[Amtrak115]

This basically a continuation of the thread "New TrackViewer"

http://www.elvastowe...ew-trackviewer/

but wanted this separate to capture comments specifically about the screen shots etc, I'm showing in the referenced video. This is a concept/Design...Preliminary to say the least for an Activity Editor with the codebase of Openrails...or ORTS.... I started ...now a couple of years ago looking at the code for Openrails....I'm not a C# programmer but an old school straight line programmer before Object-Oriented languages were around...but I understand the concepts....So it's taken me a while to walk my way through the code....sometimes scratching my head at things I see...but trying to figure out how things work....Anyway....I decided to start looking at Trackviewer as a basis for doing Activity Editing....The video referenced in the link below is basically an update to where I'm at with a preliminary design for an ORTS Activity Editor. After viewing the video...about 15 minutes long...if you have any comments, criticisms, suggestions, or if you think that I shouldn't continue...please add them below....

My thanks to PerpetualKid for kindly helping me along this journey...the first part of the video is basically his work.

Now on to the Video...
https://rumble.com/v...ity-editor.html

[Stephen]

Hi Amtrak115,

As an activity creator I find that the current TSRE Activity is sadly lacking as a stand alone editor and your version looks as though it will be excellent when finished. The TSRE Consist Editor in my opinion is the best available so far and would fit in very well with your Trackviewer/Activity Editor when it's available for general use.

Keep up the good work,

Stephen

[septf]

Too bad "rumble.com" seems to be banned in France, you can put your video on another platform

This is the message when I want to start the video :

Because of French government demands to remove creators from our platform, Rumble is currently unavailable in France. We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon.

[Amtrak115]

septf, on 27 March 2023 - 07:04 AM, said:

Too bad "rumble.com" seems to be banned in France, you can put your video on another platform

This is the message when I want to start the video :

Because of French government demands to remove creators from our platform, Rumble is currently unavailable in France. We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon.

here's a link to youtube.... https://www.youtube....eature=youtu.be

[Weter]

Thanks, Barry.
I wish You success!
If only Looky is still in mood, I hope, he'd join your colab and help.

[Genma Saotome]

Very, very interesting, lots of potential. Please get to the finish line, lots of people will be very grateful.

Various thoughts, no particular order:

Objects, a.k.a. loose "consists". I've been agitating for years now to abandon MSTS loose cars and simply use a consist file. Consider, why would anyone want to place 9 individual cars on a long spur when one consist file does the trick? A handful of 2 , 3, or 4 cars as consists are easily placed in many activities but a PITA if you have 5 activities on that route that need the same 18 loose cars.

Question: after starting a new path can you jump to the far end of the route, place the end, see the resulting suggestion, and then upon further review throw switches at sidings to change the middle of the path?

Consist editor: Needs to be a scrolling window and the program must be able to interpreter both .inc and .fa files.

Question: Did you retain the ability of the user to select colors to apply (e.g., black for track, gray for roads, blue for signals, whatever, as is possible in the current tool)? We don't need hundreds of colors but a dozen or so would serve well enough.

Another item of agitation on my part is to allow an activity creator the ability to suppress unwanted sprite text that goes with the f7 key. If you are spotting a car at just 1 spur in a town you might only want 2 or 3 of the dozen or more sprites to display. If you offer a list of all sprite text, have a turn all on/off toggle and also allow individual line items to be turned off/on then you have the basis for a complete file to use for that activity instead of the default you-get-em-all file. Using this activity sprite file would require a change to OR but that might be modest. This new file would need to be named with the activity name and use a new file suffix. It is my opinion the reason this hasn't been dealt with is nobody had a place to "hang" the selection screen... you do.

Event/location: AFAIK all real engineers must be qualified to run the route before they're allowed to do it w/o supervision. I always thought a "Training" activity that does coaching would be very, very nice (I don't know why it has never been done). Consider messages like "Ok, the grade drops in about 1/2 mile, get ready to add a couple of pounds of air to the brakes".

File locations for .json. IMO it is very, very important for all files specific for a route be held in the routes own directories (or in the case of global shapes and sounds, in the contents own directories) and not some out of the way place identified by Microsoft. These are OUR files. FWIW I will say the same for all screenshots.

Final thought: Love the screen background. I rotate display of about a hundred images like the one shown below (4k):

[Weter]

ЕF2000?

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upon further review throw switches at sidings to change the middle of the path?

With ordinary TrackViewer You can even drag path to parallel sidings, where needed.

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all real engineers must be qualified to run the route before they're allowed to do it w/o supervision

Here it's so. MSTS had, at least ITR... It would be cool to make different ITR-like rides plots by ourselves.

[Amtrak115]

Genma Saotome, on 27 March 2023 - 12:34 PM, said:

Objects, a.k.a. loose "consists".

Agree Dave, in fact TSRE only allows consists...even if you have to make a one car consist. I have a few ideas that are circulating around in my head about these....one that I've asked about before...is Why is an entire consist reloaded into the activity file when really all we need is a reference to the consist file.

Genma Saotome, on 27 March 2023 - 12:34 PM, said:

Question: after starting a new path can you jump to the far end of the route, place the end, see the resulting suggestion, and then upon further review throw switches at sidings to change the middle of the path?

Yes....I just haven't updated my local system get all the trackeditor changes PerpetualKid has put in. I was talking with him earlier today about my needing to update my local system.

Genma Saotome, on 27 March 2023 - 12:34 PM, said:

Consist editor: Needs to be a scrolling window and the program must be able to interpreter both .inc and .fa files.

Understand...have been thinking about the .inc files....and have look at a few threads where there are some examples.... .fa files...I don't know what those are...you have to help me with that one.

Genma Saotome, on 27 March 2023 - 12:34 PM, said:

Question: Did you retain the ability of the user to select colors to apply (e.g., black for track, gray for roads, blue for signals, whatever, as is possible in the current tool)? We don't need hundreds of colors but a dozen or so would serve well enough.

Yes, I think...just off the top of my head...it's under "Preferences" on the menu bar.....

Genma Saotome, on 27 March 2023 - 12:34 PM, said:

Another item of agitation on my part is to allow an activity creator the ability to suppress unwanted sprite text that goes with the f7 key. If you are spotting a car at just 1 spur in a town you might only want 2 or 3 of the dozen or more sprites to display. If you offer a list of all sprite text, have a turn all on/off toggle and also allow individual line items to be turned off/on then you have the basis for a complete file to use for that activity instead of the default you-get-em-all file. Using this activity sprite file would require a change to OR but that might be modest. This new file would need to be named with the activity name and use a new file suffix. It is my opinion the reason this hasn't been dealt with is nobody had a place to "hang" the selection screen... you do.

I believe you and I have had a conversation about this before...and I have a note on my list...that says something like "Dave/Sprites" so yes it's on my list

Genma Saotome, on 27 March 2023 - 12:34 PM, said:

Event/location: AFAIK all real engineers must be qualified to run the route before they're allowed to do it w/o supervision. I always thought a "Training" activity that does coaching would be very, very nice (I don't know why it has never been done). Consider messages like "Ok, the grade drops in about 1/2 mile, get ready to add a couple of pounds of air to the brakes".

hmmm...this would be a bear to create as a 3rd party....maybe....take a path and have a list of location events auto-generated every time is sees a crossing, speed change, signal something like that for a start that could then be edited manually to add more details....have to think about that one....

Genma Saotome, on 27 March 2023 - 12:34 PM, said:

File locations for .json.

I was somewhat hesitant to put that in...but the more I thought about...we need to start thinking that way. I had two thoughts on that....storing the JSON file within the Openrails subdirectory say within Activities....One issue with that is we are currently using that as an Openrails extension area... the other thought initially create a JSON subdirectory within say the activity Directory...of course there would be one in the paths, services,traffic...etc... The final thought was just put them in the same directory...since they will have a .json or something like that extention.

Genma Saotome, on 27 March 2023 - 12:34 PM, said:

Final thought: Love the screen background.

Thanks I do the same...

[Weter]

FA are freight animations.
Since TSM didn't allow high-polygonal models, having limit, detailed models were assembled with a model and one to three submodels.
Freight animation was a workaround for doing that.

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take a path and have a list of location events auto-generated every time is sees a crossing, speed change, signal something like that

In that is driver assistant's work, and later - auto-informer device, announcing items like crossing, speed limit, signal with feemale's voice.

[Genma Saotome]

re: include statements

Amtrak115, on 27 March 2023 - 02:13 PM, said:

Understand...have been thinking about the .inc files....and have look at a few threads where there are some examples.... .fa files...I don't know what those are...you have to help me with that one.

The idea behind include files is very simple: when you see the word Include() whatever is inside the parenthesis is a path and file name (to a .inc file) for a set of normal parameters for the type of file that holds the word Include. So for a .eng (parent) file the commands would be proper for an .eng file and nothing else. Using the Include statement let's me put the parameters shared across several parent files into the shared .inc files and thereby reducing the parent file to only what is going to be unique. Many of my .wag files are only 11 lines long, including white space. It also means if I have to correct a value I only do it in one file, the .inc file. The reason this matter is important is there may be many parameters you might use in your code... for example Mass(). AFAIK the Include() command can be placed in almost every original MSTS file except for .s and sound files.


re: qualifying an engineer

Amtrak115, on 27 March 2023 - 02:13 PM, said:

hmmm...this would be a bear to create as a 3rd party....maybe....take a path and have a list of location events auto-generated every time is sees a crossing, speed change, signal something like that for a start that could then be edited manually to add more details....have to think about that one....

If the idea would work with what you have in hand, that's good enough. An example file for part of one of the original routes could serve as a look-what-you-can-do proposition.


re: sprite text files

Amtrak115, on 27 March 2023 - 02:13 PM, said:

I was somewhat hesitant to put that in...but the more I thought about...we need to start thinking that way. I had two thoughts on that....storing the JSON file within the Openrails subdirectory say within Activities....One issue with that is we are currently using that as an Openrails extension area... the other thought initially create a JSON subdirectory within say the activity Directory...of course there would be one in the paths, services,traffic...etc... The final thought was just put them in the same directory...since they will have a .json or something like that extention.

What about this idea: I have seen instances of .zip files using a different file extension, something proprietary. But you can use 7zip to open them w/o renaming... the software recognizes the contents as a zip archive. Can that be done w/ .json files? If so then this sprite text idea could name this file with the activity name, just like all of the other activity files tied to this purpose and use a new file extension... for lack of a better idea ActivityFileName.SpriteA. The contents are 100% .json, the string to the left of the dot ties the file to all of the other files for that activity, and the file extension tells everybody what it is. The final letter A can become B, C, D, whatever, if there is any reason to think sprite text could be used in other ways. For example, maybe it makes sense to categorize sprite text to align it to specific purposes, SpriteA for siding names, SpriteB for platform names and so on. Makes it easier for an activity creator to say turn on all platforms, turn off all sidings except for these two and so on. Makes it easy to copy/paste the files, rename the them to the new activity and then do some minor editing in your program.