K I N D - What is the meaning?

boleyd

Well-known member
Is this some formal language for a specific use or just an in-house title?
I stopped at COBOL Common Business Oriented Language........:cool:
 
from the TrainzWiki
KIND data types

The main article for this topic is: KIND TrainzBaseSpec, which details required tags, containers and place in the Trainz Data Heirarchy.

The KIND data type defined in an assets config.txt files explicitly defines which other (data type) entries are needed in that particular assets config.txt file to the various Trainz game engine software modules. The config.txt and it's associated (independent*) files together define the self-defining software describing the asset and it's functionality to the game engine.

Certain KINDs are dependent upon other KIND assets, others are stand-alone. Asset KINDs are thus the entry which technologically defines the asset or sub-asset's type, scope, and needs.

KIND definitions further tell TRAINZ how to process and render the specific asset item correctly, and render it into 3D graphics models.
 
The Wiki page at https://online.ts2009.com/mediaWiki/index.php/KIND_TrainzBaseSpec#KIND_Hierarchy lists all the KINDs.

Some examples:

KIND Traincar defines the common characteristics of all rolling stock, locos, etc.
KIND Map defines the characteristics of a route that can be loaded and edited in Surveyor
KIND Hornsound defines the characteristics of all loco whistle and horn sounds
KIND Scenery defines the characteristics of all assets that can be placed in a route by Surveyor

and so on.
 
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The chumper I opened recently didn't contain the KUID number. I'm no trained chump expert, but I assumed they have the KUID's too.
 
But why “.chump”? The fact that it’s 5 letters long instead of the usual 3 suggests a clumsy abbreviation for something, or a lame attempt at a joke.
 
A "quickie search" of the Internet threw up some interesting interpretations of "CHUMP".

Here is a representative sample:-

The CHUMP file extension indicates to your device which app can open the file. However, different programs may use the CHUMP file type for different types of data.

Donald Chump Let's face facts. You're further destroying the world. Didn't think it could get much worse than Bush. Who was an inferior scared coke induced little girl. Your mental instabilities are showing. Surrounded yourself with people scared to tell you the truth . You and your family a dark wall cloud.

CHUMP (for: Cheap Homebrew Understandable Minimal Processor) is a tiny 4 bits processor intended to be implemented with less than 10 TTL chips. from my experience i never saw more simplistic Do it Yourself processor.

... and a surprising number of references to Trainz but this is likely to be the result of the search algorithm recognising that many of my searches are Trainz related. Here is one

The chump file is an internal file that you should NEVER attempt to edit. If you corrupt it you will have to rebuild the asset. My ArchiveIndex utility is mainly for looking at archives, and cdp's. The fact that it can open chump files is "accidental".. they are the same basic format as cdp's and archives.
 
There goes the can of worms. Politics and TRAINZ don't mix and isn't allowed. We have different political views and it's a hot bed topic.

BTW.......CHUMP is what Fred Sanford used to call his son-in-law, Lamont.
 
Chump is probably a binary version of a config. As such it would much faster to load in game than parsing the text version. No idea why it is called a chump but programmers are notorious for making up words for things not previously defined. IM files contain chunks for example.

KIND is a bit like an object definition as in object oriented programming.
 
Chump is probably a binary version of a config. As such it would much faster to load in game than parsing the text version. No idea why it is called a chump but programmers are notorious for making up words for things not previously defined. IM files contain chunks for example.

KIND is a bit like an object definition as in object oriented programming.

Paul, being a binary version of a config, do you know why it doesn't contain the KUID number ?
 
Paul, being a binary version of a config, do you know why it doesn't contain the KUID number ?

If it is a config.chump, it will contain the kuid number. In fact it will contain the entire contents of the corresponding config.txt file. I have a utility called ArchiveIndex that can, amongst other things, extract the contents of .chump files.

Other .chump files contain different information. For example, I found one called datacache.chump which carried no config info, but had stuff like this in it;




http://dlslists.auran.com/dumpv2/daily/20210307.txt.gz
{
cachefilename "2i4hlkl13.gz"
datedownloaded "1615322652"
datelastreferenced "1615322652"
cachestate 3
cachefilesize 1790
}
http://dlslists.auran.com/dumpv2/daily/20210308.txt.gz
{
cachefilename "bj7noj6e4.gz"
datedownloaded "1615322654"
datelastreferenced "1615322654"
cachestate 3
cachefilesize 1965
}
http://dlslists.auran.com/dumpv2/daily/20210309.txt.gz
{
cachefilename "ns5jhga85.gz"
datedownloaded "1615322655"
datelastreferenced "1615322655"
cachestate 3
cachefilesize 4572
}
http://dlslists.auran.com/dumppayware/daily/20210309.txt.gz
{
cachefilename "akpbl7hd6.gz"
datedownloaded "1615322658"
datelastreferenced "1615322658"
cachestate 3
cachefilesize 390
}
http://www.auran.com/games/gamefiles/trainz/scripts/recordmanager/../../dlsfiles/recordmanager/dumpv2/weekly/20210310.txt.gz
{
cachefilename "mlvv2wcs3.gz"
datedownloaded "1615345215"
datelastreferenced "1615345215"
cachestate 3
cachefilesize 13639
}


.
 
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Paul, being a binary version of a config, do you know why it doesn't contain the KUID number ?
It probably does but not in a form you can read in a plain text editor.

The kuid, and most other numbers, is likely encoded as a raw binary number which would not be obvious in a normal editor. Programmers use a data type called strings to represent text for humans to understand. For coding purposes "1234" is not the same as 1234. The first is a string and the second a number. A config.txt is a string or plain text file.

I think PEV's tools can read chump files. TBH, I've never needed to look at one.
 
P.S. KUIDs such as "kuid2:186372:00001:2" are possibly extracted into a data structure that notes the author number, the asset number, and the asset version. The colons are probably there as delimiters to help parsing/extraction.
 
.chump files appear to be compressed files.

I took a look at a config.chump and compared that to a config.txt file from the same route. The decompressed route has a config.txt file of 364 KB where as the chump equivalent is 192 KB

I agree with Tony. We have no reason to open these up.
 
It probably does but not in a form you can read in a plain text editor.

The kuid, and most other numbers, is likely encoded as a raw binary number which would not be obvious in a normal editor. Programmers use a data type called strings to represent text for humans to understand. For coding purposes "1234" is not the same as 1234. The first is a string and the second a number. A config.txt is a string or plain text file.

I think PEV's tools can read chump files. TBH, I've never needed to look at one.

Thanks Paul,
That explains why I didn't see it.
 
In other words, you were reading too much into it, Kind is not an acronym. But what is chump?

Well, given that according to the really old Trainz 1.3/04 era technical manual KUID is an acronym ('Koolthingz Unique Identifier'), there is a possibility 'KIND' is also one, although said guides were somewhat coy on the subject (but still wrote 'KIND' in all capitals suggesting it is). And I suppose 'CHUMP' is probably the same! The mystery remains! :D
 
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