@ralle said:

Hallo there...

It´s a great plugin at all. Big thanks vor this. It saves a lot of work.
But i have a question. I can not get the additional Streets working. I put them
into the Tracksfolder. The only things i got are the leadinglines and SU2015 starts crashing. All the othes stuff works fine.

Greetings

Ralph

Hi Ralph

Those tracks are for an older version of the plugin but if you place their folders in "tracks/" directly in the template's folder (NOT "templates/tracks/"), open the ruby console and run "EneRailroad::Templates.convert_old" (without quotes) they should be converted to the new format.

On what page did you find them? I could update them in case anyone else wants to download them.

@dan rathbun said:

No don't do that [make a hash into an array], you lose your keys!
Make your hashes into strings with hashstr = hash.inspect()
Save the hashstr into the dictionary.
To read, get the hashstr from the dictionary.
Then hash = eval(hashstr) to convert it back.

I really wouldn't save a ruby string as an attribute and later eval it. It opens up for code injection and lets people run whatever malicious code they want on someone else's computer just by sending them a model made to take advantage of this vulnerability and wait for the moment where eval is called.

DesertRaven: What pushpull bug is this? I don't think I've ever seen it.

@driven said:

hi,
track.rb is saved with Central European (Windows Latin 2) encoding and causes invalid byte sequence in UTF-8 error [at least on a mac]
I haven't checked any others yet...
john

Ooops, I had written an ä in a Swedish word in a comment since I didn't know the English term at the time. Now it's fixed and version 0.1.20 published.

Thanks!

Dean is right! 0.1.19 has been mixed up with an older version but it's now corrected and the current version in the pluginstore should be the correct one.

@oxer said:

Yes, I can place the stock selected, I can't write in the input field by click but I have discovered that you can access to it pressing Tab key, nothing in Ruby Console.

Sounds very similar to a bug with the style sheets I had really early when I published the plugin. For some reason Safari didn't understand the content of the window was supposed to be able to be clicked. Does the filter function as expected once you tab to it? I'll try to debug the dialog in safari outside Sketchup on my computer.

@deaneau said:

@Oxer

the fastest solution is bootcamp and a windows OS.
for windows users. bootcamp is a software to start windows system on mac

@ying2014

christina will drop the language features. could be that this is the reason for your problem.

in the downloaded plugin folder you can´t find the lang folder. this mean (i think), christina drop this feature in 0.1.19 and newer versions.

dean

The plugin is supposed to work on OSX too, I just can't test it myself sicne I don't have it.

The translations should so far still work for everything except the newly added features but the translation file has to be downloaded separately, there's both a German and Spanish one earlier in this thread.

@oxer said:

There are some problems with this update on OS X 10.10.2 & SU 2015:

1. I can't select a different train to default in the Add Rolling Stock window, the icons and the input field Filter don't work.

That's odd. Can you still place the already selected one? Is it possible to write in the filter or can't it be focused at all? Is anything written to the console when activating the add rolling stock tool?

@oxer said:

2. If I have selected a track, the Track Properties icon in the toolbar is off (I know that I have access by right click or Menu > Plugins > Railroad > Track Properties).

I removed the properties icon from the toolbar quite a long time ago since it got really big with all the new tools. However you should be able to right click the track directly and open the window from there.

@oxer said:

3. No more support to translation to the other languages, for me and I think to the other people it's a good solution to have the plugins in their language.
I understand that it's a hard work give support for translations but I can help you with this if you give me the rules to introduce the codes corresponding in the different files, this isn't problem for me.

I think I can add the translation support to the new mode of the add track tool but wait with doing anything to the system for creating and editing custom tracks, signals etc since that part may be changed and perhaps isn't used by most people anyway.

New version uploaded with a fix for the switch tool bug, a bug with tracks not connecting properly when drawn from library and a bug with saving rolling stocks' data on model save.

Download

Thanks for the bug report, Dean!

I've found a fix for the switch bug and will upload a new version as soon as another bug I'm working on now with track ends sometimes not updating when placing from library is solved.

No vacation, just a lot of things to do in school.

For the first time in a long time there's finally a new version published. This time I've mostly fixed bugs and glitches and optimized. I've also put a lot of work in the methods and documentation for creating custom content, such as track types and rolling stocks.

One notable completely new feature though is the library mode of the Add Track tool. A group of tracks and other geometry can be saved and placed altogether, e.g. a complete turntable including the roundhouse or a station including switches, platforms and buildings.

The save format and location for custom content (track types, structure types, signals and rolling stocks) has changed. If you already have made own custom content run "EneRailroad::Templates.convert_old" in console to move and convert it.

I haven't updates the translation template with the new strings or added the translate code under the hood for them. So far the older parts of the user interface can still be translated but I might drop the translation support completely for the next version since the translations don't seem to be used very much, unless anyone really wants to keep it.

I'm also hoping the next release can be the "official" one with the version number 1.0.0. I'll try to get the plugin into the extension warehouse so if anyone finds a bug please tell me!

Download

My resolution is just 1366 x 768 px but I hope it gets better next year.

Isn't it already possible to just change the highlight color in the rendering options? It could be done from a selection observer and depend on what's currentply selected. Only supports one color at a time though.

<offtopic>
There's a Materials.current method ?? For my latest project I created a materials observer listening to active material change just so it could be assigned to a variable so I later could know what material is active. How could I have missed this? cleaning up some code
</offtopic>

@jeff hammond said:

@eneroth3 said:

. Also push-pull is the foundation of most Sketchup modeling so introducing users to that as early as possible might be better than having seperate box and cylinder tools.

oh.. were you responding to someone's wish in the thread stating 'put box/cylinder/etc tools in sketchup"?

if so, i agree with you.. leave those out

I was thinking more generally but those 2 are the best examples. I might have beena bit unclear yesterday because I was quite tired but what I meant is that the large and small toolset should be kept as simple as possible. New tools in their own toolbar such as the solid tools are great (more of that please!) but too many tool icons visible when starting the program for the first time makes it a lot harder to learn.

Speaking of cylinders and boxes specifically there is a plugin by the Sketchup team for this already.

I think more options for existing tools are great but too many but high number of similar tools might be confusing. Also push-pull is the foundation of most Sketchup modeling so introducing users to that as early as possible might be better than having seperate box and cylinder tools.

What about not adding new native tools that are similar to the existing and might be confusing to new users? One of the best things with Sketchup is that you can just launch it and start using it by guessing what tools do based on their icons. All other 3d modelers and lots and lots of the image editors I've tried are absolutely impossible to do anything at all with without having another person that already kinows the program tellig you what to do. By keeping down the number of tools users easier understand what they all do and start learning how to combine them. Cylindes, cubes etc are easily created with circles, rectangles and npush pull.

Makes sense but should be under "Texture". Perhaps these buttons could be added where the colorize and reset color options are now and those two could be moved to a new line and be next to each other.

@tt_su said:

@eneroth3 said:

Thanks! The gem rubyzip gem does exactly what I wanted .

However I don't know what's the best practice to use a gem. Should I ask the user to install it or should I check if it exists when the plugin loads and otherwise install it? Should I in that case use statusbar texts to tell the user the gem is being installed and that it may take some time?

What I've done is wrap the require in a begin/rescue that catch LoadErrors (you don't want to catch other errors) and then use Gem.install to install it if it's missing.

What do you think is the best implementation? What about showing a web dialog or UI.messagebox when the plugin loads and the gem isn't installed telling the user that the gem is required? The user can choose to do it later (next time plugin is loaded) and the extension wont load or choose to download it now and there's a message saying it may take some time. The user would also be informed that this only has to be done once (per user and computer). Of course the extension warehouse info page would say that the extension will ask the user to install the gem and then automatically do it.

These examples use rubyzip but from a subdirectory rather than a Gem. Is it possible to only use the Zlib without rubyzip to put multiple files in the same zip archive?

I use these archives to store information for what can be drawn with my plugin. In my previous plugin I stored railroad tracks in a similar way but in their own folders instead of archives. Each folder contained a few .skp models for things to draw when drawing the track, e.g profiles, a preview image for web dialogs and a text file containing some information dynamically displayed in the web dialogs without loading the models and littering the definition list.

In this project I want to store all that data in one single file to make it easier for users to exchange them. I've already managed to do that but I don't know what's considered best practice, installing a Gem or copy the code into my own plugin's folder.