I'll try to answer all your queries but, for the benefit of people who are not familiar with the code submitted and discussed on GitHub, I will provide some background.
The animated clocks that Jonas has implemented in OR_NewYear_MG work well but introduce a new data file openrails\clocks.dat. It's been ORMT policy for some years that new data files should make use of JSON instead of Microsoft's STF because JSON is well-documented and an international standard. Rob Roeterdink used JSON for the Weather files (back in 2019) and I'm sorry that I didn't mention this policy to Jonas at the time.
To include Jonas work into the official Open Rails code, I have provided a data conversion mechanism that offers to create a JSON file from the clocks.dat if one is found or more recent. The official Open Rails code will read any JSON file and ignore any clocks.dat file.
Please note that we only need the conversion because there may now be a few routes which include animated clocks.
jonas, on 14 April 2021 - 09:52 PM, said:
Since animate.clocks-or is a new OR-only file and applies to the whole route, it is written to the Routes folder. This is not the case with every JSON file.
jonas, on 14 April 2021 - 09:52 PM, said:
There are no proposals to do that, because "carspawn.dat" is part of MSTS and not an OR-only file.
jonas, on 14 April 2021 - 09:52 PM, said:
The policy declared on our website is that Open Rails will not change your data files, so we need to ask for permission. It only happens if your route has a clocks.dat but not a more recent animated.clocks-or and only happens once, so I don't think it will be a burden.
jonas, on 14 April 2021 - 09:52 PM, said:
As we have declared in the past, all MSTS STF files will be recognised by future versions of OR. It is just new types of STF file that we will not be adopting.
jonas, on 14 April 2021 - 09:52 PM, said:
There are examples of Rob's weather file here. JSON is documented fairly simply here.