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Which 3rd party transit stations have been SLURPed?

Started by new.orendor, September 10, 2017, 08:11:53 PM

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new.orendor

I plan to relot the more interesting transit stations I've found so that they are in line with the standards specified in the transit switch costs and station capacities thread.

However, the station locator and updater (SLURP) utility exists within the installer, and I don't wish to duplicate work the NAM team has already done. But, I haven't been able to locate any information on the SLURP progress or any way to see which stations have been SLURPed except for reinstalling the entire NAM with third party transit stations and pieces in my plugins. (For example, deadwoods elevated rail shops have been slurped and were overridden in my installation, but all the other downloaded stations I had were not)

So three questions
1) where can I keep up with SLURP progress?
2) Since I'm relotting stations anyway, how can I do it such that my work benefits the NAM team?
3) I really like the NAM expanded query, and calling the NAM UI file is easy. But seeing as how I am not a NAM developer, I'm wondering how I can keep any relots/stations I make from showing the NAM certified logo when they have the NAM query GUID. Because they aren't certified.

Thank you for your time.

APSMS

Hi new.orendor,

SLURP progress was, iirc, kept on a private board in order to keep pressure off of the Team that might otherwise follow having such information be public.

Although the NAM Team tries to include as many stations as possible, obviously help is greatly appreciated, and of course is in short supply essentially always (especially now given that there are only 3 active "full-time" devs)!

As for the SLURP lists, the best thing to do would be to contact one of the NAM members directly. The ones I recall most being involved in that project are MGB204, B22rian, and PierreH. Steve (z1) was also part of that project, but I don't know how active he's been lately due to RL and other issues. PM'ing any one of them will likely get you a quicker response than this forum post as a lot of the work is going toward cleaning up the packaging for the next imminent NAM release.

Alex (Tarkus) is always a good person to contact as well, but as the lead dev right now sometimes he gets a bit swamped between SC4 and work, so perhaps the others I mentioned might be better to contact first.

In theory I should have a list for you, but unfortunately I don't actually have access to those files (though thinking about it I should ask again. I think my request got buried last time...).

In the meantime, let me preemptively thank you for your work so far and your effort to reach out to the NAM Team with this offer.

-APSMS
Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it.

My Mayor Diary San Diego: A Reinterpretation

new.orendor

Thank you for your swift and thorough reply, APSMS.

Keeping things private does make a lot of sense. I hadn't thought of the potential pressure from the community on that front.

In keeping with that, I'll keep any information I receive private unless otherwise instructed.

I'll message the NAM team members like you suggested. Hopefully they have a few moments to spare.

Thanks again for your reply and all the contributions you and the rest of the NAM folks have made to the SC4 community. I'm happy to help.

-new.orendor


mgb204

I will quickly reply here because some others may come up with a similar question in future.

If you plan to re-lot the stations (as in changing their appearance in-game), then those would not be suitable for inclusion into the SLURP program. The intention of which is simply to improve the function of the stations users most commonly have installed, with changes in the NAM. It's a silent process that's part of the NAM installer and many users may be unhappy if they suddenly find their stations looking different or missing dependencies, as a result of us altering the lots themselves. The only advice for such re-lots that have equivalents in the NAM is that to work, they will need to load after the "z___NAM" folder, otherwise the NAM versions will override them. We don't keep an internal list (that I know of), but if you look in the NAM installer, opening it as a 7zip archive, under $[125]\MTA Station Overrides\, you can browse all the currently included SLURPed stations for reference. Note each station included here has four variants.

SLURP could be considered a joint project between the NAM and RTMT team which do work closely together, but it's usually handled by the RTMT team in practise. NAM certification is a rigorous process of testing to ensure a station is optimised for end users. I'm not sure that we have the resources to certify the work of others, it's always been an internal thing. As such re-use of our UI files would not really be OK outside of NAM inclusive content. If you like the NAM UI and want something similar, you should probably make a custom UI for inclusion with your work.

As with the NAM team, RTMT membership is usually something that members do not apply for. Instead those who prove they have the right skills may be invited to join either team at some point.

new.orendor

Thank you, that covers all the information I was looking for.