I was just in the process of replying to Neil's post on my wheel removal tutorial and realised I was about to hijack my own thread but it's a topic I've been thinking about for a while and thought I'd throw some scattered "off the top of my head" thoughts out there and see where it ends up.
I started to respond to Neil by saying I appreciated his thanks but there was little (if anything) in the thread that's "mine" and apart from being grateful to the person who taught me, I think that tutorial is a good example of "institutional knowledge/memory" and there's definitely lots more of it floating around in an ever-aging and shrinking group of us. It doesn't have to be a massive break through like MSTSBin must have been (before my time) or that ORTS has been but so many of us have so much acquired knowledge in our heads how do we stop it being lost?
It's not something I'd ever thought much about until Steam4Me disappeared but after it did it's a thought that I keep coming back to. I hadn't run any of our local content for the best part of a decade and I'm not sure when I'd last visited S4M but suddenly knowing a site that had been hugely important to me in my early years in the hobby was gone came as a bit of a shock to the system. Hobby wise there's no doubt there's a lot more of us using the out door than the in door (and there's a number of reasons for that) and I definitely don't want to get into the "ORTS needs more eye candy" or "they need to advertise more" etc stuff as I think a group of people working voluntarily and producing a free "upgrade" for us has been outstanding. I'm thinking more along the lines of is there a better way to capture the knowledge we have in the community now, how do we share it with each other and ease of accessibility for any new people who do want to give ORTS a try.
I know there's plenty of people who cross between here and ET, (and UKTrainSim & the Aussie MSTS forum when they were both still around) and how there's info here that might not be at ET and vice versa and is it important to people whether that info is consolidated in some way, knowledge gaps are identified and filled, particularly in terms of what isn't "on paper" at the moment? For instance, one of these days I'd like to learn TSRE (and I know Pete Willard has a tutorial available which I haven't got to yet) and I'd also like to try out Blender at some point and at an even more basic level ORTS wise, I'm sure there's people here for whom placing a FA or repositioning/adding lighting are still unknowns. I know there are some tutorials hosted here but I don't know if the tutorials that were housed on S4M are still in existence and if they are, where are they now and are they still all relevant given the changes ORTS has bought us?
I was thinking about the way I learned to do things in photoshop. A lot of the basic tutorials were on S4M but if I wanted to learn about adding "grime" I could find a photoshop tutorial that would explain it or how to desaturate an image or fix "perspective warp" etc, etc. (Again without having looked at Pete's TSRE manual), maybe a simple "how to add a building to a route" or "how to replace trees" tutorial for TSRE would be great, or "how to make a load of pipes for a flatcar" in Blender tutorial. I'm sure like Photoshop there's a million different Blender tutorials available online, but again, the sim specificity might make a difference in encouraging people to have a go at learning something new. Basic step by step tutorials like I mentioned to teach people about FAs and lights, or a "renumber a locomotive" tutorial maybe all the way up to how to do a reskin. Just topics off the top off my head and maybe some/all of them exist but do we all know where to find them and how does it all fit into the concept of "community continuity" if we think that is important?
Anyway, it's something I've been dog & boning since S4M closed and apologies for the disorganised "off the top of my head", more questions than answers approach (and possibly totally pie in the sky) but I guess if other people think it's important and worth discussing, some good ideas/solutions might be forthcoming.
I started to respond to Neil by saying I appreciated his thanks but there was little (if anything) in the thread that's "mine" and apart from being grateful to the person who taught me, I think that tutorial is a good example of "institutional knowledge/memory" and there's definitely lots more of it floating around in an ever-aging and shrinking group of us. It doesn't have to be a massive break through like MSTSBin must have been (before my time) or that ORTS has been but so many of us have so much acquired knowledge in our heads how do we stop it being lost?
It's not something I'd ever thought much about until Steam4Me disappeared but after it did it's a thought that I keep coming back to. I hadn't run any of our local content for the best part of a decade and I'm not sure when I'd last visited S4M but suddenly knowing a site that had been hugely important to me in my early years in the hobby was gone came as a bit of a shock to the system. Hobby wise there's no doubt there's a lot more of us using the out door than the in door (and there's a number of reasons for that) and I definitely don't want to get into the "ORTS needs more eye candy" or "they need to advertise more" etc stuff as I think a group of people working voluntarily and producing a free "upgrade" for us has been outstanding. I'm thinking more along the lines of is there a better way to capture the knowledge we have in the community now, how do we share it with each other and ease of accessibility for any new people who do want to give ORTS a try.
I know there's plenty of people who cross between here and ET, (and UKTrainSim & the Aussie MSTS forum when they were both still around) and how there's info here that might not be at ET and vice versa and is it important to people whether that info is consolidated in some way, knowledge gaps are identified and filled, particularly in terms of what isn't "on paper" at the moment? For instance, one of these days I'd like to learn TSRE (and I know Pete Willard has a tutorial available which I haven't got to yet) and I'd also like to try out Blender at some point and at an even more basic level ORTS wise, I'm sure there's people here for whom placing a FA or repositioning/adding lighting are still unknowns. I know there are some tutorials hosted here but I don't know if the tutorials that were housed on S4M are still in existence and if they are, where are they now and are they still all relevant given the changes ORTS has bought us?
I was thinking about the way I learned to do things in photoshop. A lot of the basic tutorials were on S4M but if I wanted to learn about adding "grime" I could find a photoshop tutorial that would explain it or how to desaturate an image or fix "perspective warp" etc, etc. (Again without having looked at Pete's TSRE manual), maybe a simple "how to add a building to a route" or "how to replace trees" tutorial for TSRE would be great, or "how to make a load of pipes for a flatcar" in Blender tutorial. I'm sure like Photoshop there's a million different Blender tutorials available online, but again, the sim specificity might make a difference in encouraging people to have a go at learning something new. Basic step by step tutorials like I mentioned to teach people about FAs and lights, or a "renumber a locomotive" tutorial maybe all the way up to how to do a reskin. Just topics off the top off my head and maybe some/all of them exist but do we all know where to find them and how does it all fit into the concept of "community continuity" if we think that is important?
Anyway, it's something I've been dog & boning since S4M closed and apologies for the disorganised "off the top of my head", more questions than answers approach (and possibly totally pie in the sky) but I guess if other people think it's important and worth discussing, some good ideas/solutions might be forthcoming.
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