Trainz/Download Station

DLS Overview
The Download Station&mdash;or more commonly the DLS &mdash;is N3V Game's public repository ) of third-party custom Trainz assets created and shared by other Trainzers ('Content Creators') in the world wide community. The DLS was instituted late in the Trainz 1.3&mdash;Trainz UTC era (versions v1.3–v1.5) with the user community wanting an easier means of sharing CDP files, very early in the history of Trainz releases (2000–2003, when its initial website took on much of its current form and function. By the release of TRS2004, the so called 'Black Pages' website, was up and running with T'04 providing primitive file management and interfacing using a suite of individual Windows EXE files. During those early years of explosive Trainz growth, its library of assets swelled from a few hundred assets well into the thousands. The number of assets available for download in July 2013 is over 2,500 routes and 270,000 assets overall, but varies by the trainz-build version of the users Trainz installation (older Trainz can access less, and are blocked from more recent higher trainz-build number assets for the newer may use technologies unknown to the older). Then again there are assets which are functional duplicates of previous versions, dutifully updated using the Trainz and KUID2 system of version tracking and management, and those cut the count down since they obsolete prior releases. Similarly, assets with entries in the s also diminish the total count of assets, but whatever the ever changing usable total may be (). In Trainz, no one can say there is a poor selection of alternative assets!

Foundation knowledge on 3rd Party sourcing
It is said that Trainz would not exist without the Download Station and the community's willingness from the earliest pre-Beta Test days to share content. Until recently, any registered Trainz user may upload their home-built content and/or download content made by others using the cloud based facility. Overall, content creators are beloved, so support and encouragement and help will be found on the forums&mdash;so the harsh words of a few trolls, should be given the attention they deserve. Ignore them.

The New reality
In recent years policy on uploading has been belatedly changed to vett and pre-error-check uploaded content in an attempt to weed out assets made to older technology standards, ensure only legal tag names (key words) and newer data types and data structures are incorporated, and an asset is complete as well as has all dependencies on the DLS. These are all good things, but N3V Games has also begun to limit uploading by s, which has created more than a little friction with the user community. Some of that vetting (the forcing of new uploads to the latest is both unnecessary and unwise, but the N3V reputation for stubbornness is well deserved, so getting them to provide a path for 'functionally just fixing' an older asset so it works with all releases seems less likely than a snowball's chances to make it out of hell. 'Them's with the gold, makes the rulez', it is said in an old folk bit of wisdom, and unfortunately, many a good content creator has quit producing assets or uploading new goodies as a result.

Their programmer's created the compatibility issues, but won't own the responsibility for them by auto-translating during pre-processing when necessary&mdash;a particularly unprofessional attitude in the staff supporting a data base product. Historically, over 90% of software programming involves such compatibility programming, but since it's 'boring code maintenance' N3Vs programmer's have gotten away with it by citing their small size and numbers.

De-Trainzing
Others content creators have left Trainz or digital trains modeling for various reasons (including passing-away, or those 'going over to the darkside' &mdash;now modeling for a competitor product) and others don't feel an obligation to perpetually update assets they authored a decade or more ago. It must be understood, Auran was already a successful mid-size game company when it undertook Trainz' development in 1998, but by 2006 they were almost totally focused on the expensive development of a, and left Auran in bankruptcy proceedings selling off pieces, laying off nearly every employee and badly needing rescue cash from N3V Games. That event was tramatic and spawn many fan-sites in order to protect the Trainz community from the loss of the DLS and forums. After six weeks, the servers came back on line, but to this day, many an long-time Trainzer content creator hedges his bets with fan-site hosted content that takes its time wending its way onto the DLS. N3V's policies continue to tick people off even today, so politics and preference enter the motivations.

Hence even when a creator now wants to upload assets he once hosted personally on a fan site, he'd have to update them just to patch the missing asset a route has called for. Many of these, especially the older retirees who fueled Trainz early explosive growth in asset wealth have no real interest in a newer Trainz release, nor mounting the learning curves of converting things to the newer technologies since incorporating updates on the DLS to advance older (still working digital) models to the minimum trainz-build level now demanded by N3V requires expending $$resources to comply. While often friendly to users making enquiries, those folks have put Trainz into a past chapter of their lives.

Those missing assets
There are many long time Trainzer's who disdain downloading older routes, because it may require fault fixing. Then their are others who disdain newer routes for containing missing assets. In the end, where's their sensible room to complain, you are paying nothing or a pittance for a digital model that took up to eight man-months to draft, texture and test.

For the missing assets, there are over 400 other Trainz asset sources on the web hosting downloadable assets and various nationalistic/linguistic camps &mdash; plus two broad, major, and diametrically opposed philosophies fueling their continuance: A) One camp, knowing the time and effort it takes to make a digital model feels they should receive some monetary compensation for their time, so charge a bit to download same. The extreme end of this group is sites which offer only or at least, almost all, .  B) Others, feeling the assets should be free and no money-grubbing capitalists should benefit from having their asset in payware (which includes routes released by N3V as part of a release, and some reason as well the revenue stream created for N3V/Auran by the DLS First Class Ticket costs) C) Lastly, and to a lesser extent are sites resenting English as the mandatory language for asset names and descriptions, so host in Spanish, German, Russian, or other such languages since translation is time consuming and costly. Essentially, since technically all content is intellectual property eligible for copy-write under international law, all groups are within their rights, and begrudging a person who wants paid for their time is absurd. The Auran/N3V DLS upload release agreement essentially asks up-loaders to waive those rights, allowing N3V to use any DLS asset as it sees fit. Since many content creators opposed to payware also feel N3V's use of an item in a route released in a new Trainz version is also payware and deserved monetary compensation, said believers often host their own content on a fan-site. Similarly, use of an asset from a payware site means those folks want paid. N3V on the other hand, selects routes secretly from a group submitted voluntarily from the user community, and given the expense of hosting the forums and DLS servers, customer services, et. al. aren't about to pay anyone much of anything, except partners whom they have contracted with for DLC, payware hosted by N3V at the. The unresolvability of the problem is that before dependency checking on uploading (a recent development in the overall time frame), many, perhaps even most, routes and sessions used such proprietary assets, because they are frequently superior or special in some way.}}

Early in the TS2009 era, the N3V Games instituted a controversial policy of only accepting content 'made to' or 'upgraded to' currently supported releases of the software, concurrent with a policy implemented to limit their customer support to such supported versions. This policy is still causing resentment among many an old-time Trainzer. It also effectively enslaves a content creator by demanding ongoing maintenance and upgrades for some favor he did for someone else years ago!

Content on the Download Station had historically shown significant rates of errors or missing dependencies. This is being addressed via the initiative, albeit slowly as the program is now nearly five years old.

In point of fact, many so-called faults or errors in the majority (i.e. scenery assets) have trivial data model evolution caused faults resulting from unwise technical choices based in lazy and inconsiderate programming standards by a small group of young programmers lacking experience in large project politics. The damning point of fact is the programmer's chose a path easy for them with insufficient consideration of the impact on the tens of thousands in the customer base. As a pointed and common example, assets which worked fine in pre-TS2009 releases suddenly weren't able to find their own mesh tables despite being located in the same sub-folders that were part of the earlier (actually earliest) Trainz data model standards, when a few more lines of code could have 'handled the error' automatically using excerpts of proven TRS2006 software, when instead the programmer's chose to force a or  down users throats. Before v2.0 (TRS2004-SP0) Trainz didn't know about mesh-tables. Hence good programming assumptions would have handled such older constructs the same old way as the TRS series of releases.