Never will I download

I hate those.

Even things I've made that you can't see, like a whistle or a library, I take a minute and make a thumbnail for.

kuid_204652_101030.jpg


kuid2_204652_100336_3.jpg


kuid_204652_100964.jpg
 
There are a few authors who, to put it bluntly, are lazy.
The thumbnail is the main source of knowing what a download contains when the languages in the usernames are strange.
In my country there is a proverb : A picture is worth a thousand words.
 
Almost as bad are those "mass thumbnails". For example, a creator has made a large set of road signs of different designs and sizes, etc. The thumbnail contains an image of all of them and while you can see "roughly" what you might be downloading, you do not know exactly what each individual asset will contain. This can be made worse when the description supplied with each asset is vague and unhelpful. That is also laziness.
 
Yes!!!

Plops down 22 street signs. Takes a screenshot of them as a group. Uses the screen shot for all 22 assets. Gives them all the description "US Highway sign" and names them "Highway Roadside Sign 1" thru "Highway Roadside Sign 22"

And just to top it off, in game they are all "Highway Ro..."
 
How about the Russian Catanery! 100's of downloads with obscure descriptions down to every nut and bolt and wire stringer - why can't they make some whole assets with the bits and peices already attached?????
 
That case I'd be happy to get the cheat sheet that the author must surely have. Or at least a 1 board demo route showing how it all fits together.
 
I don't download those either. When I have because they're dependencies and when there's not a lot of them, I ended up previewing them then creating a new thumbnail so at least I know what I'm looking at in Content Manager. Many of the assets are quite nice but without a description and thumbnail of what they look like it's a pig in a poke as they used to say.
 
If you spend hours, days or months of creating content, you sure are going to spend 2 minutes to put a decent thumb on your great creation.

No thumb tells me the person only spends seconds on creating it if creating a thumb is too much work; it must be junk.

So yeah, not downloading if it has no thumb.

Should even be an error (if it isn't already) when trying to upload in my opinion.
 
If I understand the situation correctly, the thumbnail container is required for Trainz build 3.5 which was the minimum build accepted by the DLS. But for some reason, backwards compatibility of dependencies I think, the DLS now accepts lower build uploads but they are kept offline until the volunteers of the CRG are able to bring them up to build 3.5 standards. I assume that the CRG guys who are badly overworked as it is, have a default thumbnail container that they paste into the asset which references a default image they also add to the asset. Whether that is the "This asset has no preview image" image or not I do not know. Maybe Malc will pop in and let us know.
 
The thing is, the thumbnails stanza does not appear to be strictly required (except maybe for upload?) in CM. I would get faulty assets that had a thumbnail stanza pointing to a missing "Screenshot.jpg" or "icon.jpg". For a while, I would create one using the Trainz Mesh Viewer, but after a while I discovered I could just delete the thumbnails stanza from the config.txt file, and submit edits. No longer faulty in CM. If they ever start requiring that, I will have some work to do.
 
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... I assume that the CRG guys who are badly overworked as it is, have a default thumbnail container that they paste into the asset which references a default image they also add to the asset. Whether that is the "This asset has no preview image" image or not I do not know. Maybe Malc will pop in and let us know.

I suspect the asset Dave mentioned was one of 40 sound assets I fixed last week. There are another ten to go. They all had no thumbnail so I just plugged in the default provided by AssetX. If you read the thumbnail it literally says there is no thumbnail.

The CRG has a requirement to not change the author's intent but obviously to clear validation errors we need to do something. The assets don't belong to the CRG so imagining some thumbnail and then draw/painting is not part of our task IMHO. Our task is to repair them so others can use them. For those who gripe about these things, try having test each whistle in all the versions from TS12 through to TRS22.

Those assets are actually quite nice U.S. steam loco whistle/horn sounds.

p.s. The final ten assets will also have the same thumbnail.
 
Yes, the other classic is the "This is a no thumbnail thumbnail"

That was started by the late Bendorsey when he got annoyed at having to update a very large number of his older assets that hadn't got thumbnails, back in TS12 I think, however it was usually obvious from the asset name and description what the items were.

Generic wouldn't be so bad if there was a description as to what it was or it was clear from the assets name.

Uninformative name, no thumbnail and no description I avoid.
 
Let me add to the annoyance list:

A series of objects (pavement for example) that are named pavement01 thru pavementNN, when they should have been named pavement60mx120m and so forth. So, you download them all. Now you have them but still no idea of the size of each, so you waste time plopping each one to see which will fit that particular location. In this example, thumbnail pics are useless since they all look the same. Better naming conventions should have been used.
 
... Those assets are actually quite nice U.S. steam loco whistle/horn sounds.

p.s. The final ten assets will also have the same thumbnail.

In the case of non-visible assets this makes sense, I didnt think that was what this was about.
 
To play devil's advocate.

Content creators spend hours making usable assets, but users aren't prepared to spend minutes to find precisely what they want. It seems like the creators get the thin edge of the wedge all the time.
 
Multiply those minutes by the number of assets to wade thru and its not minutes anymore.

Downloading to see it (esp with no FCT) then seeing it, checking the next one, it adds up.
 
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