The futility of packaging

dangavel

Well-known member
Someone sent me a WIP route not on the DLS which he has made in TRS2022 . I installed 2022 on a separate drive as I'm working on a route in 2019 and don't want to update it. I of course found there were 91 UNKNOWN assets and most likely they are all contained within packaged routes, so here i am again downloading many routes just to find if those 91 assets are all contained within the built in routes.

But its even worse than it was in 2019 as now I'm confronted by a huge list of DLC items, i cant find a way to sort them into paid or free routes, or even alphabetically.

So I have been trawling through a seemingly endless list in order to try and find the route most likely to contain UK assets, I cross reference with 2019 to see what installed on there but there are still some routes i didn't install, as well as the new ones in 2022 and I'm now, after two hours ,down to 61 missing assets from over 90, not great progress.

I can see why NV3 want to stick a bunch of DLC content under my nose, but its darned infuriating to have to work my way through it all as well as downloading gadzillions of assets that i will probably never use or need in order to find 90 odd items. Whoever thought up this system needs a good dressing down and to be drummed out of the organisation after a jolly good thrashing ! ( he says, reverting to angry English colonel stereotype) but honestly , this is a total farce , I just installed another two routes and only found one unknown asset !!!! .

Also ,if you scroll through the list to look for other items, , you lose the progress download of the route that is downloading and one then has to scroll through it all over again to find out how many more gigabytes there are to download, . Atrocious design, not one aspect of user friendliness in sight, its almost as if its deliberately been made to make you want to tear your hair out. in addition , there is a search option but one can only see it if the list window has been expanded, there's ample room for it to display if its only partially open but that option hadn't been thought through by whoever created the dropdown .

What is SO annoying is I never have time to drive any of these routes anyway , so its as total waste of time and downloads, fortunately i have fast internet and unlimited downloads but not everyone falls into that category. Whats even MORE annoying is that now we have PBR applied there are now many more items that are measured in many megabytes, so it all takes longer, even though internet speeds are faster.

Not happy. Not happy at all. I wouldn't mind so much if the assets werent displayed as UNKNOWN, surely there must be a way where you could search for them and find them on the database, not this endless searching that all too often doesnt produce any results.
 
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N3V at the very least should indicate on the CM what package the unknown asset is in. Even then, it requires the user to download it in its entirety. This is a massively inefficient and user-unfriendly system. They claim they operate on a slim margin, which I do not doubt, so why have a system that aggravates and perhaps drives away a few more users?
 
Actually had a similar experience porting my WIP routes across from 19 into 22. Showing up in 22 as missing assets so a bit of Russian Roulette installing the DLC to pick up the assets.

I have said before there needs to be a means of identifying when building a route if the asset is attached to a payware route and can either be clearly listed in the readme as a requirement or ignored and not used. All the content from TRS19, the additional routes with TRS22 (very nice) and using the Steam version Murchison and Avery to Drexel once again in my collection means potential users of my routes or layouts ending up not having all the assets and even I myself won't have a clue which route they actually came from.

Not really sure what the solution is, maybe in the past it was suggested the assets from payware routes especially the older ones like Murchison, Avery, S&C etc. should be on the DLS anyway.
 
Maybe we could make the suggestion that "packaged" and "payware" assets show up in the object selector in orange text or something.
 
Maybe we could make the suggestion that "packaged" and "payware" assets show up in the object selector in orange text or something.

While in edit route, create a search filter by clicking on the + below the space for typing text:
Payware = false
Locally Modified = false
Packaged = false
Built in = false

Name it DLS Only and when objects, trains, tracks or textures tabs are opened, only items on the DLS or Base will show.
cheers
Graeme
 
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