Railworks America

Just wondering, how do you identify the content folder for a route without going into the actual content folder?

I've found the assets folder for an old route which i made a small start on a couple of years ago. However, I can't seem to find the content folder for it. Is there anything in the blueprints or whatever that tells you the name of this folder so that i can move it back to content and try and get it working again?

There is a utility in the Railworks folder called namemyroute.exe. It displays the real name instead of numbers of the route. However, if the route is newer and has stuff in an .AP, the utility cannot read it. Otherwise you have to go in each folder and open the route properties.xml and see what thename of it is.

You could install RWInfo - the latest installer package is available at railsim.de

RWInfo can (beside other things like showing a route map) export a nice list of all routes with identifiers without unpacking an .ap files.

yymot wrote:You could install RWInfo - the latest installer package is available at railsim.de

RWInfo can (beside other things like showing a route map) export a nice list of all routes with identifiers without unpacking an .ap files.

That's interesting.
I mean, could whoever wrote that program know what Mike Simpson needs to know to get RWs tools to be able to read and maybe write to .ap files?

It is not that he doesn't know, I've talked to Mike about that long ago, it's the massive changes to RW-Tools that it would require, along with the risk to break everything. At the time he felt it wasn't worth it, and I'm guessing now wouldn't be a good time to ask him about it.

I have to support the reply from @Chacal.

Obviously Mike Simpson knows how to read .ap files - otherwise he could not have written the ap file manager.

IMHO the problem is the technology behind RW_Tools. AFAIK it is still written in VB6 and that limits the possibilities for working with ZIP files directly (and .ap files are nothing more than ZIP files in disguise)

For example RWInfo contains this module RWFileSystem.

RWFileSystem provides an unified view of the files within the railworks folder - whether these files reside in an .ap file or in the windows filesystem itself.

RWFileSystem returns path objects that the other modules can use to read the file contents (and RWFileSystem unpacks the file on the fly if necessary).

In Java this is not all to difficult - but in VB6 this is nearly impossible.