Filenames and their limits

A POD entry holds 31 characters including its folder. That is the format's limit. The useful limits are shorter, and for reasons worth knowing.

Name	Cap	Why
Ordinary asset stem	18	leaves room for its derived siblings
Truck tire base name	16	the engine appends a suffix per wheel
Name inside a `.ANI`	15	including the extension — the reader truncates there
Frames in a `.ANI` entry	8	the engine keeps eight and drops the rest

Why 18

Not because anything refuses 19 — the engine's own name fields are char[64], far wider than this. It is a reservation. Art gains derived siblings whose names are your stem plus a suffix, and those have to fit too. The longest is _MASK at five characters, and the arithmetic lands exactly:

ART\ (4) + stem (18) + _MASK (5) + .PNG (4) = 31

At 20 characters that sibling needs 33 and simply cannot be stored. And it does not error. The file stops resolving, and the effect it belongs to quietly does not appear. That silence is what makes two reserved characters worth more than a warning.

This constrains new work, not anything you already have. Measured across an installed set of 750,378 pod entries, the longest asset stem in existence is 15 characters.

Why the other three are different

A tire base name is not a filename. The engine builds several models from it, appending 16l, 16r, 10l, 10r, 08l, 08r for an older truck, or 16fl, 16fr, 16rl, 16rr for a newer one. The longest suffix is four characters, so MODELS\ + 16 + 4 + .bin comes to exactly 31.

That is 31 with no margin, unlike the asset cap which deliberately keeps two characters back. It stays that way on purpose: the suffix set is fixed by the engine, so unlike a hand-typed sibling it cannot drift. The arithmetic is either right or it is not.

A name inside a .ANI is capped by the reader, not the format. The animation code reads both the base and each frame with %15s. The struct fields around it were widened to char[64]; those two format strings were not, so 15 is what is actually honoured — and that 15 includes the extension, leaving eleven characters of stem for a .RAW. Anything longer is truncated at load, and a truncated name still looks perfectly valid. It simply stops matching.

An .ANI entry may declare more than eight frames, but the engine keeps eight and drops the rest.

C-POD reports a name over these caps and never refuses one. They are conventions shared across BinEdit, Traxx and C-POD, deliberately tighter than anything the formats enforce — and a rule meant to keep authors out of trouble has no business rejecting a pod that already works. What genuinely cannot be written to a POD1 archive is still refused; that is a different thing.