Hi Everyone,
I love the logical elegance of DLS, the content management database, and the change control abilities this enables. These are far superior to competitors and N3V should be proud of having had so much foresight in creating them. Yet the current discussion brings up, again, the convoluted state of payware and locked (or not) assets and dependencies on and off the DLS. The issue is that there are multiple protected, overlapping and conflicting distribution mechanisms and states for the same KUIDs and no clear N3V solution for reconciling them.
DLS and its current version-control scheme mean that there is only ever a single canonical version of a given KUID revision with associated active, locked or DRM states if DLS knows anything about that asset in the first place. But that’s not actually true. The same KUID may have been pre-installed from previous Trainz versions carrying different DRM levels. Or it could have been purchased from different distributors that might or might not DRM that asset. Or the asset could come in versions compatible with different Trainz levels but have been distributed with the same KUID revision regardless. Or the KUID could be marked as inactive payware in DLS because it was legitimately purchased outside of N3V and DLS.
Since the DLS only comprehends an asset as having limited active, locked or DRM states, it will potentially break the asset or its parents if it unknowingly changes the active, locked or DRM states (or even the content itself) in an update it deploys. Sometimes this is a relatively minor inconvenience such as suddenly being unable to modify an asset that you could modify before. Other times it’s more serious, such as that unmodifiable asset breaking or itself breaking another asset that depends on it. Sometimes it’s more serious still, as when a notional upgrade from one version of Trainz to another is, in actuality, a clean install of the new Trainz followed by DLS and manual reinstalls of all your assets. Some of those assets might not be reinstallable afterwards because they are payware from a previous Trainz and are thus un-importable. Others might be reinstalled from DLS but are now marked locked payware where they weren’t before. Still others might be upgraded and directly break other things. You could theoretically choose not to install DLS-deployed updates to your existing installed assets, or for that matter to never install an upgrade of Trainz itself, but that’s unrealistic for many of us since another asset or purchase from any source can and will, sooner or later, require a affected asset to be updated.
This seems, to me, a problem of N3Vs own making in their desire to get Trainz on as many platforms as possible, in as many ways as possible, and with as much DRM as possible. Of course I want Trainz to flourish and for N3V to succeed, so I’m eager to hear their plans for resolving the issues and moving ahead.
Thanks for reading,
Diego
Help is much appreciated!