YoRyan, on 09 July 2020 - 12:43 AM, said:
Dave, the properties you propose seem better suited to a new activity format. Activity designers would want to control things like fuel and cargo levels. There are no doubt some data tags that belong in the consist format, but perhaps not very many, since a single consist can expect to be spawned many times during the same session.
I agree entirely.
The issue here is whether or not there is utility in having defaults and if so will the task of over-writing them be an acceptable process. Not having defaults means all of that data needs to recorded in the Activity file area yet those files would only up updated (or append) data to other objects. IMO this really needs a GUI based editor driving transactions -- Pick a train from this list (a routine step), ok now here is the list of locomotives and the attributes you might want to (must) provide new values, here is the list of cars in that train etc, etc, here is the next train.... Defaults could greatly minimize that task. Or not. At this stage it is hard to tell. In this case my role is to put the question on the table.
FWIW, some time ago Chris and I discussed using .inc files to alter a .con file as it is read into the loader. I think it is in the developing features forum. It might be a more straightforward way to accomplish things and a different .inc could be specified for each spawning..
I suppose the second factor to consider is which object inside the program will all of those variables newly added to activity file wind up? I suspect in places like the train, engine and wagon objects. That doesn't require the same attributes to also be in the original flat files but there might be some good-enough reason to have them.