then have a tool to manage collections. Done right, you'd be able to keep and maintain your collection online so that as hobbiest the trade discussions could also take place. Creators would thrive in an environment like this because they could take order requests for asset modifications and customizations. I know this goes on out there today, but wouldn't it be so cool to have it more easily and readily available?

Maybe it is and I just don't get it yes because I am the ignorant neebie!

Sorry to vent, help set me straight if you can!

E

 

[VinnyBarb]

My view of this is, yes, it would be nice to have all of the above. But... who is going to do all this, as it would be time consuming and often hard to implement.

What we have at the moment does do me somewhat alright, if I want to look for something, there is a search function on the DLS. Yes, I know, you get a lot of entries not needed but it is the best we have. If content creators do the right thing, there should be a thumbnail picture of the item created and a good enough description of what that item is included in such item created when viewing it.

Sadly, this is not the case with many items viewed and then there is the name of the viewed item itself. Often there is a meaningless code name as item name which does not say what the bl**dy thing is. If the thumbnail pic and/or the description is missing too, then such item does not deserve to be on the DLS, however good it is.

CMP or CM2 are good tools to view such items when online trying to d/load as one sees the description and the thumbnail pic with it too but one needs a good broadband connection for this, dial up is out of the question for this.

To summarize, yes all the above you quote would be nice to have but who shall be doing all that?

Cheers

VinnyBarb

 

[higgikay]

Neverending story

Hi novastorm,

I'm sure you will find a lot of us agreeing to what you said. But it's like Vinnibarb mentioned. "Who should do all that?"

Also look for example in this treat out of the last year:
http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=23100

Cheers Kay

 

[novastorm2000]

Couple ways it could be done

Someone can take ownership of it, pay for it and develop and sell a shareware desktop and web tool.

I imagine you could contract someone offshore or even locally to do the PHP development work for a few thousand US dollars. A tool like PHP with a MySQL Database would probably be the easiest in the long run. I am guessing this could even be done in MS Access or a Filemaker Pro tool as well, but distribution might be more expensive for users. MySQL and PHP are readily obtainable and someone could easily package a solution up into something that would install on to your local PC.

Basically its a matter of taking the exisiting Trainz DB and reverse engineering a solution that would allow management of that file using a new tool. Down side is that Auran could if its not already encrypt it to block people doing that. That would be foolish though in my mind because providing better tools and letting people organize around their product would ultimately spur more interest and growth. Companies can get greedy though and fall on their own sword so its a risk for those under taking it. Keeping it in common language like PHP and Open Sources Database like MySQL would ensure that future developers can easily come along and maintain it though.

The way I see it, there is one heck of a third party opportunity someone could seiez out there. A $9.99 shareware tool would probably sell well since you have in theory millions of Trainz owners out there. Sell 1000 copies and you'd easily pay for it and have money to maintain it in the future.

Another way to work it is to have the tool indpentendly manage CDP files that can be imported into Content manager. This gets around the encryption worries and still allows users to manage all their content ect outside of Trainz and then just do a mass import any time they want to get it all pretty and clean again.

There are probably enough people out there that have the know how to pull it off, it may take the idea of it at least paying for itself to make it work.

If we have a rich trainz fan out there wanting to make their whole hobby around this better, then for a few thousand US dollars they can contract an offshore development company or other indpendent reliable PHP developer to do the work. I am happy to act as a consultant to that effort for free to help priovide the system requirements behind it or ideas. A strong trainz vet or two or 5 would be invaluable to help in that regard as well.

For fun, people might start spitting out their wish list and we can sort of design the requirements here and then see what comes of it. You only have a little time to loose. Someone may see these and say, heck yhea, I can code and make a buck off that easy and run with it. A java coder could also run with this as well and just about any other programmer.

E

 

[knight42]

The biggest problem with the DLS is the lack of proper tags and attributes set by content creators. Virtually nothing has a region or era, and in some cases has completely the wrong category and/or no description. CMP is perfectly capable of filtering content, but when the content has nothing to filter, no amount of coding can get around that.

 

[novastorm2000]

Content Clean-up

I think some coding and design for facilitating clean-up could greatly help the current situation and improve it in the future.

As a hobbiest community we really could create and define the noption of certified content and in a new tool have it manage it accordingly, either by filtering it and or actually helping facilitate updates to bad or missing data.

I think that people just have to want and or rally behind it, thats how good things will come to pass.

E

 

[johnwhelan]

Someone can take ownership of it, pay for it and develop and sell a shareware desktop and web tool.

I imagine you could contract someone offshore or even locally to do the PHP development work for a few thousand US dollars. A tool like PHP with a MySQL Database would probably be the easiest in the long run. I am guessing this could even be done in MS Access or a Filemaker Pro tool as well, but distribution might be more expensive for users. MySQL and PHP are readily obtainable and someone could easily package a solution up into something that would install on to your local PC.

Basically its a matter of taking the exisiting Trainz DB and reverse engineering a solution that would allow management of that file using a new tool. Down side is that Auran could if its not already encrypt it to block people doing that. That would be foolish though in my mind because providing better tools and letting people organize around their product would ultimately spur more interest and growth. Companies can get greedy though and fall on their own sword so its a risk for those under taking it. Keeping it in common language like PHP and Open Sources Database like MySQL would ensure that future developers can easily come along and maintain it though.

The way I see it, there is one heck of a third party opportunity someone could seiez out there. A $9.99 shareware tool would probably sell well since you have in theory millions of Trainz owners out there. Sell 1000 copies and you'd easily pay for it and have money to maintain it in the future.

Another way to work it is to have the tool indpentendly manage CDP files that can be imported into Content manager. This gets around the encryption worries and still allows users to manage all their content ect outside of Trainz and then just do a mass import any time they want to get it all pretty and clean again.

There are probably enough people out there that have the know how to pull it off, it may take the idea of it at least paying for itself to make it work.

If we have a rich trainz fan out there wanting to make their whole hobby around this better, then for a few thousand US dollars they can contract an offshore development company or other indpendent reliable PHP developer to do the work. I am happy to act as a consultant to that effort for free to help priovide the system requirements behind it or ideas. A strong trainz vet or two or 5 would be invaluable to help in that regard as well.

For fun, people might start spitting out their wish list and we can sort of design the requirements here and then see what comes of it. You only have a little time to loose. Someone may see these and say, heck yhea, I can code and make a buck off that easy and run with it. A java coder could also run with this as well and just about any other programmer.

E

Strangely enough we have the programmers in the community to be able to do this. Unfortunately what we don't have is clean data on the DLS. We have a large number of routes that are set to TO, the default. It makes picking out the UK or other contries routes extremely difficult.

Other issues are hosting, do you use MySQL or would Microsoft SQL be cheaper? There are issues on cost of ownership. TARL unfortunately wasn't maintainable because of coding issues.

Shareware, I don't think it will happen. Sourceforge yes that is a possibility.

Cheerio John

 

[aardvark1]

....snip.....

The way I see it, there is one heck of a third party opportunity someone could seiez out there. A $9.99 shareware tool would probably sell well since you have in theory millions of Trainz owners out there. Sell 1000 copies and you'd easily pay for it and have money to maintain it in the future

.....snip...
E

If you look at the bottom of the Forums home page, you will see the following data:

Members: 354,324, Active Members: 3,824

While it can be said that there may be a large number of Trainz owners who have not registered their copy of Trainz.... say for arguments sake, we double the 354,324, we get to just over 700,000 people.

So, your saying that there may be millions of Trainz owners out there may be an overstatement.

Can someone document the numbers and prove otherwise?

Thanks and have fun,

 

[knight42]

I think some coding and design for facilitating clean-up could greatly help the current situation and improve it in the future.

How? The only answer is to go through each asset in the DLS and clean up its metadata - you can't program that, it's a manual task. You'd also need more access to the DLS data than we have in order to correct it, and Auran granting such access on an ad-hc basis would be a bad idea.

 

[ldowns]

I understand that the DLS is akin to your hobby store, but it just seems clumsy in many regards. Auran itslf doesn't seem to do a lot with this either.

I think a more realistic view would be to imagine the DLS as a meeting place for a huge hobby club, with Auran providing the electricity and paying the rent out of dues (i.e., the cost of Trainz and a first class ticket). The rest is up to us.

The difference, that makes Trainz so much more than a model railroad club, is that we can share what we build as well as provide labor. If someone at a model railroad club handed me a station building, free of charge, and it turned out that it fell apart or lacked some prototypical detail I'd hardly assail the creator--after all, they provided it for free, and they didn't have to. Likewise, I wouldn't blame it on the party paying the rent (Auran). They have their hands full just trying to build a good enough creation platform to pay the bills and make enough of a return to justify the capital expended. If they sometimes make decisions that leave us unhappy, more often than not it's because they're following the expressed opinions of users on these forums. (I seem to remember people demanding to know why Auran hadn't incorporated SpeedTree into Trainz yet...)

Trainz is really a very small community. I still find it incredible that so much is available, at no more cost than my time and a few dollars for a FST. If something doesn't work and it takes me 15 minutes to fix it, it's my own decision whether it's worth it to me to spend that 15 minutes.

I don't mean this to be a rant. But I do think Auran deserve a great deal of credit for continuing to make and improve a product which is not exactly a path to riches for anyone, and our content creators for the sometimes unbelievable amount of work they expend to make an idea become reality (virtual though it may be). My own hoped-for pot at the end of the rainbow is when I retire in a year or two to have the time to start contributing things of my own to the DLS, as at least a token repayment to all of those who have done so already.

--Lamont

 

[OzBoz]

The biggest problem with the DLS is the lack of proper tags and attributes set by content creators. Virtually nothing has a region or era, and in some cases has completely the wrong category and/or no description. CMP is perfectly capable of filtering content, but when the content has nothing to filter, no amount of coding can get around that.

It gets worse (or is that better) in 2010. Era and Class have been dropped from the map's config file, and each 2 letter region code has been replaced with it's own kuid.

Cheers

 

[novastorm2000]

How? The only answer is to go through each asset in the DLS and clean up its metadata - you can't program that, it's a manual task. You'd also need more access to the DLS data than we have in order to correct it, and Auran granting such access on an ad-hc basis would be a bad idea.

I am not proposing we mess with or deal with the DLS, think of a DLS replacement if you will, a clean start, and new software around it that forces updates to assets or allows you to ignore or choose the way you deal with those assets.

 

[novastorm2000]

I think a more realistic view would be to imagine the DLS as a meeting place for a huge hobby club, with Auran providing the electricity and paying the rent out of dues (i.e., the cost of Trainz and a first class ticket). The rest is up to us.
--Lamont

I do think of it exactly that way and just proposing that we have a non AURAN sponsored solution as well.

The difference, that makes Trainz so much more than a model railroad club, is that we can share what we build as well as provide labor. If someone at a model railroad club handed me a station building, free of charge, and it turned out that it fell apart or lacked some prototypical detail I'd hardly assail the creator--after all, they provided it for free, and they didn't have to. Likewise, I wouldn't blame it on the party paying the rent (Auran). They have their hands full just trying to build a good enough creation platform to pay the bills and make enough of a return to justify the capital expended. If they sometimes make decisions that leave us unhappy, more often than not it's because they're following the expressed opinions of users on these forums. (I seem to remember people demanding to know why Auran hadn't incorporated SpeedTree into Trainz yet...)
--Lamont

Whats wrong with another club with its own structure and benefits?
If anything it will benefit Auran, which BTW, is not a club or charity, it is a business with business goals and so in this club analogy they are open to feedback on the membership services they are providing no? I think any time you take peoples money you have to be open to feedback, thats just how it is and the responsibility with taking peoples money.

I don't mean this to be a rant. But I do think Auran deserve a great deal of credit for continuing to make and improve a product which is not exactly a path to riches for anyone, and our content creators for the sometimes unbelievable amount of work they expend to make an idea become reality (virtual though it may be). My own hoped-for pot at the end of the rainbow is when I retire in a year or two to have the time to start contributing things of my own to the DLS, as at least a token repayment to all of those who have done so already.
--Lamont

I think they make a great product and thats why we are all here just collaborating to make it even better and that ultimately means more profit for Auran and hopefully more versions and goodies for us as well.

This conversation is no different really than building a new route, or building, or any other asset if you think about it.

Peace!
E

 

[johnwhelan]

I am not proposing we mess with or deal with the DLS, think of a DLS replacement if you will, a clean start, and new software around it that forces updates to assets or allows you to ignore or choose the way you deal with those assets.

And who is going to add the 100,000 assets available on the DLS. The current system where many creators have web sites that show their creations and often have a link to the DLS may not be perfect but it does work.

Cheerio John

 

[clam1952]

I am not proposing we mess with or deal with the DLS, think of a DLS replacement if you will, a clean start, and new software around it that forces updates to assets or allows you to ignore or choose the way you deal with those assets.

I assume your software would still have to access the DLS as that's where most of the assets are? Physically moving them all or duplicating them would probably not be allowed by Auran unless they were overseeing it and possibly you may get dissent from some creators if their babies were moved to someothersite.com plus I guess Auran would then not be able approve new assets that were not passed through the DLS's checking system and you may end up with a lot more defective stuff FWIW.

The DLS is not the best organised system however it does work and is usable, if you take time out to work out how to get the best out of it.
As a relative newcomer to Trainz, been here just over 12 months, I did eventually work out how to find stuff old and new in English or one of the several other languages used, without having to ask for help other than using online translation, however I can see that it would possibly be totally confusing to some newcomers who may not have got the same amount of patience as some of us.
To be honest I don't find it very difficult to find anything now, just took practice, reminds a bit of some of the Shareware BBS's from days gone by, which in some cases, were incomprehensible with many files in the wrong categories or with the wrong description.

To my way of thinking, the only way of getting it sorted is for a group of like minded people to work with Auran to improve or replace it! I'll be available in two years and 10 months when I retire from full time work if it hasn't been done by then.

In my opinion perhaps if someone could come up with a better search engine as a front end for the DLS and sub divide some of the categories, which are far too broad, perhaps that might solve the problem, maybe Auran could talk to Google?

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

I agree with you novastorm2000, it is a mess, but like every other time that grand solutions have been proposed, it will come to nothing. Watch this space for a few weeks and you will probably agree.

Auran must accept some share of the blame for continually changing the category tags from one release to the next and for not implementing a quality control mechanism, early in Trainz history, to ensure creators comply with the classification system. Creators too are at fault for not being very rigorous or consistent in the way they label their goods. Buildings categorised as 'vehicles' will defeat any attempt to sort and find things easily!

For my part, I re-configure every asset I download so they fall into some sort of self-invented classification system. Without that, I too could never find anything. But it only applies to stuff on my own computer, it doesn't address the deficiencies of the DLS.

I don't think 3rd party sites are the answer either. At least the DLS has the potential to be a one stop shop and at least Trainz is designed to interact automatically with it.

~ Deane

 

[deeelare]

Simply my thoughts -

It all began with little or minimum requirements to uploading by Auran , I honestly believe they had little concern at the beginning . Today it would be a very time consuming task to correct , Auran does not have the staff and most likely the desire to correct . In the past , members have offered help in minimizing the problems , but it was not accepted . I am not criticizing Auran , it is simply a situation that should have been dealt with prior to it becoming almost unsurmountable .

A fix , it ain't gonna' happen ? --- ,DLR

 

[novastorm2000]

I assume your software would still have to access the DLS as that's where most of the assets are?

First off, not my software and other than making a suggestion, I will be straight up in saying I'll do no more than write ideas here.

The concept in theory and thats all this is would read your existing assets and content from its current location, use information from the remote location to update the missing data, and create a file you could import back into Auran's content manager and fix all your issues.

The theory also is that such said software would have a more powerful interface, and that the supplemental data fields maintained on the online site would make organizing and managing content easier.

Stuff on the server would not be Aurans or anyone else's unless they checked it in and it met all the clean data criteria the group set forth. Unloaders would have to validate themselves and acknowledge they had permission and would be accountable in the event someone made a claim against such said content. Heck, the program could even make it so the actual assets were not housed on the server.. but this is all theory and someone has to want it and own it and yes, pay to have it developed in the absence of someone doing it for free.

Yes, great measures would have to be taken to keep it legal and to make sure content was clean and had all its meta data. You'd need to have an incentive and that would likely be allowing developers to sell their content and you'd need a review system to keep them and everyone else honest.

I am guessing I am not getting my point across that this whole effort requires nothing from Auran, not even their permission.

I agree though, this will never happen because A. nobody will seize the opportunity and B. I am of the belief that some here don't want to have it happen and would fight it.

Its the equivalent of someone using their favorite photo package to edit assets rather than paint shed. The assets are still on their computer, they just use a different tool to create and or edit in. You don't have to use the tools provided, all someone has to do is provide an alternative.

Whats required in my humble opinion is creative out of the box thinking to address the issue, and yes, I will already tell you, it will never be perfect.

Thanks for reading, I am going to let you all do or not do the rest and if someone is serious about it, they can contact me if they want ideas, ect.

E

 

[JCitron]

E,

This as others have said has been brought up before. I complained like you did about the DLS mess when I first joined the forums in late 2004. The DLS was initially designed for far fewer assets than it contains and as a result it has grown way bigger, and I think faster than Auran anticpated.

In some ways the new way of accessing the data through CM/CMx has made the DLS obsolete. The problem now is to get the software to better recognize older content better, and improve the search capabilities within the program.

Eventually I think with every future release of CMx, the program has gotten better in its abilities to handle the vast amount of data out there, and its search capabilities is far superior to what it had in the beginning. When will it finally reach it's full potential is something that we hope will be soon, but given the small staff size at Auran, along with other projects with higher priorities, I don't think this will happen anytime real soon. The end result will be incremental changes in the right direction.

@Meatloaf. -- I wish it was 33-35 right now. We're freezing right now in New England with -13! It's supposed to be warmer on Saturday with highs around 0.

John

 

[johnwhelan]

Stuff on the server would not be Aurans or anyone else's unless they checked it in and it met all the clean data criteria the group set forth.

Yes, great measures would have to be taken to keep it legal and to make sure content was clean and had all its meta data. You'd need to have an incentive and that would likely be allowing developers to sell their content and you'd need a review system to keep them and everyone else honest.

I am guessing I am not getting my point across that this whole effort requires nothing from Auran, not even their permission.

I agree though, this will never happen because A. nobody will seize the opportunity and B. I am of the belief that some here don't want to have it happen and would fight it.

Whats required in my humble opinion is creative out of the box thinking to address the issue, and yes, I will already tell you, it will never be perfect.

Thanks for reading, I am going to let you all do or not do the rest and if someone is serious about it, they can contact me if they want ideas, ect.

E

As a content creator I assume I would be responsible for creating error free content that was correct in the config.txt file ie a loco would be a loco and not a scenery item.

OK but that's a very big demand. It doesn't sound it but the requirements for error free shift over time. What was considered error free by content creators in TRS2004 no longer can be guaranteed to be error free by TS2010 standards. Many content creators are just so exhausted and pleased to get something appear in Trainz the extra effort to bring it up to your standards would defeat them.

Who would confirm if it was error free or not? How would this be done? People would be happy to pay for content? Given my tax bracket do I wish to be paid for content, knowing that puts me in the small business category and more likely to be audited for tax purposes? Now we are into the payware / freeware conversation. There are issues here, things like I have permission to use some textures for freeware but not for payware.

How do we address existing content that needs correcting but the content creator has died? or left Trainz, or has too much on the to do list to do the corrections you want in the time frame you want, or even doesn't believe there is anything wrong with their content. It runs in a version therefore it must be correct the messages about missing texture fires etc are irrelevant, I've actually come across this reaction.

These and the other issues need to be addressed for your idea to work. If they aren't addressed then the project fails. There are a lot of people who would like the project to succeed but having seen other attempts where the problems have been identified and not been overcome they are identifying problems early on.

Cheerio John