Selecting assets with mouse PLUS a question about "missing dependencies".

JonMyrlennBailey

Well-known member
Have you ever noticed that while working with objects in Surveyor that if you were to place objects and spline points of various objects too close together they can be hard to select one or the other with the mouse to move, rotate, raise/lower, delete, look at their properties, etc? Placing people too close to trees for example or speed limit signs close to junctions: trees and railroad switches seem to dominate over other nearby objects for being chosen with the mouse pointer.

What exactly is the meaning of "missing dependencies"? This message comes up sometimes while taking inventory of Routes/Sessions in Content Manger. Is this something important? How so? :o
 
The selecting stuff can get quite frustrating. As for missing dependincies, these are always associated by a Jigsaw Piece (reminds me o Banjo Kazooie lol) with a ? mark in the center. It means that your missing a few kuids for the specific piece. Usually, if you totally given up searching for it, you can replace it, but with routes, I don't advise you do, as it might screw up more.
 
How do kuids ever get lost? I have never removed any assets from my database, only have downloaded and added to them.

This missing dependencies jigsaw puzzle piece only seems to show up in CM when I save sessions or routes by OVERWRITING them after editing them rather than calling the route/session by a whole new name at saving time, such as Revision A, Revision B, and so forth.
 
How do kuids ever get lost? I have never removed any assets from my database, only have downloaded and added to them.

This missing dependencies jigsaw puzzle piece only seems to show up in CM when I save sessions or routes by OVERWRITING them after editing them rather than calling the route/session by a whole new name at saving time, such as Revision A, Revision B, and so forth.

It could also be that the new route is looking for previous sessions which you have deleted or moved elsewhere so the route can't find them basically. The same the other way too if the route can't find a now missing session.

This can also happen if something is open for edit, besides being actually not found physically. In Content Manager, check for assets that are open for edit. These will have the hammer and sickle icon lit up. Highlight those and press control+M to commit the asset(s). Why this happens is hard to explain. It could be from a crash which left the database unstable, and the route or session was never closed properly.

Sometimes, and this happens quite often, you'll download a cool looking locomotive only to find it's missing a part. This will cause the same error. The problem is the part was never uploaded, or came from some website located somewhere else in the world. Now you'll spend the time KUID hunting as we call it. There's a nice website for that called

http://www.trainzkuidindex.com/

You put in the KUID and the website can find the asset usually. The problem then becomes going to the source and downloading the part as this can now be some website in Russia, or some other country. This can be cool too because then you'll find a lot of interesting stuff to download. :)

John
 
When saving maps or sessions some builds of Trainz didn't add all dependencies to the kuid-table (which is used by the ContentManager to check for needed dependencies). When saving these maps/sessions in a version without this problem, all these kuids are added to the kuid-table, some being listed as missing afterwards. Mostly these unlisted dependencies are groundtextures or drivercommands. Peter
 
missing dependencies that shouldn't be missing ?

Ihave also been caught out, quite badly, by the fact that quite amazingly, TS12 clearly does NOT save ALL the information required in a CDP. After making sure (I thought) that I had a good CDP copy of my latest version of what I am now calling "Bad Spiralz" for ease of reference. It is called this because the whole N gauge model layout is a 20 by 20 feet or thereabouts layout whose main line takes 60mph trains around 12 minutes to complete the circuit back to the station. It includes "pseudo" reversing loops that make trains appear to be travelling in basically different directions along tracks that are relatively close to each other. It gives a nice impression of vast complexity to what is in fact one long double track that spirals and climbs/descends all over the place, giving the watcher (and even me at times) the impression of trains traveling a far longer distance than they in fact do.

However, back to the plot, I decided to clean up a load of old assets in CM as there must have been 200 + of them. So I duly did so, leaving some of the more recent older versions. But when I restarted Surveyor I nearly fell off my chair. The main line track was dotted black lines, and loads of other stuff was missing. A large number of spline points along track that was remaining were broken splines and had to be repaired manually.

I would have assumed that when you save a CDP, IT HAS EVERYTHING NEEDED to recreate that route and session , even on a new machine. I now know differently, after several day repairing it all again.

Why on earth does it have to refer back to sundry older versions to find stuff, it is a crazy idea. ??

Ian

When saving maps or sessions some builds of Trainz didn't add all dependencies to the kuid-table (which is used by the ContentManager to check for needed dependencies). When saving these maps/sessions in a version without this problem, all these kuids are added to the kuid-table, some being listed as missing afterwards. Mostly these unlisted dependencies are groundtextures or drivercommands. Peter
 
Have you ever noticed that while working with objects in Surveyor that if you were to place objects and spline points of various objects too close together they can be hard to select one or the other with the mouse to move, rotate, raise/lower, delete, look at their properties, etc? Placing people too close to trees for example or speed limit signs close to junctions: trees and railroad switches seem to dominate over other nearby objects for being chosen with the mouse pointer.

Have you tried using layers? If, for example, you place all trees in one layer (I name mine Vegetation) and people in another (which I call People and Animals) there is no problem with selecting.

Ray
 
Back
Top