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In the last developer conference we've talked about a possible creation of “dev teams” focused on certain parts of the mod.
Since that conference i “joined” the “Livery Team” currently leaded by @Blockhead. The livery customization and in general the artistic part is the weak part of this mod, but things might change.
I have some ideas to implement this, one of them is the Train Painter Tool.
What does this item have?
Well you have 2 possible type of customization, the first being the Simple Configuration (SC), and the second being the Advanced Configuration (AC).
What changes between SC and AC?
The Simple configuration is the one that we currently have on the painter tool of the Bike mod. The advanced configuration is completely new and it will allow you to choose from various skins (inspired by the ones of the real companies like DB, FS, OBB etc) through a list that will show you the prewiew of the skins applied to the locomotive or wagon.
Ok but the skins? How do i tell the tool that those are the skins for that locomotive?
All the skins for a certain loco are going to be on the “textures” folder of the locomotive mod. In the painter tool code there will be a list for that locomotive where we are going to write the name of the file of the skin.
OK nice but how can i integrate my own skins for that wagon/loco?
You'll need to put the skin file in the “textures” folder and insert the name of the file of the skin inside the list.
Do you have an image of the new painter tool?
Yes i do, we all have the formspec of the SC and i made a prototype of the AC:
Each livery mod comes with its own modus operandi and assumptions. The 3 significantly different mods I considered are:
As complicated or featureful as Multi-Component is, it's not suitable for all applications. For instance, in order to paint wagons like DlxTrains, one would need to make each different livery a different 'component', and promise not to color it with anything except 100% white, and promise not to paint multiple components.
I do not believe it is the role of the advtrains core to dictate how liveries are formatted, calculated and applied. There are simply too many ways to do it, none of which could suit everybody. I do believe however that going forward we should have:
The formspec on_submit is again handled by the wagon mod to allow it to work its own magic. The train painter simply shows what the wagon mod has registered will be shown by calling into the wagon mod's code. Wagons that want the same painting methods can use library functions from e.g. a future version of multi_component_liveries. Other wagons that want to do their own thing can do so.
Load/Save will act like the train copy tool: it will save the livery info onto the stack metadata, and allow it to be restored onto the same type of wagon (or compatible other wagons). It will give an error for incompatible wagons.
… Further discussion to take place at the conference (soon TM)