New to Trainz - whats with the random Object names?

[AndyKay]

Hi,
Only having discovered Trainz recently (last week in fact), I cant help but wonder why a 'professional' game producer would release a game to the market with such random, useless and annoying object names in the included objects list.
I spent a couple of hours last night in Content Manager renaming things so I could actually find them when the need arises.

Thinking outside the box, it would be good to have 'categories' of objects - so when you open the objects list in Surveyor, you can quickly and easily select 'tree' or 'grass' or 'train' or 'house' etc, then have the group of items showing.
I know about the filter, but it would just make things easier just to quickly select a category. Plus the filter doesnt select things called 'xcf345' when such item is 'grass' for example...

Also is it really that hard to have a screen shot of each object?!

 

[Dermmy]

Almost all Trainz content is created by users, not by Auran/N3V so there is no overall naming convention. Believe it or not you will quite quickly work out a system to help in finding the stuff you need!

As to 'categories' that is pretty much exactly how content was sorted in older Trainz versions. I was as vocal a protester as any when the system changed, but now that i have worked out exactly how the new search engine works it is like 10,000 times more efficient the new way.

Welcome aboard...

Andy

 

[ShadyCadence]

I agree.

I sent the same idea into the suggestion boxcar, only to have it vanish into the ether...

 

[AndyKay]

Almost all Trainz content is created by users, not by Auran/N3V so there is no overall naming convention.

It seems odd that a user would call their objects such random names

Also seems weird that Auran/N3V wouldn't edit them before including them into a publishable game.

At first I thought I had been sent a Beta version of the game by mistake! :hehe:

Cant believe its the accepted way?

When the next release comes out (2011/2012), I cant wait to have to trawl through all 150,000 objects and rename them all again....great! :'(

 

[Dug]

Next version you will only have to rename 150,000 objects if you re-download all 150,000 objects. If you transfer them from the old version to the new version that should not be a problem.

I seriously doubt the folks at Auran have time to correct asset names. That is up to the creator and everybody has their own thoughts on that.

Definitely agree on the screen shots. And not the same screen shot for 50 different assets. But again, that is up to the creator. Again, I am sure Auran does not have the time to chase this down, nor should they have to. I may be missing out on some quality items but I no longer download anything unless I can see what it is. Too much time wasted downloading then deleting because I was not sure what the item was then finding out it was not something I needed or wanted.

Doug

 

[PerRock]

I'm curious as to what you mean by "random names" Overall I've found that almost everything is named in a fairly understandable manner. If I want a station I can easily search for "station" and find practically all of them.

Are you referring to the foreign names? If so what do you think the people in (oh say) Germany you think if they had to make all their stuff in English?

peter

 

[NikkiA]

I'm curious as to what you mean by "random names" Overall I've found that almost everything is named in a fairly understandable manner. If I want a station I can easily search for "station" and find practically all of them.

Are you referring to the foreign names? If so what do you think the people in (oh say) Germany you think if they had to make all their stuff in English?

peter

I agree, there are a few 'strange named items' but they're really quite rare. If he thinks that they're 'all' like that, the only thing I can think of is that he's confusing the hashed filename that trainz generates when an item is stored in the database.

The only 'problem' names I can think of, are the russians, who still insist on using item names that aren't supported by trainz, so you end up with an asset database full of 100,000 objects all called "????", that makes me rage.

 

[AndyKay]

I agree, there are a few 'strange named items' but they're really quite rare. If he thinks that they're 'all' like that, the only thing I can think of is that he's confusing the hashed filename that trainz generates when an item is stored in the database.

The only 'problem' names I can think of, are the russians, who still insist on using item names that aren't supported by trainz, so you end up with an asset database full of 100,000 objects all called "????", that makes me rage.

hmm so you seem to have no problem with these I quickly saw in CM:
all of these have no description OR screenshot:
sr16
3 stack
abri (x 2)
zipper
weigu tt
wbs70b
Andreaskreuz
Anhaen 1
Valla
ul ksh6
transfo
ma256pt2 (absolutely loads like this)
CP 221934 (a few like this)
WS 1zu26,5 (lots of these) - german description

Absolutely useless object names! Surely Auran checks them before including them? Surely someone has to trawl through them anyway - why dont they help us (the paying public - i.e. paying them to do their job) by giving them a proper name?!

Another thing - why are there lots of objects which already have a 5 star rating!? I certainly didnt rate any yet!

 

[tardis626]

Some of those listed are likely to be foreign (they sound foreign).

Also, whats wrong with "3 stack" it makes perfect sense (I Think)- It's a stack of something 3 objects high.

I know as a content creator, naming objects is actually harder than you may think, for example- is it "station big" (so it can be found by typing "station") or big station (which is grammatically correct! But people like you are likely to complain about as it is not found alongside all the other stations).
It is the same story for many things (e.g. Modern House, Church Building....)


Regards,
Phil

 

[RRSignal]

hmm so you seem to have no problem with these I quickly saw in CM:
all of these have no description OR screenshot:
sr16
3 stack
abri (x 2)
zipper
weigu tt
wbs70b
Andreaskreuz
Anhaen 1
Valla
ul ksh6
transfo
ma256pt2 (absolutely loads like this)
CP 221934 (a few like this)
WS 1zu26,5 (lots of these) - german description

Absolutely useless object names! Surely Auran checks them before including them? Surely someone has to trawl through them anyway - why dont they help us (the paying public - i.e. paying them to do their job) by giving them a proper name?!

Another thing - why are there lots of objects which already have a 5 star rating!? I certainly didnt rate any yet!

I guess you have to put your big boy undies on like everyone else does.

Seriously, this really isn't an issue. But remember that a large portion of Trainz content is created by non-English-speaking people. I don't think it's appropriate that Auran enforce an "English-only" rule in a game that is geared towards a worldwide community.

Never mind the amount of time that would take Auran to check names is probably unfeasable.

I agree though that the star rating is rather silly - especially that it is enabled by default.

 

[sniper297]

I agree it IS a problem, and having someone else's "favorites" selected out of the box and showing ONLY someone else's favorites by default is rather weird to say the least. Naming has no easy solution unfortunately, this was discussed before - I give all my reskins names starting with "PON" or "IndustRail" or "Harbormaster" so I can easily find them, some people say they would prefer listing by categories, "GP-9 PON" and "RS-11 PON" so all the engine types for different roads would be grouped together. Would be nice if there was a better filter so you could select from a list of locos, freight cars, passenger cars, whatever but for now the only filter is the Content Search Filter in the upper left corner of Surveyor. Type in "sd" and I get SD-9s, SD-40s, RSD5s, and assorted other stuff with the letters "sd" in them. Try to make it tighter with "SD-40" and you find that some have labeled theirs without the dash, "SD40" or "SD 40" so you don't get those. Clumsy at best, one thing I took time out to do was disable a lot of foreign stuff in Content Mangler, anything with "GWR" or "Renfe" or "DB" I'm unlikely to use on a Yankee Doodle route so I disable it so it don't clutter up the list in surveyor.

 

[Dermmy]

...for example- is it "station big" (so it can be found by typing "station") or big station (which is grammatically correct! But people like you are likely to complain about as it is not found alongside all the other stations).
It is the same story for many things (e.g. Modern House, Church Building....)

Phil

Aha - now that is exactly the advantage of the new system. The content filter will find a 'station' if the word 'station' is anywhere in the username, asset name, keywords and/or (I think) the description.

Auran/N3V did take the time to add keywords to all built-in assets, including those with configs written in languages other than English and it is no big effort to add your own keywords to new oddly-named assets as they are downloaded...

Andy

 

[tardis626]

Ah, never noticed they'd done that!
I learn something new everyday


Regards,
Phil

 

[ianwoodmore]

Favorites

1. Every download by default is a favorite these days. In my opinion this was a case of Auran getting the starred/favourites wrong in the Routes menu in the first place. This was to highlight the new TS routes but as default in native mode was favourites only a few routes were initially visible (Favorite uses 5 stars filter by the way). When people panicked when they couldn't find their layouts and sessions, rather than sorting out the initial wrong logic Auran compounded the problem by then ensuring ALL new downloadable assets are favourites/5 stars. Thus even obsolete and out of date dependencies that get downloaded are marked as 5 stars. This also makes nonsense of the Railyard favorite selection. I have had to develop a custom 'unmodified' filter and than select 'Ratings 0 stars' to overcome this stupid arrangement.

Naming Conventions

2. While it would be nice to have a convention for naming assets,apart from the difficulty of the many languages used it would be too difficult to ensure its integrity, given that no two people are likely to agree on a schema. It ain't gonna happen.

Using Search Engines

3. Both the Surveyor and Content Manager have very powerful filter systems which used judiciously can find most assets of a particular type you are interested in. By default the assets name is a keyword on which you can sort. It works on partial sorts of the config file tag 'username' which is also the source of the 'Name" column in the Content Manager Main View. Description is not involved in search but to add additional information in Asset Details and as the text in in DLS. So if in ContentManager you want SD-40 and SD40 then filter using SD 40 and both will show. You can narrow the search by adding (+) a search filter such as 'Category Locomotives'. There are also some boolean operators you can use like 'AND, OR, AND NOT' when designing more complex custom filters.

Sorting using Keywords

4. There are also two keyword functions:

a. The tag 'category-keyword' that can be added to any config file, but you can only do this one at a time unless you are adept at using a Search and Replace text editor. This is stored in the TAD.

or

b. 'RMB Edit Keywords' which allows you to add keywords to multiple assets simulataneously. While useful it has the danger of contradicting a keyword in the first method and it is volatile in the sense that unless you remember to use 'File Backup asset keywords' regularly, it is not automatic, you could lose all or some of your keywords on transfer to another installation or due to a crash or corruption. These keywords are stored separately in KeywordsDump.dat in the Trainz root folder.

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

In other words, nothing has improved in this aspect from TRS2006 onwards. I agree with AndyKay, it's hideous.

 

[NikkiA]

Naming Conventions

2. While it would be nice to have a convention for naming assets,apart from the difficulty of the many languages used it would be too difficult to ensure its integrity, given that no two people are likely to agree on a schema. It ain't gonna happen.

Not only that, but if they did, every chicken little that is already bashing 2009/2010 would be crying about how Auran is oppressing them and not allowing them to choose their own name for things.

Auran really can't win in this regard.

 

[AndyKay]

Its Aurans game - they should come up with the naming scheme and should be adhered to.
If a train company names their train a certain way, that that should be the way it is: i.e. the SD40 example someone mentioned- it should be exactly like that: no hyphen, no space for all SD40's in the Sim.

Getting rid of the categories from the older version (sorry I only started on TS2010) sounded like such a daft idea. I would have loved to see (and I thought I would see) categories like 'Diesels', 'Passenger Cars' etc and even 'Industries' category

Re: Language
If you are foreign and would like to add items to the game, give an English translation - its not like you'd need to make an effort - Google does it for you these days!
Its an English language game - if you're foreign (Im dual nationality so Im not being biased here) - you should accept the fact that you should give an English translation.

It seems to me that you have to have had Trainz since the start (TS-year-dot) to understand the [very strange] way this Sim works.

Sorry about all this, Im not normally a complainer! At least Im not the only one who thinks this anyway!

 

[PerRock]

Its an English language game - if you're foreign

Umm no it isn't. The German version is in German, I believe there are versions in French and Spanish as well.

Maybe you need to just figure out how to work with the system. The majority of Trainz users don't seem to have any problem with it. It's a free world we can name out content the way we want to, not the way YOU want us to.

peter

 

[AndyKay]

Umm no it isn't. The German version is in German,


peter

So why isn't the English version in English?
So Auran translate the whole game from English to German, yet dont bother converting the few German items to English. Slightly unfair I think.

Anyway, going a bit off topic here...

 

[Dermmy]

I assume you would prefer English English? Of course Auran/N3V are in Australia so to be fair dinkum we should default to Australian English. But then the majority of English speaking users are from the USA, so we should probably go with the majority and use American English where there would be no 'stations' at all, they would all be 'depots'.

There is no 'system'. Most likely there never will be a system. As for the suggestion that non-English speakers should master a second language just for your menu-browsing convenience - Wow....

Andy