Speeding up the loading time of MSTS

To improve the speed of loading your MSTS, together with Activity Editor and Con-Builder.With this method, you can also place country- of- origin stock into their respective routes.
You have MSTS installed with extra routes, trainsets and consists.Change the name of your 'Train Simulator' in Microsoft Games, to, for instance, Train Simulator OLD.Install Train Simulator...place disc 1 into PC - click on 'Customise Installation Options'
then - "Custom, you can decide which routes you'd like to install'Click on ALL routes and remove the crosses.
Click 'Yes' to create specific folder.Without the routes, disc 1 installs to 93%
Remove disc 1, put in disc 2, and continue.When install is finished, click on 'Play Now' - because you have NO routes installed, your only choice is 'Tutorials' and 'Options'.
Click 'Options' and set up MSTS as you wish, to suit your preferences, and Exit from the game.Open Windows Explorer, click on Train Simultator, open 'global', and delete the 'startup' MPEG video.Make a backup of the default routes.Make a backup of the default consists and trainsets.
Delete evrything out of the Routes, Consists, and Trainset folders.
( Important - Leave the 'Default' trainset.)You now have a second MSTS ready for your 3rd party Routes and trainsets.
(In this state, MSTS only takes up 228 MB.)For purposes of this excercise, Copy and Paste one of your 3rd party routes from 'Train Simulator OLD' to the 'Routes' folder of 'Train Simulator'
(if you have backups, you can cut and paste)Find as much of the rolling stock and consists for this route that you can remember, and copy and paste from 'Train Simultator OLD' to the respective folders in 'Train Simulator'
(again, if you have backups, you can cut and paste)Open Con Builder, check all items, including activities, and copy (or cut) and paste whatever is missing.You may find that you need to replace some of the default trains and consists for your route to run.Go for it.
From personal experience, you can have seperate 'Train Simulators' installed for each Route you have,
or you can bunch your routes into groups, i.e. Countries, High-Speed, Steam, etc., naming them accordingly.Just be sure that before you run the game, ONE of your Game Folders is called only
'Train Simulator', otherwise MSTS may have to be re-installed.This idea speeds up the loading of not only MSTS, but also Activity Editor and Con Builder.
I've been running this system for two month now, with 18 versions of MSTS, and so far had no problems.When you want to install a new Route, you will probably have to copy and paste all the default routes into the particular Train Simulator you choose, so the .bat file loads.
When it's installed, you can then safely remove them again.Further to the above, I have found that deleting the following folders does NOT affect the running of TS.
Help; Route Geography Creator; Samples; Template; and Utilities.And, last but not least, a time-saving suggestion from a simmer friend who lives nearby, who 'tested' this whole idea for me. Once you have your various versions set-up as you want them, go into each version of T/S that you have, find 'train.exe', and place that onto your desktop as an icon. Then all you have to do is click on the icon, and that particular version will start.Important:
If you want to compress routes with 'Route Riter'. From your back-up files, copy/paste 'Utilities' into the version of TS that has the route you want to compress, as 'Route Riter' needs the 'make.ace' file.
When finished, you can safely remove 'Utilities' again.
E&OE.........NO responsibilty taken,just use your common-sense.. It Works For Me !However, Murphy's Law states "If Something Can Be Stuffed Up By Someone, It Will Be"Have Fun.....
Alan
a.k.a. grandpaOz

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RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, plainsman, Dec-05-02, 09:24 AM, (1) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, grandpaOz, Dec-05-02, 09:43 AM, (2) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, jm1941, Dec-10-02, 05:30 AM, (3) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, downside, Dec-12-02, 02:34 PM, (4) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, jm1941, Dec-12-02, 07:12 PM, (5) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, downside, Dec-13-02, 11:42 AM, (6) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, grandpaOz, Dec-14-02, 09:34 AM, (8) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, downside, Dec-14-02, 10:46 AM, (9) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, grandpaOz, Dec-14-02, 11:37 PM, (11) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, jm1941, Dec-13-02, 05:54 PM, (7) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, michaelnscale, Dec-14-02, 09:42 PM, (10) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, grandpaOz, Dec-14-02, 11:40 PM, (12) RE: Speeding up the loading time of MSTS, downside, Dec-15-02, 02:59 AM, (13)

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LAST EDITED ON Dec-05-02 AT 09:25 AM (EST)

Just guessing, this probably also remedies the consist limit problem, as each version would have 800 plus limit??
Bob

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To Plainsman.....quite possibly, but haven't checked that out, it's a whole lotta consists !!regards
grandpaOz

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Here also is a slightly different way to have your Routes each running with its own separate MSTS. Great idea Alan (GrandpaOz) exactly what I was looking for. A safe way for me to load Routes without glitches, goes fantastic.How I did it is in HTML format zipped.http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/User_files/3df5bf4b68fd248e.zip

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JohnI have downloaded your instructions and everything seems to work just fine - thanks for the work you have both put into this.Just one minor point:I do not believe it is necessary to copy over Route Control. In the options you can alter the path to each version of train simulator on your system. I believe this works - at least it should do. It seemed to work for me but I need to look a bit further into it.As I say, just a minor point but more space saved!!Bill

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Bill,First thanks for answering this thread. I thought no one was game to give it a go, as I was at first when Alan ran this by me as an idea, but I was fortunate that I met Alan here at the TS Forum and he only lived (yes) 20 minutes away from my home, so I had the opportunity to head down to his place for a few hours and see for myself it actually working in 18 separate routes, and not a lot extra space used. I was totally sold there and then and for me is next best thing since Conbuilder and that's saying something. It is so nice now knowing if a route goes belly up it does not affect any other routes. Have not now got all my eggs (opps routes) in one basket anymore, just waiting to trip over.>> I do not believe it is necessary to copy over Route Control.
>> In the options you can alter the path to each version of train simulator on your system.
When I made my extra MSTS for this Route setup, I found you needed to copy over the Train Station Folder if you have Route Control installed as it needs that folder on every Route copy IF you want to use Route Control to check activities on that specific route. So if you copy the Station Folder over (only 3.78megs) into the MSTS when your first making MSTS for your future Routes, it will appear automatically in every route copy you make from then on.I only included Route Control, as I personally, only use it to check activities and 99½% of the time everything's always fine. Normally I would not bother using it seeing the Add-on Routes are all separated now each into it's own cut down MSTS, but I thought it a good idea to put it into my initial full install MSTS Route version when it is very first made, as with any other utilities you might use, before copying that MSTS copy over to your other hard drive for the future copy for all future routes you install.Then when I need to copy that full MSTS version back to C: ready to install the next route and then delete out the not needed folder bits, all the utilities (like Route Control) are in there that I normally used in my original MSTS. If I needed to let's say use Conbuilder, one has to rename (as far as I know) your Route back to Train Simulator to run it as Conbuilder is installed through the registry, and the registry only sees a folder called Train Simulator. Then you can use the default Add-in utilities icons including Conbuilder to check everything before renaming back to the Route. example" Train Simulator_PO&N. So far everything has worked 100%.I found it helped heaps to use the "Launcher.exe" from that named route, as a desktop icon (see my picture in zip file in my post above) as normally you make or change consists more often (well I do) so by having an Editors icon on the desktop to that specific route. Is easy to use the Activity Editor for consist adding or changing anytime with that route without having to rename your Route back to Train Simulator. Saves a bit of time for me that's all.But yes surely this idea here can be worked on as this started out as a rough idea of Alan's. As soon as I tried it and immediately saw the whopping benefits (well for me personally that is) I felt I improved on it a bit, (well from my point of view) no doubt others can and will and I do hope they put any improvements here for us all to see.All the very best for the coming New Year. Not into the "Silly Season", be glad when we get past that.

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Another little point that springs to mind - what about installing new activities that come as apk files? As far as I can see it cannot be done.My solution - the folder for the original Train Simulator has a dummy folder for each of the add on routes with just the .trk and .tdb files from the root of each route. Then an apk will happily install the activity, creating the necessary folders at the same time, and you can then move all the folders to the TS that holds that route.Bill

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Hi, as the following pic shows, I've installed activities, including the updated ones, straight into my trainsimulator BODID route, simply by clicking on them, as per normal.
As long as the route you want to unpack to, is in the current TS that you are using, named only.....Train Simulator regards
grandpaOz

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Thanks for that but I am going to keep the dummy folders in main train simulator so I can check what is being put on my machine.Bill

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You're correct, as per following pic, RC loads into Microsoft Games, as Train Station. I've found that when I use RC, again I stress, make sure ONE of your versions is named only Train Simulator, and RC works fine.
regards
Alan

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Bill,>> Another little point that springs to mind - what about installing new activities that come as apk files? As far as I can see it cannot be done.I see why not overall, but you got me on that one, as I do not install add-in activities, had a couple of very bad experiences early in the MSTS days and being a retired railwayman these days, myself I prefer to do my own stuff with MSTS, most Routes have activities that come with them, and at present I'm happy with just using them. With 5 routes now installed each with their own MSTS now, all working “happy as larry” I have no need to use add-on activities, as plenty to play with in the Routes normally, but I sure do see your point as a lot of others would want to do this.As I said when you made this extra basic MSTS and before you copied this basic MSTS over elsewhere to keep as a spare for future install Routes. You would or should have copied over all the basics you have added to your original MSTS that you know that works for sure. One being you UTILS folder. In my mind here, if you copied over your UTILS folder from your original MSTS that you know will unpack activities, into your basic MSTS copy. (If it unpacked activities in your original MSTS, it then should unpack to this basic MSTS route you have made as well) A Scenario here"-
Say you have a Route made from your BASIC copied MSTS, and you have deleted all the bits as stated in my HTML file to keep MSTS small and renamed it to say Train Simulator_PO&N and its going fine. Now you want to install an add-on activity! Here I'm at a bit of a loss, as I do not do this. BUT, as I understand the unpacking of activities is done by "tsunpack.exe" which is in your UTILS folder of MSTS that you copied over into your new basic MSTS copy in the beginning and is for unpacking an activity.
Here I presume the activity is for the Route you have installed of course.But first you would need to, if you have another Train Simulator already still named Train Simulator, then re-name it to Train Simulator_ORG and re-name your MSTS Route, e.g. Train Simulator_PO&N to Train Simulator and then unpack your Route activity. For you after install of activity would also NEED to run Conbuilder and Route Control to see if everything is there that the new activity needs to operate. Further reason for re-naming your MSTS Route back to Train Simulator so all your Utilities can read it, namely Conbuilder and Route Control. Once it's up and running, rename Train Simulator back to Train Simultor_PO&N.Okay if I'm wrong here and it does require other parts, it is also very easy to goto your basic MSTS copy wherever you have it stored and copy out what is actually needed for the new Route activity, or for anything else for that matter you may be installing for this only Route. If the bits are not needed after install, then delete them out to keep your route small. This is one big PLUS with using multiple copies of MSTS, is you ALWAYS have a spare copy of MSTS somewhere else, namely your second hard drive, as a backup at all times. As long as your computer does not get pinched, no need for those MSTS CD disks, as you have a full working installed spare basic copy at all times ready to go. Nice feeling.Bill, seeing your maybe into add-in activities, and I'm not. If you have made your new Route setup using the extra basic MSTS, and have it reduced to minimum and it's working fine. Before you start to install the add-in activity to save some small pain. Copy your now working MSTS Route over to somewhere else, and then install the add-in activity and try it out. IF it needs bits that have been normally deleted, grab them from your Basic MSTS copy and see what happens. If the whole thing falls in a mess, (which I doubt) then you only need delete this messed up MSTS with its route and then move back that MSTS Route copy you put elsewhere as a backup, your back in business in 30 seconds. Try again..... Easy hey. I would be very interested how you got on if you give it a try, not that I want to install add-in activities. Here I might add for others reading this, in an absolute WORSE case scenario all that could get damaged is that new MSTS with Route, delete that MSTS and Route, as it only takes a short while to go back and make another new MSTS with that only installed Route again, by using a copy of your Basic MSTS you have elsewhere and your original MSTS is still always intact. Nice hey, love that bit now. Sorry if I’ve been a bit long winded explaining this each time, but for others who may be first viewing this type setup, I do not want them getting the “Bull by the Horns” so to speak.
Done correctly, it is a breeze, but is IMPORTANT to get that first copy right to make it easier later when making more new Routes with their own MSTS’sIf some are wondering what I'm talking about here, please read carefully this HTML Zip file first.
http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/User_files/3df5bf4b68fd248e.zip from my No 3 post above.

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Sounds like a great idea...I'm going to try with my various routes....one question though - how would this work with routes like Sandpatch, Cajon and KHP? When I install them from disk, where would I install them to, etc. Not quite sure about to handle them.Thanks! Michael

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I have no idea re. the routes that you have, but I have 5 routes installed from discs, and have NO probs. Just follow the instructions, and you can't go wrong. Apart from Murphy's Law, of course.!!

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One must not lose sight of the fact that routes are transportable. It doesn't matter where they installed. Just take the whole route folder and move it to wherever you want (not forgetting to take along any consists etc that were installed with the route). A route puts nothing in the registry (apart from uninstall information by some types of installer). On the payware routes they can be installed wherever you like. I always install all routes to a dummy folfer first just so I can poke around to see what is there.Bill

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