I may get blasted for saying this...but...I can see this either being really successful...or disappointing. I recall the days of RCT3 scenery design...EVERYONE wanted in on it...and we ended up with zillions of scenery sets, of which only a percentage actually looked like the in-game RCT3 stuff or better. Most, I'm sad to say, were lower quality.....how do you guys feel about that?
While I agree that to start with, there's a chance that the quality-to-crap ratio of TMT content may be on the low side, I don't think that will be anywhere near as bad nor last so long as it did with the regular PC Workshop items. There are a number of reasons for this:
1. Making the content all takes place outside the game except for your own checking of how the part looks in-game. Thus, you totally avoid folks just throwing stuff together in-game and uploading it while playing, which beset the early days of the PC Workshop. Also, it takes considerable time outside the game, when you can't be playing except to test the in-game appearance of what you just made, and that will be at relatively long intervals. This non-playing time commitment alone weeds out most wannabes.
2. 3D modeling is hard. It takes considerable time even to learn how to make even just a totally crap static object. Add an order of magnitude if you want to animate more than a wheel turning. If you've never done it before, just getting the hang of the process and learning your editor's controls and workflow shortcuts takes quite a while. All of which takes place outside the game instead of playing it. This is a significant hurdle that weeds out many more aspiring content-builders who simply don't have the dedication.
3. Making textures and mapping them to the model you just made are even harder than making the model. Many who get over the model-making hurdle trip on this because they simply aren't graphic artists and/or lack the patience to fiddle with persnickety mapping and specularity issues. These are 2, arguably 4, separate skills over and above the several other skills you need to make just the bare-bones model. And again, this all takes considerable time that you're not actually playing the game except to see how things look, then going back out and tweaking yet again. So again, the weed-out factor is high.
4. The folks who already have all these skills and aren't afraid to use them probably already have portfolios of stuff ready to shove into PC, or will now be cranking out such things as they know their time to shine is fast approaching. Because they already know what they're doing, this stuff will hit the market first, way ahead of those just now starting to acquire the tools and doing the basic tutorials. Seeing quality work immediately on the Workshop will further discourage the wannabes. After all, I'm sure Frontier has already picked a goodly number of "featured designers" who are already working on stuff to set the bar fairly high upon the release of TMT.
So all in all, I expect a fairly high ratio of quality-to-crap from the outset and, while this might get a bit diluted after a month or so as the few surviving self-taught wannabes cross the finish line just to say they did, things will soon be back to pretty much all good after another month or 2.
Once it's on the workshop, how will it relate to the file on the TMT?
If someone downloads your scenery from Steam, do they then need to download custom content from the TMT? Or does it link there?
I'm not quite clear about that part.
As I understand it, it works like this:
1. You make your model in .fbx format and texture(s) in .png format. Note that neither of these files is usable in the game.
2. You upload the model and texture to the TMT site.
3. The TMT sight outputs a single file in a format that PC can use as a scenery object. You download this into your custom content folder.
4. You can now select your custom parts out of that custom content folder to use in your own parks, same as you do with your custom billboards and music.
5. You can also upload your custom parts to the Workshop same as you can with anything you build.
