TRS2010---->TANE SP2. Worth the struggle to fix assets?

Well, after happily using Trainz 2010 (44088) for the entire duration of the unhappy debacles surrounding Trainz 12 right through to TANE, I have finally taken the plunge and purchased TANE SP2, despite my hatred of all things DRM.

And I have to say that I am quite impressed generally. I am fortunate enough to have it installed on an SSD, and have a quite recent graphics card, and it seems to run very smoothly graphics-wise and with very little asset-call delay, even at max scenic distance and high detail. It loads and saves very quickly, and to my shock it has been exceptionally stable so far, the most stable I can remember ANY Trainz product being. The new features are cool. The sound environment seems much improved too. To my even greater amazement, I seem to be able to SAVE and EXIT during a scripted session and return to it the next day with the session functioning as it was written, rather than Trainz forgetting which session rule gets triggered next. I can't recall ever successfully completing a session during which I had to save it before this week's TANE SP2 test run. A few more sessions will be required to verify this general improvement, granted, but overall Trainz now feels like a professional and polished product.

I might even be tempted to change my asset and route collection over TANE SP2, but for one major fear: How many weeks, months and years will it take me to repair most of the hundreds of thousands of items of content I have downloaded over the years?

At this point I am intending to continue using 44088 for operational sessions, and TANE when I feel like simply driving a train and looking at the terrain roll by. This attitude stems from the fact that I only recently finished repairing all the asset destruction that changing from TRS2006 to TRS2010 caused, and have no wish to repeat the exercise. I learned how to fix almost all asset-killing faults, except the texture format and mesh related faults, but it takes a lot of time as experienced Trainzers know well.

May I enquire of the much greater TANE experience held by the forum community that might shed some light on this question? What has been the general experience with backward capability for existing asset and route collections from the TRS2010 era at a practical level ? Are the faults with assets that will be incurred fixable? And if so are they easy faults to fix?

Any insight will be appreciated.

I fully understand the asset updating as I too have done this going from TRS2004-TRS2006, then the wash, rinse, and repeat again more than once for TRS2009-TS2010 onwards. For the most part, 95% or more of the assets made for TRS2009 and up will work fine, and many, many of the older ones will as well. Those with truly broken meshes, however, cannot be repaired. For the .texture issues, there is PEV's Tools Images2TGA available to repair that. There are some of those dumb config.txt errors hanging about, but they're not as common as they used to be.

Importing your assets can be done, and the process does take time. I recommend bringing in the assets in batches, I did this by author, repaired stuff in batches then continued. This was before anything was available for T:ANE and I encountered 7500 faulty assets out of the nearly 195,000 assets imported. Out of the 7,500 I deleted about 2,500 right away due to bad meshes. Since then I have a goal to remove stuff that hasn't been touched in a decade or more, but that's quite a daunting task, which I need to stop procrastinating on.

With that said, you are, however, coming into this at a good point in the game . Once you've imported your assets, errors and all, check for updates. There's a group of Trainz users dedicated, with N3V's help, to update/repair the assets that are on the DLS to work with T:ANE in addition to those authors who have also updated their content. The update check will eliminate many, many of the errors encountered on import and save you time. The updates will include TS2010 content as well as that was updated further to work with TS12, and these will work in T:ANE. When the assets are imported, check for open for edit assets as these are the built-ins and need to be reverted to original.



I highly recommend creating some custom filters which will help considerably:

Customize the Faulty assets filter by removing missing dependencies and faulty dependencies from the Faulty filter. This will reduce the number of errors listed, and only show the truly faulty assets and not muddy the waters on you.

Use the Out of Date filter to search for all content that can be updated. (I can't remember if this one is built-in now that I think about it).

Create an Obsolete AND NOT Built-in filter to search out and delete these obsoleted assets once they've been updated.

Upgrading to T:ANE SP2, like any software is a one-way affair due to internal file changes within the program. The only assets that cannot be exported back are routes, however, any other asset as long as it hasn't been up-versioned will work fine. With that in mind, we highly recommend keeping your TS2010 installation intact until you are no longer looking for assets in TS2010, or fine any need to use that for your Trainzing needs.

Wow, that's a comprehensive response, thanks so much. I had an expectation, based on past experience, that the whole subject would be much darker than you are presenting it. I didn't know there was a tool to fix that compressed texture problem, maybe I should stay in the loop more.

Is there by chance a good thread or website dedicated to this asset update program you speak of, so I can investigate and get an idea of what the primary differences between the 2010 era and TANE era assets are?

If I do decide to commit the time and plunge into a TANE conversion project, I would much prefer that any DLS assets I have to fix can be fixed for the community as well. Avoiding duplication-of-effort and all that. How many other long-time Trainzers are involved in this program? How much $$ are N3V paying per hour to fix their assets?

anathoth71 said:

Wow, that's a comprehensive response, thanks so much. I had an expectation, based on past experience, that the whole subject would be much darker than you are presenting it. I didn't know there was a tool to fix that compressed texture problem, maybe I should stay in the loop more.

Is there by chance a good thread or website dedicated to this asset update program you speak of, so I can investigate and get an idea of what the primary differences between the 2010 era and TANE era assets are?

If I do decide to commit the time and plunge into a TANE conversion project, I would much prefer that any DLS assets I have to fix can be fixed for the community as well. Avoiding duplication-of-effort and all that. How many other long-time Trainzers are involved in this program? How much $$ are N3V paying per hour to fix their assets?

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I can't think of a website that has comparison list of assets. Being that much of the content has been around awhile, there's bound to be some duplications.

For the list of tools, check here:

http://trainz.shaneturner.co.uk/tutorials/index.php?page=pevsoft-trainz-tools

You might want to check out his other nifty tutorials as well.

You can download the Images2TGA from there. There's a nice user guide which comes with the tool which is really, really, helpful. The other tools are helpful as well such as PM2IM. AssetX is quite complex, but is helpful too if you want to delve into that plan on doing some reading first. I've used it a few times as it scripts some of the repair process.

Speaking of the repair group. This is strictly volunteer and there's a good handful of well seasoned Trainz users in that group. They repair, test, verify, then upload the assets. At this point in time, they've done a couple 1000 at least, but I've lost count.

Hope this helps. If you need help with anything, let us know. We'll jump in and help you!

anathoth71 said:

Is there by chance a good thread or website dedicated to this asset update program you speak of, so I can investigate and get an idea of what the primary differences between the 2010 era and TANE era assets are?

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See here:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/AM&C/Fixing_Assets
You need to wade through vast amounts of unnecessarily pompous verbiage, condescending irrelevancies and gratuitous insults in order to extract the pertinent detail, but it's all in there somewhere.

Be sure to right-click on any error message in T:ANE to get a synopsis of the problem, usually with an example fix.

What I did from 2010 was import routes and sessions only. save each into CDP and save to desktop, open Tane and import. These will have loads of missing assets which I get CM to list and then download them all. This way I only have the newest assets. Any missing afterwards I look for in 2010 and import.

SailorDan said:

See here:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/AM&C/Fixing_Assets
You need to wade through vast amounts of unnecessarily pompous verbiage, condescending irrelevancies and gratuitous insults in order to extract the pertinent detail, but it's all in there somewhere.

Be sure to right-click on any error message in T:ANE to get a synopsis of the problem, usually with an example fix.

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I have to disagree with your criticism of the writing style. I totally agree that previous Trainz documentation has indeed been pompous and incomprehensible but I find this to be quite readable. It's a matter of personal preference of course.☺
Mick

Mick_Berg said:

I have to disagree with your criticism of the writing style. I totally agree that previous Trainz documentation has indeed been pompous and incomprehensible but I find this to be quite readable. It's a matter of personal preference of course.☺
Mick

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Anything added by the newer contributors is generally intelligible and useful, and that is most of the technical detail. The difficult stuff is the original. For instance:

"Modifying an Alpha Mask for a light Licht.BMP into a streaked licht1-dot-BMP copy to replace missing mask file.png Modified AlhpaMask to fix asset giving only one, needing three. All three affect light patterns cast by lenses of a in-world simulated spotlight source. The base pattern can be discerned under quick and dirty 'hack' introducing individuality to this AlphaMask, and so to the lamps using it on the yard light tower asset to which it provides definition."

If anyone can make sense of that I congratulate them. This is not N3V sourced, and where you find similar convoluted descriptions in other documentation it comes from one source - the only Trainzer I now of who has been banned from the N3V WIKI. If you look at history you will see that there are many attempts to clean it up, but they are resisted, and some contributors have given up as a result.

SailorDan said:

Anything added by the newer contributors is generally intelligible and useful, and that is most of the technical detail. The difficult stuff is the original. For instance:

"Modifying an Alpha Mask for a light Licht.BMP into a streaked licht1-dot-BMP copy to replace missing mask file.png Modified AlhpaMask to fix asset giving only one, needing three. All three affect light patterns cast by lenses of a in-world simulated spotlight source. The base pattern can be discerned under quick and dirty 'hack' introducing individuality to this AlphaMask, and so to the lamps using it on the yard light tower asset to which it provides definition."

If anyone can make sense of that I congratulate them. This is not N3V sourced, and where you find similar convoluted descriptions in other documentation it comes from one source - the only Trainzer I now of who has been banned from the N3V WIKI. If you look at history you will see that there are many attempts to clean it up, but they are resisted, and some contributors have given up as a result.

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Reading that is like reading some Shakespearian play involving a witch's brew!

I suspect it's a Google translation from some German text. The giveaway is Licht, which means light.

JCitron said:

Speaking of the repair group. This is strictly volunteer

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Hehe, yes I know, my question was rhetorical. The remuneration N3V is offering for this asset repair service meets expectation perfectly !

Thanks to all for the tips and info, much appreciated. I have decided to follow Stagecoach's suggestion and import my primary route and see how it goes. It's big (I built a London to Lille route that was potentially part of N3V's Content Creation program when they first announced it years ago), with 4000 different assets, so we will see how many of those need fixing or updating. I haven't messed around with TANE'S surveyor module yet, but superelevation etc etc might present a time challenge, especially for high speed lines. (shivers)

Is there a formal procedure that must be followed in order to submit a fixed asset for the DLS? Contact with someone in N3V for example?

SailorDan said:

See here:
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trainz/AM&C/Fixing_Assets
You need to wade through vast amounts of unnecessarily pompous verbiage, condescending irrelevancies and gratuitous insults in order to extract the pertinent detail, but it's all in there somewhere.

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Favourited, thanks. ANY text we have to guide asset repair is a vast improvement on what was available in the early days - which was essentially ZILCH.

anathoth71 said:

Is there a formal procedure that must be followed in order to submit a fixed asset for the DLS? Contact with someone in N3V for example?

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Two things are needed: It needs to be identified as an eligible repair, and it needs to be tested and uploaded by someone in the CRG. If you post details in the forum it can be looked at. It must be faulty, however - that is, shows an error in T:ANE. The repair process is aimed at making the asset available for use in-game, not at 'improving' the original creators ideas.

BuilderBob said:

Two things are needed: It needs to be identified as an eligible repair, and it needs to be tested and uploaded by someone in the CRG.

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Ok, so for a guy in my position, there is no official list of assets to be worked through. It is a matter of selecting any particular asset (or family of assets that are similiar) that my TANE SP2 Content Manager marks as faulty, making a repair if an asset update doesn't fix it, then submitting it to one of you experienced gentlemen in the CRG for a test/peer review? And then the CRG member will use their access to N3V to get it onto the DLS. Is this a reasonable summary?

Also, I am yet to learn TANE's requirements, but are there any particular minimum standard such as shadows/seasons/LODs etc etc that a repaired asset must meet? Or is eliminating the FAULTY tag sufficient?

I think your summary covers it.

Note that if you have TS2010 assets that are faulty in TANE, they might have already been repaired. So before doing anything, be sure to check if an update is not already available. It could save you a lot of unnecessary frustration. They did well over 3000 assets so far already.

Also note that if the original asset did not originate from the DLS, the CRG won't be able to help you. They can only upload assets that are a) faulty in TANE and b) are on the DLS.

To my knowledge, the CRG could always use more active members, so if you love fixing things and you learned how...

anathoth71 said:

Also, I am yet to learn TANE's requirements, but are there any particular minimum standard such as shadows/seasons/LODs etc etc that a repaired asset must meet? Or is eliminating the FAULTY tag sufficient?

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Shadows: No longer something to worry about. You can remove the shadow mesh as TANE does the creation for you (though not as you leave it at a TS12 build).
Seasons: No requirement.
LOD: Lowest LOD should be 500 or less.

Though these are all covered by the warnings and errors.

Note that you could in many cases limit yourself to fixing the asset to work with build 3.6 (so effectively TS12) as those are accepted in TANE. This could save you a lot of work, especially if it comes to LOD.

oknotsen said:

To my knowledge, the CRG could always use more active members, so if you love fixing things and you learned how...

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Yes I learned how - the hard way. But only for assets up to the TS2010 level. I need to get up to speed for later assets.

For now, if I go down this path of doing a mass conversion to TANE (am importing/updating a test batch of assets now), I will make sure to keep records and share any asset repairs of DLS items with the Content Repair Group. In thinking about it, the fact that this repair program even exists makes the idea of going through with a mass conversion much, much more palatable, knowing that the community as a whole will derive a benefit. The duplication-of-effort that must have occurred over the years must be truly staggering.

Thanks for your answer, it is all good info. May I ask a couple of further questions?

Is it fair to say that ALL of the faults that the CRG has encountered so far, except for the mesh related ones, can be remedied by what is written in the "Fixing Assets" Wiki or PEV's tools I was referred to earlier? In other words, is it comprehensive?

Also, many of the asset fixes I did myself involved swapping faulty/missing dependencies for working dependencies. Things like bogies, sounds, even interiors at times. Is this kind of substitution fix permissable for complex assets like locomotives and wagons? Or is that messing with the original author's work excessively?

Thanks to all who responded to this thread, it is much appreciated, and helped me decide this issue.

As a test case for conversion 2010>TANE SP2 I imported a route with 4383 assets, counting the dependencies of the base session too. After updating FAULTY assets that happened to have an update available, only 161 are still tagged as FAULTY by TANE, and a bunch of those are third party payware that the CRG won't be interested in. That is VERY many less than I was thinking would be the case, so I have decided to go ahead with mass conversion to TANE, and get a repair program going for assets that don't have appropriate updates.

I have a suspicion that some of the repairs I made on some assets during the change from 2006>2010 have made them acceptable to TANE, so I am not sure what the best thing to do with this group of working assets tagged as MODIFIED by the content manager should be.

In any case, if I can make the appropriate arrangements with the CRG I should be able to supply a steady stream of repaired DLS assets over the next few months. May I ask if there is a particular user from the CRG that I can speak to about this, a point of contact perhaps? Private Message if you prefer.

anathoth71 said:

Thanks to all who responded to this thread, it is much appreciated, and helped me decide this issue.

As a test case for conversion 2010>TANE SP2 I imported a route with 4383 assets, counting the dependencies of the base session too. After updating FAULTY assets that happened to have an update available, only 161 are still tagged as FAULTY by TANE, and a bunch of those are third party payware that the CRG won't be interested in. That is VERY many less than I was thinking would be the case, so I have decided to go ahead with mass conversion to TANE, and get a repair program going for assets that don't have appropriate updates.

I have a suspicion that some of the repairs I made on some assets during the change from 2006>2010 have made them acceptable to TANE, so I am not sure what the best thing to do with this group of working assets tagged as MODIFIED by the content manager should be.

In any case, if I can make the appropriate arrangements with the CRG I should be able to supply a steady stream of repaired DLS assets over the next few months. May I ask if there is a particular user from the CRG that I can speak to about this, a point of contact perhaps? Private Message if you prefer.

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Good news on the content! I told you it wasn't so bad.

Contact Paul Cass, aka pcas1986, if you are interested in repairing content. A pm would work initially. There are some guidelines a process of course which needs to be followed, but like everything else it's not as bad you'll think it is.

JCitron said:

Good news on the content! I told you it wasn't so bad.

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You did indeed!

For the moment, since I am starting repairs right away, I will keep track of everything I repair that seems to be of DLS origin so I can give them to the CRG once arrangements are made. Will send PCAS a PM as you suggest. I look forward to contributing to this effort.

anathoth71 said:

Is it fair to say that ALL of the faults that the CRG has encountered so far, except for the mesh related ones, can be remedied by what is written in the "Fixing Assets" Wiki or PEV's tools I was referred to earlier? In other words, is it comprehensive?

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Most of the repairs are trivial, especially for the older assets where it is simply being updated to comply with a newer standard. You will always run into new issues, but they will mostly involve a variation on something that is documented somewhere. If it really is new, it gets added to the wiki.

anathoth71 said:

Also, many of the asset fixes I did myself involved swapping faulty/missing dependencies for working dependencies. Things like bogies, sounds, even interiors at times. Is this kind of substitution fix permissable for complex assets like locomotives and wagons?

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The preference should be to fix the dependency. Sounds, for instance, should all be fixable. Bogies are sensitive, because some creators are very particular about the vehicle being prototypical, and interiors might fall into that category also. Substitution should be considered a last resort. A question also arises where textures are missing. Some can be adequately guessed at - others are too critical to permit guessing.

SailorDan said:

Most of the repairs are trivial

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Music to one's ears!

SailorDan said:

The preference should be to fix the dependency

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Copy that.

It's good to know substitution is still viable as a last resort though. I suppose if the original creator is watching the DLS closely enough to object about a CRG repair job, he/she may be inclined to re-update it to TANE anyway. Thanks for the answers!