Of all the changes introduced in TRS19, most of them significant improvements on previous versions, I think that the 'Zombie drivers control panel' is by far the worst for several reasons.
1: It takes up a huge amount of screen space compared with other controls and compared with the previous implementation. Management of screen 'real estate' is vry important when operating the control system.
2: The images of the so-called drivers are well described as 'Zombies', and are much less interesting than the images provided previously. No useful purpose is served by having the images so large. The relationship between the face and the 'name' which appears under it has been broken and is purely arbitrary, and no doubt disappointing to those many people who supplied their images as drivers.
Personally I replace the driver names when I produce the driver schedules in Surveyor, with loco or train descriptors when I create a session - much more useful than the individual loco model instance descriptor, but there is now not enough space to display this and now mouseover functionality to display it in full.
3: The loco image is unnecessarily large as it only indicates general type rather than a unique vehicle in the session.
4: There is not enough space for the full description of the locomotive to be displayed - if there are several of the same type, the full name needs to be displayed as the distinguishing information is the last character: 1, 2, 3 etc.. The full Loco description should display on mouseover.
5. The same comment applies to the description of the schedule command which the loco is currently performing. The previous practice of displaying the Driver Command icon was more intuitive and the full description was displayed on mouseover.
6: The descriptions of the effect of the five 'button' icons is not clear:
- What happens when the driver is removed from the session? Does her/his train simply stop or disappear?
- What happens if the driver 'Gets off the train'?
- What is the functional difference between 'Move to Destination (eg. Locomotive)' and 'Focus on Driver'? The seem to do the same thing.
The size of this control panel in previous versions of Trainz and its unambiguous and helpful mouseover functionality were very effective. Perhaps an implementation similar to the previous version but with a fly-out panel on mouseover to display any additional information would be a much better implementation, but the descriptors of additional functionality need to be clear.
I agree with you!!