What happened with ianwoodmore's TARDIS project ?

I think the Time Lords put a time lock on it forcing Ian and Jo Grant to be stuck in 1969 where they ride around in a bright yellow car named Betsy.
 
Well, the obvious answer is he lost interest. Ian is still around the forum, maybe he will pop by if he can tear himself away from Jo.
 
TARDIS WIP for sixteen years now. Every time I think it is ready the goalposts shift.

When ANDI (Andi06) died we lost a brilliant designer.
PETER (PEV) was authorised to be guardian of AssetX, but gradually he drifted away to build lovely guitars and enjoy his grandchildren.
PAUL (pcas) had made a valuable contribution in linking to Trainz, but now is working hard with the rest of CRG to repair faulty assets one by one.
While I'm a member of CRG I generally work on my own to develop a means of automating Trainz Asset Repair. Someday!

I'm 87 next year. and no i've not lost interest in making TARDIS so that everyone in the Trainz Community can use it without fear of corrupting their Trainz Assets.

It's been sixteen years with illness, hospitalisations, and broken hip causing multiple hiatus', the latest being shingles the day NZ went into full COVID lockdown and I had to walk 2 km to A&E in the pre-dawn of a Sunday. Spooky with not a human or vehicle in sight. Two years later as NZ slowly opens its borders to the world again I have a nerve pain and brain fog caused by the Shingles that requires continuing medication, maybe for the rest of my life.

I have rebuilt TARDIS seven times now, each time better than the last. But the Trainz simulator keeps bringing new requirements for which I have to adapt TARDIS. Huge milestone in Apr 2022!!! I now have the complete DLS downloaded along with ~40 DLC also. So that's a 600k+ TAD and after removing OBSOLETES I have 430k+ of assets as my workbench for testing TARDIS. Along the way I have been stimied by small HDDs in my test rig with a baloonong Trainz. Alas my beast of a computer has died and it may not be possible to revive it. I bought a MiniPC Ryzen 7 4500U with 1 TB SSD. At last I have a 10TB HDD with a USB C Gen 2 of which TS22, in conjunction with my TAD, takes up 5TB at the moment. Pretty good rig for Content Management but the inbuilt APU reduces my ability to check proper rendering of moving images. Still works OK but with more jitter than I care for. Currently I am trying to UPversion all legacy assets from the range of TB 1.0 through to TB 3.7 (TRS12) while downloading each day's DLS changes, then processing them in TARDIS/PEVTOOLS/AssetX. At the same time repairing what I can of TANE/TRS19/CS22. NO fibre in apartment so WIFI Broadband.

Passing thoughts on current state of Trainz:

1. VE109: The low-detail meshes total more than 500 polygons. This may have a negative impact on performance: 0: 1737, 1: 846

I'm seeing far too many new assets, or UPversioned assets, that are faulty at TB 4.6 because they exceed the mesh polygon limits and if you count the warnings on legacy assets this is many thousands of unuseable assets. Only the Author can fix these. It would be helpfull if N3V developed a builtin filter so we can cast these assets into the too hard tray. Perhaps a filter with a dropdown menu based on VE codes.

2. A particular nuisance are assets that have this tag missing at TB 3.8 or higher, or if it exists has a null value:

VE60: Required tag 'mesh-table-lod-transition-distances' was missing and has been set to default.

3. Packaged/Builtin/Base assets that can't be modified by the user, or CRG. Increases every new build of Trainz.

4. The lack of compliance with the spec in 3, hidden in N3V assets. Not good enough.

5. Any assets that are on the DLS. Change the license tag to Freeware in compliance with CREATIVE COMMONS.

See @https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/


When will TARDIS be ready for Community use? Don't know!

For my personal use it saves a hellava lot of repetitive fault finding and repair but currently TARDIS is like the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff whereas we need a first aid post at the top.

In TRS2009 we had a builtin equiv of TARDIS as an adjunct to Content Manager (CM).

If N3V can and does generate faults and warnings notices about asset non-compliance, and then notifies the user that they have programmatically set it to the default value, why can't it be automatically repaired within CM.

Ian
 
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After reading this thread . I was humbled greatly by all you've done . 16 years . WOW . But I have to disagree with one statement . With all that your doing , this would make you 87 years young . I often say . It's the not the age , it's the mileage. Trainz keep me young .

Matt
 
Ian,

AssetX and PEV tools generally are getting less and less applicable with every new edition of Trainz and are not going to be updated. You have found it impossible to keep up with the changes too. Would it be feasible then to release TARDIS with a caveat that it is only built to deal with Trainz versions from 1.0 to something like 4.5? Beyond those builds, some of its scripts may still work, but they may not.

I fear that if you don't do something along these lines, we will see nothing for the effort you've put into this. Don't let perfection be the enemy of the good.

Deane
 
I agree with Deane that AssetX is getting to be beyond its best by date. Paul said as much too.
Similarly I have been thinking about release with a caveat on its usefullness in TANE/TRS19/TS22.

Currently I'm working on maximising TARDIS capability at TB 3.7 and have UPversioned all legacy assets that are not locked in builtin or packaged assets. While the current AssetX is not going to get any improvements, I can and have worked around these limitations as the TARDIS scripting goes further into the repair process than Andi intended. His processing was geared to working on assets one at a time rather than batch. TARDIS,on the other hand, is focussed on repairing assets a thousand/hour or more at a time. As long as Trainz is backwards compatible the majority of Faults and Warnings are just as much applicable for all assets of Trainz regardless of the Trainz version. I'm currently running TARDIS quite comfortably in TS22.

I have some cleaning up to do with some of my scripts having unexpected results. eg I have a script that repairs the missing name tag in the kind name mesh effect. Not supposed to do this in the other mesh effects but it does.

Similarly, there is supposed to be one jpg thumbnail with a 240/180 image size. But in many legacy assets jpg was used in the main and attached images and textures. In later versions of Trainz we have new sizes for additional jpg thumbnail images. And now png images are occuring in both main and thumbnail as are PBR textures and Trainzmesh mesh images. AssetX and PEVTOOLS don't cover these. I'll need to integrate other external editors for the newer stuff at a later date.
 
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First, hats off to you and all those who are helping to make Trainz a better hobby.

That said, I'm slowly coming around to the point-of-view that Trainiz used to be a fun place to pass the time and create both objects and routes to my hearts content, limited only by my imagination. With each new version, it appears to be less fun and more work. It used to be: install, turn on and enjoy. Now, too often it is install, turn on and spend time fixing warnings and errors. For some this might be an interesting challenge but for many, this is a PITA. Yes, I still see some people showing fantastic routes, more power to them. As for the rest of us, ... .

I've recently been dabbling in another sim, no not that one, it's a transportation sim that also includes trains. While train specific operations leave a lot to be desired and the overall game world space is rather confining, the simplicity of the implementation, the visual look and the ease playing, make it a very appealing game. True, from a train perspective, it does some rather silly things, but the fun factor tends to blur that. Now if only the best of it and Trainz could be combined into one game, that would be a winner. We can dream. LOL

Meanwhile, back to reality. If error checking can identify a problem, it would be nice it it would also offer one of more solutions that the user can pick and then proceed to implement it. Thereby avoiding new syntax errors but not making things worse by fixing the wrong thing. I know it's a big ask, but if it could be done, I and I'm sure many others would be thankful. I suppose the more efficient solution would be to fix all the errors at the source on the DLS but that would open a whole other can of worms. And then there are the 3rd party sites.
 
....

Meanwhile, back to reality. If error checking can identify a problem, it would be nice it it would also offer one of more solutions that the user can pick and then proceed to implement it. ...

It already does, but not very well. Any VE error reported by validation is a hot link to the Trainz WiKi where, if you are lucky, you may find a solution that matches your problem. Some of those WiKi pages are probably still blank.

Most, if not all, assets I have repaired for the CRG have been achieved by using AssetX and its macros. For example, I can think of one batch of 700 or so assets dumped on the DLS by one author and all they needed was a bump to the Trainz Build to 3.5 and a tidy up of the older tags. This would be typical of the work carried out by Ian's TARDIS system. The difference is that the CRG must carry out independent testing to avoid some of the DLS repair issues of the past. If you are repairing assets just for personal use then TARDIS would be a good solution.
 
Just a comment about AssetX and my PEVSoft tools.

AssetX is a project that Andi06 (Andi Smith) and I put together in the TS2009 days. Most of the smarts in it were from Andi and I provided the Trainz files decodes which I had worked out (with help) just after TS2006. Hence I was able to make Images2TGA and MeshViewer to suit the various trains files of that time. So my tools and AssetX were fully up to date with Trainz data right up to TS12.

When TANE came along N3V were not willing to share file formats with me any longer. (And rightly so if you wish to maintain a commercial advantage.) So as more new file formats came in my software was left behind. I was able to figure out quite a bit until the FBX transition to trainzmesh.

Additionally to compile AssetX, many additional code libraries had to be added to the standard Delphi 7 compiler. Delphi 7 is now over 20 years old and of course is 32 bit. The latest 64 bit compilers do not suit many of the added libraries so I was never able to up date AssetX to 64 bit. So unfortunately we are stuck with out dated code that now cannot be updated.. And of course I am no longer participating in the day to day stuff in Trainz.

Ian's Tardis suite is a set of AssetX scripts that fix many config.txt problems as well as texture connections and formats. Like Paul, I have used it to fix hundreds of faulty assets over the years.

Thank you all for your support over many years.
Regards to all.
 
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