Search Filters or Naming Conventions???

[treblesum81]

Hi All,

Been having a heck of a time lately trying to populate some sessions with appropriate rolling stock (still need my other question answered about industry training since I'm not sure what should go where...) because I can't find what I need in the trains / rolling stock tab in surveyor. I keep trying to use the search engine, but typing in "hopper" doesn't even give me a single result, despite the fact that the "railyard" shows me at least 10-15 different installed options. Are there search filters that I can apply that will let me at least narrow it down? Or perhaps the search engine allows for modifiers and/or wildcards that I don't know about yet?

Also, I'm wondering if there is some sort of mystery naming convention for content that isn't immediately obvious? I've found that its hard to put in a certain type of locomotive, for example, three versions of the same locomotive, for the same company, have three entirely different names, so I have to go into "railyard" to find the one I want and then search for it back in surveyor to put it in... a tedious process in the best of times, but downright frustrating when I'm trying to put 15-20 different kinds of rolling stock down and I can't remember the names for all of them easily.

Please help,
Thanks,
Greg

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

Greg

I assume you're using TRS2006 or a later version. As I understood it, to impose your own naming convention on these versions, you had to work through your entire collection of assets one at a time using CMP or CM2 adding your own keywords to each one (possibly replacing any existing keywords that don't fit your convention). Then search on these keywords using the Surveyor filter thing. There were 2 forms of keywords, one was 'hard wired' into an asset's config file in the form of the category-keyword tag. The other was a more convenient but more 'volatile' form of keyword added only to the asset database via CMP. There used to be problems in that those keywords could all be lost if the database got corrupted. Backing up your keywords was the attempted fix for this, I think.

I never much liked the keyword system, found it clumsy and painful so I went back to TRS2004 which uses a different classification system and different program (Trainzobjectz) for content management. But even in '04, it's necessary to re-name and re-classify according to a convention that makes sense to you.

The most annoying assets are the ones that have been locked by their creators against any editing, even just re-naming and re-classifying. In anger, I normally disable them so that I can't see them.

~ Deane

 

[treblesum81]

That is a Royal PITA!... Especially if I really want to be able to search my entire 20K+ asset database. Yeah, maybe not all of them are needing to be searchable, but even having to go through 1000 is just about impossible...

 

[wreeder]

Hi Greg,

Here's three ideas:

1. Pick an item in CM2 and look in the Asset Details panel at the asset name. You can change it here for most items to whatever you want.

2. Find the Pick List at the bottom of the panels on the left. You can drag any item here and it will be on the pick list panel of the content search filter in surveyor.

3. Create your own consists in surveyor and save them. Add the cars and locos you want to the track then look at the top of the Rolling Stock tab where there are two large icons. Click the right one to enter consist mode. Find the Get Consist button on the bottom left and choose it. Now left click on the cars you placed on the track and give it a name. It will appear at the bottom of the consist list. I make different consists for different trains and then add the consist to the track all at once. Switching back to Train mode allows me to quickly delete any cars I don't want.

Hope this helps,
William