klyte45
commented
2 years ago Hi!
I really understand your pain! This mod was not well documented and evolved so fast that some old concept names got outdated. The "prefix" one is an example.
Making story short: "prefix" are actually groups of lines that share the same models, budget, ticket and depot settings, as well a color that can be used to paint all vehicles and other minor information.
The name come from the first design, in TLM 2.0, that used to identify the group with a prefix added in the start of the line identifier. This got outdated at 14.0 with introduction of the field that allows you to give any line identifier to the line.
May TLM 15 be a breaking version and most of these concepts may be corrected and documented, but there's other priority mods ahead of it needed attention right now. Wait for news in the future!
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. There is no documentation for the mod. In particular, there is no explanation of what the 'prefix' concept is, even though it is mentioned on almost every tab of the UI.
I know that prefixes are something that is added to the beginning of a word. But how are they used in Cities:Skylines? I have never previously heard of "prefixes" in transport history or computer games or computer programming.
Describe the solution you'd like Ideally, when the TLM Menu is opened, the in-game help pop-uo should explain how to use the mod, in particular the prefix system. If that is too difficult, then the information could be written in on this repository's README.md, or a GitHub wiki page, a GitHub Gist, or a page in the official Cities:Skylines wiki, or a thread in the Paradox Forums.
If you can simply write one sentence in English that says, "In TLM, a 'prefix' is.....", then that would be 50% of the problem solved, I think!
Describe alternatives you've considered I searched GitHub (both main repo and any associated wiki), Steam Workshop, the official C:S wiki, the C:S subreddit, Paradox Forums. I could not find any explanation or general guide. I only found some references to deleted Steam Workshop pages. So I searched using Google. I found some YouTube guides, but the first one was unintelligible because the streamer's voice was at the same volume as C:S radio. There was a video by you (Klyte45), but it was 25 minutes long, out of date (the UI is much better now!), and assumed from the beginning that we know what a prefix is in this mod. So I could not understand it because I did not know what a prefix is in this mod.
Or maybe the mod needs a better translation into English of the concept that is meant by "prefix". A "prefix" means some kind of group, I think. But it is a group of lines? Or a group of buses/trains/etc. within a line?
Additional context I found some references to deleted Steam Workshop pages. Is it possible that the documentation was deleted when development moved to GitHub?
P.S. Thank you for the hundreds of hours of time that have been kindly put into this mod. I think it is probably a very clever mod, but I don't know how to use it well!