A so called improvements in TS12 SP1

I'm aware that the developers took much much time to prepare the patch. One thing though is difficult to understand. Why the heck the lack of an icon or screenshot raised from warning to error now??!! Is it so dangerous? Will it eat my Trainz installation? As a freeware developer I'm angry on it! You just don't care about me. I won't torment on them (the developers). This is wasting of their time and effort to 'fix' this this way. Thank you!

Actually, I support N3V on this. It's a requirement for Download Station assets to have a screenshot/thumbnail (and in some cases, an icon). N3V are simply extending this to other assets.

Shane

Ok, so why most of the builtin assets don't have a screenshot and they are errorfree?

That's always been the case, and is not new to TS12 SP1. It's due to the fact that the built-in assets are stored in the .JA files, which means that CM cannot check for faults in them unless they are opened for edit and recommitted.

Shane

No, some of my assets which had only warnings in TS12, now are marked faulty.

My all assets have screenshots (I don't like assets with no screenshot) but sometimes I miss it preparing a cdp and publishing it.

In the process of making a loco or enuything elese you have a raw config and all the necessary files. Only when this object is ready I prepare a screenshot. You nay say I can just delete the lines about the screenshot from the config. But then I could forget it before publishing. Now what is better for me durnig the process of preparing an asset: a warning or an error?

Can I check what error(s) you are getting? Once my version has finished patching, I can double-check.

Shane

yes, of course.

-lack of an icon in some of my product assets (there is the icon tag in the config though)
-lack of a screenshot in some of my assets (there is the icon tag in the config though)

Again, is this so dangerous to become an error while it was a warning (or no info) in TS12??

I'm a flexible person and prepare my assets for TRS2004 users. They work just fine in TS12, too. Forced by N3V I have to prepare all my assets in T2009+ version if I want to upload them to DLS and these versions are most probably error free.

Can I check if those are the exact errors?

It may be that you are using .tga instead of .texture in the icon tag, and possibly not using .jpg in the screenshot.

Shane

P.S. Regarding the screenshot issue, Asset-X may be able to help.

Thank you for your help. To be honest I know I made those mistakes. Yes, sometimes there is the tag 'icon blah blah' in my asset and there is no corresponding tga, jpg or whatever file. But my question is, sorry it's again - should it be marked as error or as a warning like it was succesfuly till yesterday? For me it's (delicately said) now a step back, I have install a new copy of TS12 for the purpose of checking all of my DLS uploaded asets and (!!!!!) I have to buy the FCT just for it! As I said I have TRS2004 versions and TS2009 versions and I can't have all of them in one Trainz install because when packing a CDP with dependencies for TRS versions it would be very difficult when new TS2009 versions (with a higher KUID2 number) are installed.

I had the same issue on some of my assets and on closer inspection it turned my assets are faulty as they path to the icon file and the name of the icon file is wrong. Could this be the case on your assets? The gripe here is why these errors were not picked up in previous version Trainz.

Only about 20 of my assets are faulty. I can live with it. I will repair it. But 491 previously working and good assets from other developers are faulty (yes, I did 'show warings and error' to all of them to 'repair' incorrectly faulty marked ones before counting - by the way, isn't THIS bug supposed to be repaired in TS2010????)! Please, N3V developers explain me the importance of changing this kind of warning to an error! Otheerwise I understand it as ignoring us freeware developers and (more terryfying) - users. This would be disgusting.

I had the same issue on some of my assets and on closer inspection it turned my assets are faulty as they path to the icon file and the name of the icon file is wrong. Could this be the case on your assets? The gripe here is why these errors were not picked up in previous version Trainz.
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To the OP,

You are not understanding the purpose of the warning flag. While the end user can disregard warnings since the asset will work in the game, content creators should consider warning flags as something that needs to be fixed ASAP because in the future it will be flagged as an error.

William

I understand them and I do fix all the things I see a warning at because I respect users.
Now I narrowed out the errors: no icon or bad filename while the icon or screenshot tag exists in the config. Those things were completly ignored by CMP 3.6. No warnings, just ignored. And here the chorus comes: is the particular thing so crucial to take care of in this so long expected update? Really?

"All animals are equal but pigs are more equal"

As I said, most of the built-in assets have no screenshot. Why don't they change it? Why can they be errorfree?

Nonsense.

I actually love the idea that it's forcing creators to put in thumbnails and icons. A long overdue move. Icons and thumbnails take up less than 1% of the creation effort but they convey information that users need and have a right to demand. So don't complain when the error pops up. It's doing you a favor by highlighting something that you really should have been taking care about all along.

Jesus...

You didn't LOOSE something

You're no longer able to GET AWAY WITH something...

frogpipe said:

Jesus...

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Please don't treat me this way. I could say "Jesus, will the world collapse without a thumbnail?" The truth is they don't respect us. Null, zero, nada...

I actually love the idea that it's forcing creators to put in thumbnails and icons

Click to expand...

I would be the first in line to say that, too! But not this way they do. BTW, have you seen my assets? All of them have thumbnails, if they have no icons they have thumbnails which act as icons in 100% cases (loads, rolling stock). I do everything with respect to users which I can't see in N3V policy. This is not friendly, this is offensive. They act like a road roller not seeing their own faults like no thumbnails in 80% of built-in assets.

Good Morning All
Simply put, not having a thumbnail is an error. Albeit a minor one, it is still an error, and in this case we now show this. Previously, it was a warning, however as we have stated many time warnings will often become errors eventually. Not all will (some are 'subjective' warnings, such as the use of '.lm.txt' lod on lower poly meshes; some assets can only have LOD this way). The DLS has been detecting this particular issue for several years now...

For content on the DLS, the recent DLC clean up pass will have picked up on this error and as such this content is now in the process of being repaired.

Now, the second error you see is when you specify a thumbnail in the config.txt yet the specified file does not exist (e.g. it is in a different folder, or under a different name). This is an error, the file is missing. This does consume resources, as Trainz will attempt to locate the file. The DLS has been detecting this particular error for a few months, so new content won't have this issue. However, there has been a delay between the DLS being updated and Trainz being updated with the most recent error checking. As a note, the error checking won't check for /just/ missing thumbnails. It checks for any image that is referenced in the config.txt but is not present in the asset (e.g. the 'icon' for commodities, the icon for a driver command, images referenced in the string-table for use in the properties menu, etc). A couple of my texture groups referenced non existent images, and threw up the same error...

Again, this is a situation of the content has always been faulty, just Trainz couldn't detect it until now. With the DLS clean up in process, and authors hopefully updating their content to repair the issue, there shouldn't be too long a delay before the issue is resolved. I know I fixed the random scattering of my own items with this (and other missing image errors) last night, and will be releasing them when I've finished a few I don't have installed...

Regards

Excuse the ignorance of this modest content creator, but what are those icon's some talk about.
I was under the impression that the use of those had been ironed out over the past years?

Greetings from drizzly Amsterdam,

Jan

For a commodity asset, the icon is that small picture you see in the product queue of a railcar or an industry. It's a quick visual confirmation for the user. For loco's and rolling stock an icon represents these assets in a consist, for example. Thumbnails, commodity icons and railcar icons each have different standard dimensions to suit different purposes, so they all need to be there.

Jan, you might be thinking of the little 'green tick' icon that used to signify interactive assets. I think that was dropped a few years ago, which was a pity really.


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Yup, I was actually thinking of those icon's shown on the thumbnail sometimes in the past.
Since as a hobby programmer I allways think of icons as being square, I didn't think about railcar icons and I haven't made any commodities yet so I wasn't aware those where called icons as well.
There are quite a few railcars in my production queue however, so thanks for the tip.
Oh dear oh dear, my my, that'll be a visit to the wiki again. :hehe:

Greetings from rainy Amsterdam,

Jan