[REL] Road to Asia v1.7.1 for ETS2 1.48 by TerraMaps

[Ronin]

Hi Arayas, thank you for your detailed response. I'll pass this along to the experts at Terramaps. We really appreciate the effort you've made.

[b738pilot]

Arayas, thank you, we are looking into it this week and will upload a patch. We've tested it with RoEx, VolgaMap, SibirMap, Southern Region, and no CTD's on our end, so we have a lot to look into.

Regarding the FLD prefabs, i'd like to remind you and everyone that we picked this project up from an old team of RTA that included a sloppy assets collection of 16 different files that the first step for us was to compile them some how as they were all scattered and used everywhere in their 2 areas in Turkmenistan they mapped. If I have to do it all over again, I would've wiped out their old areas and started fresh, but at this point it's too late to do that of course as we are much much larger than the original team. Am I blaming the original team for this? Absolutely. But I also blame myself for not foreseeing these issues in the future and instead just doing whatever I could back then a year ago to make this map work from the time we picked it up from them. Now every update it seems we are dealing with old remnants of this messy ASSETS file, as you pointed out.

The end goal is we will address these issues, patch them up, fix them with the bright minds, and we'll get RTA healthy again. For now many including those in our team, patreons, etc. are enjoying RTA without CTD's or issues with the maps I mentioned above so we can only do so much in terms of beta testing before public release, otherwise maps will never be released if we tested every possible map combo and release so I hope you all viewing this can understand this aspect and why public releases may have some bugs of this nature. The important thing to know is we are addressing and fixing them. Thank you all for your continued support of RTA as we continue to expand! :)

[Arayas]

Nobody is to blame here except FLD. You download a pack and use it in good faith without knowing the implications. When free map assets are available for download i almost never use them as the public release, but i make a quick clone to have for myself. This way i stay away from bad future developements like this one.

[Tomsun66]

Hello Arayas,
from the user perspective i want to ask you a few things regarding the FLD topic.

If i understood right

1. FLD is a person or a group
2. FLD is a modeller
3. FLD has the intellectual property on his modells
4. FLD has done some mistakes in his model libraries like renaming modells, erasing models,.. other modders were already using
5. Other modders (e.g. PM) took models, altered them without renaming them, despite of any side effects for other mods
6. You decided to avoid the FLD models to avoid conflicts

Did i get the points right?

So i think there is codex of collaboration missing, there are a lot of mods in the market each one of them is great, but the collaboration makes each one even greater, so the sum of the collaboration is bigger then the sum of single pieces. But this can only work if there are rules of collaboration an they are strictly followed.
And it should be pointed out if someone thinks he has not to follow the rules despite the consequences for others.

Why i ask this from the user perspective? If you are running map combos with each new version you ran into the same problems, which i now begin to understand.
The microcosmos of modding is a very difficile ecosystem, where all decisions made by a single mod can influence other mods (in good and evil). If a modding team means they have not to take care about the sideeffects in other mods this is a foul, and it has to be highlighted.
Of course sometimes there is a quick and dirty fix, but quick and dirty is firstly dirty, and it leads to problems for others in the ecosystem.

[Arayas]

You are right 1-6.

Sadly, some would take in consideration the fact we function in the same enviroment, some wont.
Some will cooperate and some wont.
For example, every time Sergey is making changes in our common areas (presented in the road connection) he sends me the definitions and the stuff he removed from their part, making it easy for me to update, without starting fresh.
Other people, they have changed a GIVE ROAD sign with other identichal GIVE ROAD sign, just to make sure my work and Sergey's is now incompatible.

And some...just don't understand the bigger picture (some modellers).

[Tomsun66]

So point 4 is to give FLD the awareness of the problem to avoid something like that in the future, if he means i don't care i will do it in the future the same way, the awareness of the mappers should be made to avoid the modells due to that reason. Do you know how the intention of FLD is?

So point 5 in my eyes is the most critical, if a great map mod behaves "wie ein Axt im Wald" and don't care if they change property of third, where other rely on. Is PM aware of what they are doing in that case and do they have granted by FLD to do what they want with they model despite the fact others are affected?

So if point 4 and 5 have no solution point 6 is the only solution

And finally most of the (map)mods should have an agreement how to deal. And PM will see what effect their behaviour has in the long term.

So perhaps the modders needs certain areas of numbers reserved for each mod so they don't interfere.

[Ronin]

As for the Road to Asia crashes with other maps in Combos. We have now been able to bring the problem back to Southeren Region.
In many Combos, Southern Region is placed above Road to Asia in the Load Order. This causes the most crashes.

The solution is to place Southern Region directly under Road to Asia. I saw already that GMC changed this in there latest combo update on Euroroad.net. Thank you for that.

As for the Prefab problems. This is not so easy to solve. We'll look at this in the next update.

[Tomsun66]

As for the Prefab problems. This is not so easy to solve. We'll look at this in the next update.

if i understood arayas correctly, the solution is on one hand to use ONLY own prefabs with a naming where it is not easy to interfere, or on the other hand to use a common set of prefabs where everyone is accepting the rules like no changing or deleting existing prefabs.
You never can avoid that someone is trolling at will.

For the great group of Mapmods at Terramaps it could be an idea to have a common set of prefabs.

It also can be an idea for group of modders to join together and use a common set of prefabs.

The problem is how to deal with trolls working against this.

The example arayas showed up that PM changed prefabs of others so that this interferes with other mods is bigger problem and i think there has to be done a proper Root cause Analysis if this was a single problem by accident and one developer, or a general problem by culture, but this can only answered by Promods.

[Ronin]

Yes Arayas showed us to solve the prefab problems.
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2177&start=130#p48193
But that doesn't mean it is easy. It means cleaning up the whole Assets file. Now every update it seems we are dealing with old remnants of this messy ASSETS file, as Arayas pointed out

[Tomsun66]

i understood that you meant the cleaning process. The process of getting rid of all the remnants, and replacing with clean assets fully under own control.

i fear that there will several other mapmods facing the same problem.
Its sad that the approach of distributed work with distributed roles does not work, due to (in my opinion) not lived or not defined rules.
The interfaces have to be defined precisely and even the rule have to be defined so veryone has a baseline to rely on.
So now every mapper has to define and develop his set of assets on his own.
In the past it was somehow funny to see assets in different regions looking astonishing the same, what was not real, on the other hand now we will see in reality identical assets totally different (e.g. Europalett, crate of Coca-Cola) from one developer designed very efficient, from another very inefficient.