Assets appearing that have not been selected by me but by someone else

Assets appearing that have not been selected by me but by someone else

Postby Rockdoc2174 » Fri Jan 05, 2018 10:09 am

Brian sent me his model of Friargate station but it was so big and unwieldy I had a lot of difficulty maneuvering it to fit the track so I asked him to send me the two scenery tiles it sat on from his copy. This did the trick but showed up something a bit strange. Brian had deleted several assets and they disappeared, as I would expect, but he had selected Kuju to give him some figures to go on the platform for his screenshots. Kuju is not one of our dependencies so it was unselected on my copy but the figures still appeared. It isn't a problem as I can select the figures normally in the editor and delete them as required but I was surprised they appeared at all on my system. Anyone have an explanation? Is it simply a case that an available asset being referenced in a tile will appear even if that author's box is unselected?

A slightly puzzled Keith
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Re: Assets appearing that have not been selected by me but by someone else

Postby AndiS » Fri Jan 05, 2018 11:59 am

I guess so. Once the asset reference is in the tile file, all the software needs to do is follow the path given there to display it. It should not appear in your asset lists so you will not be able to place another copy. But you may be ably to copy and paste the already placed instances.
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Re: Assets appearing that have not been selected by me but by someone else

Postby Rockdoc2174 » Fri Jan 05, 2018 6:00 pm

That’s pretty much what I thought.

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Re: Assets appearing that have not been selected by me but by someone else

Postby gougha » Wed Jan 10, 2018 2:08 pm

This does pose an interesting question.

When the author selects a set of assets while route building, ie kuju, It is my understanding that all of the assets in that folder, even if they aren't used, are loaded up at runtime. This is what makes the kuju assets folder undesirable as it chews up memory.

So the question I have is this - If you don't select the kuju folder, (or deselect it before distribution), but still use some of the assets, does it just load the assets you use into memory rather than the whole folder?

Experimentation may be required when I have a moment.

Regards

Andy
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Re: Assets appearing that have not been selected by me but by someone else

Postby VictoryWorks » Thu Jan 11, 2018 12:04 pm

If you don't select the folder then you can't add the items as they won't appear in the assets list.
If you deselect it after adding items it removes everything from that provider/product (it gives a warning to this effect when you try and do it).

Sadly it was a bad design decision when the software was first made and we've been stuck with it ever since.

If memory serves there are 2 tick boxes for provider/product.. one of them adds it to the project and other simply shows it in the filter list. You can untick the visible option to tidy up the filter list as you work but the reference to the assets still exists. If you remove the "working" reference to the provider/product then all of the assets are removed.
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Re: Assets appearing that have not been selected by me but by someone else

Postby Rockdoc2174 » Thu Jan 11, 2018 3:10 pm

Neither box had been selected on my system but had been on Brian’s. The Kuju assets appeared after I replaced my tiles with his so Friargate appeared in the same place on both our systems. Getting rid of the “rogue” assets isn’t an issue because they’re selectable as normal. I was just curious about how an asset that was not selected on my system appeared as if it had been.

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Re: Assets appearing that have not been selected by me but by someone else

Postby Rockdoc2174 » Thu Jan 11, 2018 10:26 pm

OK, I've had a play and I think I've got a handle on this. When you place an asset and save the route the program writes the details of the asset into the appropriate scenery tile, beginning with the provider. If you deselect the provider but don't delete the assets associated with that provider they will still appear because the tile still calls the provider directory and it is present on your system. If anyone who has a copy of the route and has the Kuju file structure (in this case) it will appear. Only if someone doesn't have the asset will a milk bottle appear instead.

I don't know whether there are any advantages or disadvantages with this. I would expect that the game would not caché the unselected provider's files but that could actually be an advantage with a bloated directory like Kuju.

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Re: Assets appearing that have not been selected by me but by someone else

Postby AndiS » Mon Jan 15, 2018 11:33 am

This exactly matches my guess. I can only add that if you think that the game uses the list of providers/products in the RouteProperties.xml file to efficiently check the existence of these folders so it needs not check again for each item it that is referenced but not there on the harddisk, you are wrong. At least for track-related items, when I get a route from someone and I simply lack a few folders (on the product level), LogMate fills up like mad, telling me about thousands of items that would be in that folder when it is totally obvious that the whole darn thing is just not there.

In short, the list of products and providers seems to be used to fill the menus of available assets to place and for nothing else.
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