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Copying tracks does not copy its sections

Started by TrainzLuvr, July 19, 2018, 02:33:10 AM

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TrainzLuvr

I made a fairly large staging yard with 3 different sections and I wanted to make a copy of it so I can try something else without destroying my original work. I copied all the tracks and created a new layer then pasted the tracks in. All of the sections were lost.

I do not think AnyRail works as expected in this case, because when I copy the tracks all of the attributes should get copied along.

Of course, this would be totally avoidable if only we had a Duplicate Layer function, which would duplicate everything in that layer under a new name...
Website: Trains Luvr
YouTube channel: Trainz Luvr

David

AnyRail is not designed to try different options in the same plan. For instance, the list of materials would not be correct anymore, and it's unclear which tracks should be connected to the rest of the plan in case of different versions of a station. This would currently influence the export to Trainplayer, and also cause trouble when AnyRail will include simulation in a future version.

I think that in many cases you don't want the section info to be copied along, especially as it creates duplicates in the names. You will get two sections with the name 'Mainline', or perhaps 'Occupancy detector 8.11'.

We have considered some sort of 'version control' like idea, perhaps where you can have multiple versions of a layer where only one is 'leading', and the other versions of that layer are ignored.
However, this opens a whole new range of problems and may be very confusing. Not fun. Just like in MS Word, there's no option to have two different versions of a paragraph or a line in one document (as far as I know).

A thing we are working on are modules. These modules can be assembled into a master plan. That will probably open options to try different variations of part of the plan in a much clearer way.

Of course you can always try some variations and 'Undo' and 'Redo' until you're happy.

The best thing to do is to simply to save your file under a different name (FILE/Save as), and try your changes in that plan.
David Hoogvorst. Founder and Owner of DRail Software. Creator of AnyRail.

TrainzLuvr

Thanks for that clarification, David!

The modules idea sounds great, if it's what I think it is (proxy objects that you can load into any plan, but edit just once on their own propagating changing across all plans).

I do use my own "version control" system with files that use date-time stamps, but it's getting out of hand. I'm forgetting where things are anymore, or where the features I built and like reside in. Perhaps this modules feature would supplement that eventually.
Website: Trains Luvr
YouTube channel: Trainz Luvr

vistisen

Hi David, I would like to suggest that a workaround might be to open up for the option to copy between to instances of AnyRail. Then you could copy/paste a section of a design to another instance of any rail, work on it and then copy/paste it back into the first design (which you have of course saved before pasting). Another (better) option would be to enable Any rail to have more than design open at a time with a tabbed window view that ideally could be synchronized so that we can zoom/scroll around in a design, switch to the second tab and it would also have zoomed and scrolled to match the first tab. This would be great for comparing versions of a design. Which brings me on to an other wish... I'll start a new thread!