Genma Saotome, on 21 April 2024 - 09:28 PM, said:
Sanjay, the only concern I have about the information you've put together is with the examples. The use of very non-specific names for your .inc files can be rather dangerous in practice. For example, in North America there are at least 7 different brake standards in use in the 20th century. If you are using a set of brake data for 1995 named brakes.inc and you receive another named brakes.inc containing values correct for 1916 there will be problems running your activities.
Because of that risk I use very specific names when creating .inc files so I can tell at a glance the differences and pick the correct one.
I do understand you were giving examples and the use of generic names made it easy to write. May I suggest you slip something into the introduction of you examples telling the reader you used very generic names for easy reading and to warn the reader that his own names should be specific enough to avoid problems with .inc files for the same purpose colliding because no one took care to deal with the differences of era and maybe even country in the file names or directory paths.
I totally understand where you're coming from.
In my examples at the end of the tutorial, I put a subfolder within the main
*.eng and
*.wag file folder labeled
Include. (This is in addition to the normal
Cabview and
Sound subfolders.) Thus, in that case, the file paths would be:
/TRAINS/TRAINSET/Indian_Valley_4_6_2/INCLUDE/LOCO/Brakes_Wag.inc
/TRAINS/TRAINSET/Cedar_Park_Railway_4_4_0/INCLUDE/TENDER/Brakes.inc
By putting the
*.inc files in a separate subfolder within the main
*.eng/
*.wag folder, I don't have to add prefixes to every
*.inc file.
On the other hand, if the
*.inc files for multiple locomotives or cars were in a centralized location, such as separate "
Common.brakes" folder, then it would be necessary to name the files with the specific style of brake system (e.g. K, UC, 6ET, etc.).
A few of the guys here on ET and I are working on a set of standardized
*.inc files for North American brakes and couplers that hopefully addresses, if not avoids, this kind of ambiguity.