Content Manager

Revision as of 23:58, 3 February 2010

Content Manager is Auran's included content management GUI.

Functionality

Content Manager is intended to address the following functions:

• Install and remove custom content.
• Archive custom content.
• Search both local and DLS content.
• Download DLS content.
• Create and edit custom content.
• Provide a platform for executing Content Manager Tools.

Ideology

Content Manager is designed to allow content creators to produce new content, and to allow end-users to download with a minimal of hassle. It is tightly integrated with the Download Station (DLS) to allow content to be uploaded and downloaded in a reliable fashion.

Content Manager is specifically not intended for users to perform regular editing of content created by others; this behavior is considered fairly counter-productive for the following reasons:

• It is expected that DLS content will be available in a working format, and that Content Manager will transfer the content to the local machine in a working format. (This is historically inaccurate, please see the Download Station Cleanup page.)
• It is required that local content maintains parity with the original DLS content, such that dependencies and updates continue to work appropriately. By editing DLS content locally, the user is establishing that they will take responsibility for maintaining not only the edited asset, but potentially all assets which share some kind of dependency on the edited asset.
• When a user downloads or purchases a new item of content, they have a reasonable expectation that it will work "out of the box". This expectation is in direct conflict with the user performing significant edits to other content.

There are some obvious cases where edits are harmless, and CMP attempts to allow for the most useful of these- such as renaming or hiding an asset.

It is expected that the Trainz environment will be optimised and extended with each new version release. To allow existing custom content to work with newer versions of Trainz, Auran has adopted an "installation" process for custom content, in favor of the original "drop it in a folder" process. During this process, the Trainz environment performs the following steps:

• Validates that the content will work with the current Trainz installation.
• Precaches various metrics from the content that Trainz requires at runtime such that the entire item of content does not need to be loaded at game startup (as was the case in the earliest Trainz versions.)
• Upgrades files within the content to the latest file formats, such that the upgrade process does need to not occur during loading.
• Converts some files from human-readable form to a machine-optimized format.
• Moves the raw content files to storage within the Trainz Asset Database.
• Notifies running Trainz executables of any changes.

Users are no longer provided with direct access to installed custom content, for the following reasons:

• Installed content may be stored in a custom internal format, rather than in the public distribution format.
• Edits made to files which have supposedly been pre-processed will result in runtime errors where the cached data no longer matches the actual content on disk.

Since direct access is not possible, Content Manager provides a mechanism for users to 'check out' items for editing, and to check them in again after the edits are complete. The normal installation steps are performed during the check-in process allowing Trainz to use the updated content safely.