Missing Terrain Buffers

Ok, just did a forum search and didn't turn up much of anything, so...My MSTS has been crashing a lot lately - phoning home, not any of the nice error messages that actually TELL you what might be wrong. It always happened at the loading screen after I'd set up an explore mode - and at first, I kept suspecting the equipment I was trying to test. But then it seemed to happen with any combination of equipment or route, add-on or default. Now, as of tonight, I can't get anything to work period. Before, maybe I'd run one trip, then set up another and it would crash. Basically, what happens is...I get to the loading screen, no progress bars appear at all, and it's saying "Checking for any missing terrain buffers." After a few seconds, I get Send/Don't Send. This happens for all routes - both default and add-on, so at least most of them shouldn't need any buffers to be regenerated - and with any combination of equipment, location, etc.Incidentally, the most recently added route was 3DTS Cajon Pass (v1.6), and I haven't visited all areas of it yet, but as I said, this is happening on ALL routes, even default. I'm at a loss for why this is suddenly happening...I wonder if I may have to do a re-install to fix a corruption, in which case it'd take forever to back up all my various projects that are halfway done, sitting around in pieces...BTW, in one of the topics I found in my search, someone had added carspawners in their route and found that it suddenly crashed at the loading screen. They thought it was a terrain buffer issue, but it turned out that by restoring to get rid of the spawners, everything was ok. So this could be totally unrelated to terrain buffers. Problem is, I haven't done any route modifications in a loong time, especially not to Cajon Pass. No hardware changes with the exception of replacing the monitor, but I ran the sim once or twice with the 'new' monitor. Only MSTS mod I can think of (aside from constantly working on rolling stock) was creating 2 new paths for Cajon today...but MSTS had already randomly started crashing before then. If the paths made any kind of difference, they just made it so that it crashes all the time instead of just sometimes.Thanks for any input...I'd like to just be able to get into the sim so I can see what my work looks like! I don't care so much about being able to have it work flawlessly all the time...Alex Stroshane
Amtrak Prototype & Model
Photos, Train Gifs, and more!
http://www.trainweb.org/asamtrak911

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RE: Missing Terrain Buffers, buttercup, Jul-07-03, 01:24 PM, (1) RE: Missing Terrain Buffers, sniper297, Jul-07-03, 06:47 PM, (2) RE: Missing Terrain Buffers, buttercup, Jul-07-03, 07:06 PM, (3) RE: Missing Terrain Buffers, asamtrak911, Jul-08-03, 03:13 AM, (4) Spare Boat Anchors, sniper297, Jul-08-03, 08:19 AM, (5) RE: Spare Boat Anchors, asamtrak911, Jul-08-03, 02:20 PM, (6) RE: Spare Boat Anchors, Motley24Crue2, Jul-09-03, 00:16 AM, (7) RE: Spare Boat Anchors, shawnbecher, Jul-09-03, 11:42 AM, (8) RE: Spare Boat Anchors, Bing, Jul-09-03, 01:40 PM, (9) RE: Spare Boat Anchors, shawnbecher, Jul-09-03, 04:23 PM, (10)

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Do you have Train Store? Have you checked your rolling stock with ConBuilder? Have you checked your routes with RouteRiter? How many consists do you have?RegardsEric

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I'm going to have to download and try out trainstore one of these days, still haven't gotten to it yet. Judging by your symptoms I would say that's your best bet tho.I noticed slower and slower loading as I installed more routes and trains, and I finally figured out thru trial and error what the sim does.On startup, it goes thru all the routes and loads the .trk file in each route folder into RAM, and after consulting that it loads the track and road database files for each route, plus the tsection.dat, and compares them to the \Global\tsection.dat file. It then goes thru all the services in each route and gets a list of driveable consists. Then it switches to the consists folder, and reads the .con files listed in all the .srv files in all the routes for trainset .eng and .wag files. If this sounds like it's loading a hell of a lot of stuff it doesn't need yet, you're absolutely right, I haven't heard a programmer yet who could explain what in the name of Bill Gates they were thinking when they programmed it that way. Possibly it was done while testing and since the game was rushed out the door to meet a deadline, they never had time to set it up properly.There's supposedly an upper limit to exactly how many .con files you can have at once, 900 or something, but I suspect it doesn't load all the .con files, only the ones listed in the .srv files so it can put up a menu of player driveable consists. Whatever, too many routes and/or too many consists installed at the same time will slow down loading or even stop it. Since it's loading all routes and consists, when you go to start one route driving with one consist and it locks up, it may not be that route/consist it's having a problem with, it may be another one. I just looked on my son's machine, he has 21 routes and 572 consists currentyly, and on an Athlon XP 1.45ghz with 512mb DDR RAM it takes almost a minute and a half to load trainsim, and any activity with AI traffic takes almost 2 minutes to load. I've been playing with PCs since they first came out, so I've been using Windows Explorer to move individual route folders out of \Train Simulator\Routes\ and into a backup folder for faster loading. When I do get a problem I'll move all but one route folder out, try that, and if it works OK I'll move others back in and test them until I find the bad one. Frequently when I have a problem these days it's from installing a new route that requires Xtracks without having Xtracks installed.So if you know how, move the route folders out, move consist folders out, and hunt down the culprit, otherwise try that Train Store, I hear it's a good file management tool.
The other item is error checking routines, Route Control Lite (which I have tried and tested extensively) has one of the most useful for startup errors, since it goes thru a loading and testing routine similar to what the game uses, and will automatically move any files with errors plus whatever files would be looking for those files into a backup folder so that trainsim will start without errors.

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Sniper,Once you get used to Train Store you will wonder how you ever did with out it.You can load individual activities with a mouse click. I have the following currently installed: Routes - 112; Activities - 932; Services - 2,684; Consists - 2,782; Engines - 1,514; Wagons - 3,179.The sim loads as if only one route with one activity is installed.Also if you have activities that you don't have all the needed stock you can install them without a problem because you can store them until you have the needed stock.It will tell you if you are loading an activity that does not have all the needed stock installed so you can store it before starting the sim.I'm just scratching the surface here. Get it you will like it.Did I say it has an excellent manual? etc etcRegardsEric

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Sniper and Eric, thanks for your replies. I actually have a minimum of add-on routes and equipment, not sure how many consists but it'd definitely be well below the limit. Most of my simming time is spent testing out rolling stock that I'm building - for me, add-on routes are more like backdrops to pose my creations in front of.However, considering my system specs (P2 400MHz, 256MB SDRAM, 32MB nVidia TNT2 M64, XP Pro) it's a wonder I can even get MSTS to run at all with decent graphics. Framerates are another story, but I know where my priorities are - I keep the sliders maxed, and until my big monitor fizzled, I was running the sim at 1600x1200x32. With all that to worry about, I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised that my machine is having difficulty with the loading process. I agree, it's a ridiculous way of programming it, but then again, what else have we come to expect? Believe it or not, I solved my problem today (at least enough to satisfy me for now) by deleting the two new paths I had created for Cajon Pass. Suddenly I was able to get into the sim again without having it hang up at an empty loading screen. I later restored one of the paths and it still worked perfectly. I'm tempted to put the second one back and see if the darned thing works anyways! My MSTS is still not back to its original pristine status - sometimes it crashes when I try to run a second or third explore activity - but at least I'm not locked out like I was last night.You can now officially add me to the list of folks looking forward to an MSTS 2 that hopefully makes (slightly) more sense...Alex Stroshane
Amtrak Prototype & Model
Photos, Train Gifs, and more!
http://www.trainweb.org/asamtrak911

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"P2 400MHz, 256MB SDRAM, 32MB nVidia TNT2 M64, XP Pro", that explains a lot. I have one of those too, carry it with me when I go fishing in case I lose the regular anchor. Actually the video card and RAM are OK, the CPU is like the Brewster Buffalo. Nice airplane for its day, fast and maneuverable, but by the time World War 2 came along it was a rather slow moving target for the Mitsubishis and Messerschmitts. When I first bought MSTS two years ago, I had an AMD Athlon 800, 128mb SDRAM, Voodoo 3-2000 16mb PCI video. Anything other than 640x480 with minimum detail led to monotonously frequent crash/lockup/send-don't send. My youngest son's system was worse, an AMD K6-2 450mhz (about the equivelant of what you have there, AMD K6 class chips were slower than the same mhz P2 chips) with 64k RAM, Voodoo Banshee 12mb PCI. So I oiled up the .380, went out to the suburbs and stuck up a few gas stations, and started throwing money at upgrades. In my own situation it's actually economical, Daddy gets a new toy, Mike gets Daddy's old toy, 2 for the price of 1.Micro$oft marketing department actually sets the minimum system specs, they had a test route made with one track and one tree, ran a single geep with 2 cars on that 266mhz junker for 30 seconds before the CPU caught fire, and announced that was the minimum system specs.So my suggestion, do whatever you have to to upgrade, like real quick, cuz I strongly suspect MSTS 2 won't run on that system at all!

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Sniper,For now I'm holding out until I get my laptop in mid-August. Looking at the specs for it (IBM T40, 1.6GHz, 512MB RAM, 32MB Radeon 9000) it should do a much better job with MSTS. Strangely, though, the sim had been cooperating on my desktop up until now, despite the Stone Age processor. Since I'm bringing both systems with me to college, I actually have begun to think about getting a new motherboard and processor for a retrofit upgrade - I'm sure I'd never want to go back after 5 minutes on my laptop. As you said, I'm satisfied enough with the other parts of the system, although a bigger HD is a must too.Oh, and thanks for the tip...if I ever take a fishing trip I'll make sure to bring my PC along just in case Alex
Amtrak Prototype & Model
Photos, Train Gifs, and more!
http://www.trainweb.org/asamtrak911

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LAST EDITED ON Jul-09-03 AT 00:17 AM (EDT)

>So my suggestion, do whatever you have to to upgrade, like
>real quick, cuz I strongly suspect MSTS 2 won't run on that
>system at all!
Fried Chips anyone? Robert Steskal
Philadelphia, Pa

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Wow! I'm also amazed that you are able to run MSTS on that PC. I'm running an Athlon XP 2100+ w/512MB DDR333 (2x256MB in dual channel mode), and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro w/128MB DDR on it. I can't push my machine past 1024x768x32 without taking substancial frame rate hits. I haven't even turned on AA or anisotropic filtering yet. I'm afraid that if I do, my frame rates will be cut in half!ShawnP.S. At 1600x1200x32 I'm barely able to hold 15 FPS.

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Shawn - I have a system comparable to yours, other than the video card being a Ti-4400 rathet than ATI Radeon 9800. Drop a line if you would like, we can discuss ways to get your rig to run better. I use 1600 x 1200 x 32 as my standard, the frame rates run anywhere from 15 to 18 in builtup areas, sometimes as low as 15 - up to maxed out 60 in the wide open spaces of Marias 31. NO stuttering either - Load Lurch, yes, which I sincerelyhope will be cured when my new rig arrives with a SATA HD and 8 Meg cache. Better reduce it, or it will truly be hand grenade time. The "private" message thing for me is too much trouble, just e-mail me at: binglesh@chartermi.net - -First off, do you have the latest vid drivers for the Radeon? That wouldn't necessarily make the frame rates higher, but it does to an extent affect overall performance. Also: DX8 or DX9? If the latter, how was it installed: Over the existing DX8 with MSTs in place, or did you have DX9 installed PRIOR to your last MSTS installation?Drop a line,Bing

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I'll shoot you an email when I get home tonight. Thanks.Shawn

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