F9 "Reloading Assets"?

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

Inadvertedly, I pressed the F9 key and got presented with a window "Reloading Assets".

What is it, what does it do, and what's its purpose? Refreshing the .pak caches, garbage collection of assets not needed anymore?

[wacampbell]

This is a feature for asset developers. You can keep Railworks open and also your 3D modeling program. After making changes to the source files for your model, changing the texture image of a scenery object for example, you can press F9 to 'reload' it into the route editor without having to exit Railworks first.

Here's some notes I lifted from somewhere:

The F9 key is used when you are developing assets and exporting them from the blueprint editor, and you want to view the asset in the game without having to restart the editor. When you run a scenario the game creates a database with information about each asset the route uses. Prior to TS2014 you had to quit the game and restart it to refresh the assets database. That takes time because a whole bunch of other things happen when the scenario loads. When you hit the F9 key while you’re in the editor it refreshes the database only. Subsequent F9 hits apparently only look for differences in the database so the change is available much sooner.

[artimrj]

Thanks Wayne, I accidently hit it yesterday myself and was actually getting ready to post it as a question myself. It was taking too long so I canceled it which presented me a crash and a dump.