Hello! I've just had the first opportunity to try out the new Surveyor 2.0 - it's a real game-changer, even if it requires re-learning certain habits
. This is just a fresh glimpse after checking out different things, but I hope you will find it useful.
Great things
I really like the new multi-selection and highlighting of selected objects. It would make adjustments of the whole scenery crazy simple. I remember moving a part of a station in TRS2019 because of miscalculation. It had to be done by careful copy-pasting without much visual guidance. Here it looks like a piece of cake. I can even freely rotate the scenery, if e.g. I want the station to point 5 degrees to the west. Big "thank you" for that! Another great thing is the Anchor. I discovered that I can move e.g. a single track perpendicular or in parallel to its current orientation which was previously not possible. One had to move individual track points, and use additional scenery objects as templates.
Independent "placement", "free move" and "fine adjustment" tools: I find it useful, because in TRS2019 it was hard to say what would happen if I place a new spline node in a dense scenery. However, it requires some time to adapt. Right now I find it hard to switch between those modes. Accessible keyboard shortcuts would be welcome.
To improve
I also see one thing to improve: the pain of rotating objects. In TRS2019, I have to spend a massive amount of time, carefully rotating individual objects to match the general direction of the scenery. For example, let's imagine that I model a part of town. I lay the streets, and I want to place houses, lamps, etc. The orientation of the street gives me the angle - let's say - 130.5 degrees. The only option in TRS2019 is placing all objects, and then rotate each single of them carefully to 130.5 degrees. Imagine doing this for e.g. 60 houses and 130 street lamps. When I read about Surveyor 2.0 for the first time, I hoped that it will make it much easier, and well... new tools help a bit, and probably more by coincidence rather than intentional wish to improve this functionality. For now I see only the following options:
* build everything at 0 degree rotation, and then rotate the entire scenery - possible, but you have to have extra free space, and you don't see how things match the rest of the scenery until you finish,
* make one object, select it, copy plenty of times, then move everything to the intended position. Yes, copy-pasting now works well and makes it possible, but still - you have to make all objects elsewhere and then move them carefully one by one. It is much less time-consuming than the "old" way, but still.
I feel this is not the way how it should work. My ideas for improvements:
* Placement Tool: we have the entire window "Tool options" occupying the screen, but all options are greyed out. Options "Height", "Angle", "Rotation" could be active and taken into account by this tool. I could then enter the angle 130.5 and make all new objects with this angle, or place all objects at certain height above the ground.
* Multi-select: currently, rotation of multiple objects rotates the entire selected fragment. But what about the second anchor option which would rotate individual objects by the same angle? Then I could place all objects, and then rotate all of them at once.
Generally, the privileged place of 0-degree rotation should be abandoned. It should be still a default value, but only until you reconfigure it to your current needs.
Asset list - please add some contextual tooltips for different elements, and consider changing the placement of one of them. At the first sight, I thought that displaying asset images is
the only way of viewing the asset list (and I was about to put a huge explanation here why having a named asset list is an absolute must-have). It turned out that the picture icon next to the search box switches the asset viewing mode from image-based to name-based. But I discovered it by accident. There is no tooltip for it, and for me neither the symbol nor its current placement give a hint what it does. Also, the asset name in image-viewing mode is displayed in a completely different place - again, at the first sight I though that the asset name is not displayed at all, until I noticed that the window title changes. Over here, a tooltip on mouse hover with the asset name would be also great.
Missing things
* In Surveyor 2.0 it was also possible to rotate ground textures while drawing. I see that the keyboard shortcuts are still listed in settings, but they don't work anymore. I used it for drawing large grass areas. Keeping all ground rotated in the same direction creates the unnatural "grid" effect, even with PBR textures, and I'd like to avoid it on my maps.
* Regarding circles at spline/track nodes. I also think that it would be good to have them back as an option. They introduce a lot of visual mess when you don't need them, but at the same time they are very useful when you want e.g. to align your tracks, and you don't want to spend time on adding a temporary template scenery object.
* "Straighten track/spline" - the current way looks more time-consuming than the old way of selecting "Straighten" and clicking on objects. It was very useful for larger stations. Is it possible to bring the old way back for this particular option?
New ideas
Regarding rulers and templates, I have an idea for another type of ruler. Among Polish add-ons, there is a useful scenery object: a configurable template for making realistic track curves. You entered the desired curve radius (e.g. R800 m) and the degree, and the template showed where the track nodes should be positioned. Unfortunately, in TRS2019 SP3 it became a bit broken due to issues with selecting it and moving around. How about making something similar and maintain it as a part of the core game?
