A tale of reverse-engineered software development leading to an unexpected and almost genius solution for a frustrated Scenario Developer... On another thread I was asked about QD-Preloads in my software. Now, not knowing anything about QD’s I asked for clarification, and this issue of “Preloads”. Not being familiar with “Preloads” as such, but being familiar with Route preloads (dependencies), I queried. Anyway, we mean Stock-Preloads. Now, as it happens I’ve been avoiding these buqqers in my software as the stock refs contained are not stored as simple linear consists, but can be a composite (and part-composite) of fragments, plus I’ve never found the need to mess with them tbh (apart from picking them from the TSC Scenario-Builder side-panel – more later). So, I thought we’d better finally get to grips with the Stock-Preloads for this QD stuff (to be continued...) , and so have reversed-engineered (as is done for everything in TSC) the Stock-Preload files and knocked-up a Stock-Preload Manager. It’s pretty good as a stage#1, and can be developed further. As an example, the belows shows ALL the Stock-Preloads on my system (only some of which are expanded) - blue items are packed inside an *assets .ap file – while black are native unpacked files.... Or can be filtered by Route. e.g. restrict to North London Lines (BR NSE) Dependencies (route preloads) You can then drill-down to the specific Preload Consist (in this case with any Fragments inserted for a running config) or see the actual Preload consist (as on file) with Fragments construction... (can't show here as forum has limited number of screenshots allowed to paste - I'll post them as a follow-up. There are also some listing functions with options to output data to a CSV file etc. Anyway, (and back to the point of this thread) while playing around with this and getting it working, I suddenly had a thought. Could I STORE these Stock-Preloads so they don’t clutter-up the TSC Scenario-Builder “Consist” side-panel? It turns out you can. Genius. The software already does Route and Scenario storage so you can hide routes and scenarios from the TSC front-end menus (and speed-up TSC loading time), but as a Scenario developer, what has always narked me no end is that tiny TSC Scenerio-Builder Side-panel, and everything about it. Most of the items relate to stock I would never use, and scrolling through that list trying to find things is tedious beyond belief, and then waiting for the consist text to *oh-so-slowly-scroll-right* (as the wanted info is *always* at the end of the text...) is a another pain in the hole and seriously frustrating. And the TSC Grouping things are about as reliable as the TSC Scenario-Builder itself (i.e. not very). But yeah, it works. You can STORE (and thus hide from TSC Scenario-Builder side panel) selected Stock-Preloads. For instance, there’s a whole bunch of AP Class 31’s I’ll never use clogging up the side panel... So we STORE everything except just the 3 BR Blue versions we use... And bingo, there we have it, just the 3 Blue Class 31’s in my side-panel (that old Kuju stuff is next for the chop...). And of course any STORED Preload can be simply RESTORED at any time. However, it does seems you do need to exit RailWorks.exe completely, then go back in for any changes to be picked up, so they must be internally cached... Ah! But alas it can only work on native (unpacked) files, though is useful nonetheless to store native stuff. So, not quite genius, but still pretty nifty... FastLeg
As I said, You can then drill-down to the specific Preload Consist (in this case with any Fragments inserted for a running config)... Or see the actual Preload consist (as on file) with Fragment construction...
How did you go about STORE ing those 31s? I have a number of assets that I won't use but I did not want to delete them Thanks
Well remember, I'm only storing the Stock-Preload Consist here, not the actual stock (looking into it, but stock items are more complicated). While that example looks like I'm hiding the Class 31 locos, they are all actually single loco Stock-Preload consists (not the stock directly). But all I do is rename the \Preload\xxx.bin file to xxx.bin.store. TSC then doesn't see it. Easily restored by renaming it back. Similar method to Storing Routes and Scenarios. Obviously it can be done manually, but more efficient to get some software to do it...
