BabyBear
06-11-2001, 07:30 AM
*****AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MSTS COMMUNITY*****
Hi Everyone, So far the add on rolling stock & engine liveries have been great.. Now if someone could just do "The Rock" Rock Island.. :')
Anyway this is an open letter to the Skin, Engine Designers and the rest of the community, we need a NAMING SCHEME for all new rolling stock! Whether it be just a new Boxcar skin or a completely new engine, let me use Kevin Combs EXCELLENT "Chessie System Safety Caboose" as an example..
Everyone is going to install Kevin's Caboose(heh) into a different named directory! Like for instance on my system I have it installed in "US2CABOOSECHESSIE". Herein lies the problem, if I make up a custom Consist or Activity, anyone downloading it would have to have the same directory already or copy all the files from whatever they named Kevin's Caboose to a directory that matches my consists(or edit my consists to match their directories). This could get VERY VERY messy down the line, when we could have few hundreds custom rolling stock skins, engines & engine liveries. Imagine an activity using 50 or more of these custom skins! In the first activity I'm writing I'm not using any of the customs models/skins, but I'd certainly like to and without forcing the dl'er to either edit my consists or spent and hour making extra space wasting copies of rolling stock just to play 1 activity!
Part of the solution to this problem lies with the author, PLEASE give us a directory name to put it in.. This way we all will have a certain Boxcar, etc.. in the same directory then we could add them into loads of activities and such and share them with others with limited trouble.. Also another good idea is list all custom rolling stock/engines used in the readme.txt file for those of us who make activities then this way a user of the activity can check to make sure they have all the needed addons if they run into a "error loading consist" when they try to run the activity.. Just give all the directory names then they would correspond to all the custom cars you use, they are missing one of the directories for a Boxcar and get a consist error they know which boxcar to search for and download.
The way I've been naming all the rolling stock I've downloaded so far has been "US2xy", x=type such as Tanker,Boxcar,Flatcar and y=roadname such as BNSF, Chessie, CN...
This has an added bonus then for an activity maker, in the consist editor you can click on the name tab, then under this naming scheme everything is sorted by type then by roadname! (actually the names you give inside the directory of the files is what the consists editor sorts by, but if the .ace .sd .s .eng files matched the name of the directory they are in then we are all set) Wooohoo!
Reason I used the "US2" in the name is that all the freight cars are defaultly(a word?) named like that, and continuing to do so will help keep the rolling stock separate from the engines. And you can still use freight cars in all other routes obviously, but helps keep the "clutter" down a bit..
06-04-01 1:23a DASH9
06-05-01 10:47p DASH9CSX
06-04-01 1:23a GP38
06-06-01 8:29p Gp38Conrail
06-05-01 10:45p Gp38NewHaven
06-05-01 10:52p Gp38OldSantaFe
Also doing Engine dirs in the xy pattern will give it quicker access to all your engines with different liveries all nicely sorted in the consists editor..
Course 1 problem could still crop up. Let's use the chessie caboose again as the example and say I have US2CABOOSECHESSIE installed and wanted to do one myself but since that name is taken could always use US2CABOOSECHESSIE02,etc.. Let's just hope that someone making a new livery skin will check the major forums DL areas to see if a particular name has been "taken" already.. :') Though like I said earlier its up to the author of the skin to make up the name for us to use. Then 95% of the time we should be save using it in custom consists and activities, now if I made a Chessie Caboose too and used the same directory name and someone had my chessie caboose and dl'ed a activity made using Kevin's at least the activity should still work since both are the same items even if the skin is a bit different. If MSTS told you to drop off the 3 Chessie Cabooses(or is that Caboosi? heh)at Whitefish Siding 3, at least either way both of our cabooses would work, with the 1 exception I think is if the filenames (the .ace .sd .s) files were named different.. But I am assuming(uh oh) that if the directory was named US2CABOOSECHESSIE the files would be named the same ALSO, example US2CABOOSECHESSIE.ACE.
This is the best way I could think of for all of us to use the great addons we have and are yet to get for MSTS, if anyone has any suggestions or additions I'd certainly like to hear(read) them.. :')
I am cross posting this message on all the MSTS forums I'm on in hopes of starting a united movement toward the promised land!!!
Now its back to editing my activity.. Sakes, that editor sure can get frustrating.. heh
Thanks for reading my ramblings,
Baby Bear
(Bob D.)
Hi Everyone, So far the add on rolling stock & engine liveries have been great.. Now if someone could just do "The Rock" Rock Island.. :')
Anyway this is an open letter to the Skin, Engine Designers and the rest of the community, we need a NAMING SCHEME for all new rolling stock! Whether it be just a new Boxcar skin or a completely new engine, let me use Kevin Combs EXCELLENT "Chessie System Safety Caboose" as an example..
Everyone is going to install Kevin's Caboose(heh) into a different named directory! Like for instance on my system I have it installed in "US2CABOOSECHESSIE". Herein lies the problem, if I make up a custom Consist or Activity, anyone downloading it would have to have the same directory already or copy all the files from whatever they named Kevin's Caboose to a directory that matches my consists(or edit my consists to match their directories). This could get VERY VERY messy down the line, when we could have few hundreds custom rolling stock skins, engines & engine liveries. Imagine an activity using 50 or more of these custom skins! In the first activity I'm writing I'm not using any of the customs models/skins, but I'd certainly like to and without forcing the dl'er to either edit my consists or spent and hour making extra space wasting copies of rolling stock just to play 1 activity!
Part of the solution to this problem lies with the author, PLEASE give us a directory name to put it in.. This way we all will have a certain Boxcar, etc.. in the same directory then we could add them into loads of activities and such and share them with others with limited trouble.. Also another good idea is list all custom rolling stock/engines used in the readme.txt file for those of us who make activities then this way a user of the activity can check to make sure they have all the needed addons if they run into a "error loading consist" when they try to run the activity.. Just give all the directory names then they would correspond to all the custom cars you use, they are missing one of the directories for a Boxcar and get a consist error they know which boxcar to search for and download.
The way I've been naming all the rolling stock I've downloaded so far has been "US2xy", x=type such as Tanker,Boxcar,Flatcar and y=roadname such as BNSF, Chessie, CN...
This has an added bonus then for an activity maker, in the consist editor you can click on the name tab, then under this naming scheme everything is sorted by type then by roadname! (actually the names you give inside the directory of the files is what the consists editor sorts by, but if the .ace .sd .s .eng files matched the name of the directory they are in then we are all set) Wooohoo!
Reason I used the "US2" in the name is that all the freight cars are defaultly(a word?) named like that, and continuing to do so will help keep the rolling stock separate from the engines. And you can still use freight cars in all other routes obviously, but helps keep the "clutter" down a bit..
06-04-01 1:23a DASH9
06-05-01 10:47p DASH9CSX
06-04-01 1:23a GP38
06-06-01 8:29p Gp38Conrail
06-05-01 10:45p Gp38NewHaven
06-05-01 10:52p Gp38OldSantaFe
Also doing Engine dirs in the xy pattern will give it quicker access to all your engines with different liveries all nicely sorted in the consists editor..
Course 1 problem could still crop up. Let's use the chessie caboose again as the example and say I have US2CABOOSECHESSIE installed and wanted to do one myself but since that name is taken could always use US2CABOOSECHESSIE02,etc.. Let's just hope that someone making a new livery skin will check the major forums DL areas to see if a particular name has been "taken" already.. :') Though like I said earlier its up to the author of the skin to make up the name for us to use. Then 95% of the time we should be save using it in custom consists and activities, now if I made a Chessie Caboose too and used the same directory name and someone had my chessie caboose and dl'ed a activity made using Kevin's at least the activity should still work since both are the same items even if the skin is a bit different. If MSTS told you to drop off the 3 Chessie Cabooses(or is that Caboosi? heh)at Whitefish Siding 3, at least either way both of our cabooses would work, with the 1 exception I think is if the filenames (the .ace .sd .s) files were named different.. But I am assuming(uh oh) that if the directory was named US2CABOOSECHESSIE the files would be named the same ALSO, example US2CABOOSECHESSIE.ACE.
This is the best way I could think of for all of us to use the great addons we have and are yet to get for MSTS, if anyone has any suggestions or additions I'd certainly like to hear(read) them.. :')
I am cross posting this message on all the MSTS forums I'm on in hopes of starting a united movement toward the promised land!!!
Now its back to editing my activity.. Sakes, that editor sure can get frustrating.. heh
Thanks for reading my ramblings,
Baby Bear
(Bob D.)