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Colleagues, Newbies especially,I have noticed, especially when laying roads, that if I have laid roads for a mile or two, AND THEN, go back and examine what I have laid, I will often find those situations where there appears to be no road piece, but the database generated lines are present. My habit is to lay no more than 4-8 pieces AND THEN SAVE, so here is what I have discovered.In the above situation, exit from RE and TrainSim WITHOUT SAVING. If you were religious in your saving, as I mentioned above, you should not lose much. Just before exiting, however, jot down the coordinates of the bad spot.I find that when I go back into RE, in all but one case, and I think I accidently saved that time, the problem has disappeared, leading me to suspect that RE doesn't like backing up, i.e. physically moving back over a just laid route. I am generally more precise laying track and rarely lay more than a mile of it without leaving RE for other reasons and then returning, so I have never seen this with track, but it can happen just as easy.NEVER PUT IN any track related objects until all of your track & roads are laid, and at least basic sculpting done (Y key i.e.). In fact I hold off on track related objects until the very last thing.J. H. Sullivan, P.E. (retired) Creator of the KP & BR Subdivision of CSX 2nd & now 4th subdivision of the Milwaukee Road, Rocky Mtn. Division.
Something else to try, jump a full degree in any direction and then jump back. I have found that the shape fails to load for some reason at times.Steven
I have seen that many times Steve, originally to my horror but it did not seem to affect the object at all. IOW, if I saw the object missing after a save and exited the RE, when I reloaded the RE, the missing object was there. Seemed to happen more on tiles with a high object count. I never tried to pin it down since it did not affect the finished product. Another quirk of the KUJU Klowns Kode I quess.
Regards, Vince Cockeram NEC Track Team Author of the NECv4 Route
J.S. writes: >>...My habit is to lay no more than 4-8 pieces AND THEN SAVE,...<<Jerry, I would be even more conserative and save after every 2 - 3 placements except when you approach a tile boundry.The problem is if you are sculpting terrain (the 'Y' key) when placing track or roads and you cross a tile boundry. If you havn't saved your work BEFORE crossing the boundry, all your terrain sculpting after the last save will be lost. (The terrain buffers get reset when you cross the boundry.)When I was building the nec4 I saved after EVERY track/road/interactive placement no matter where I was on a tile. Yes, it takes a little more time but doing it that way I never lost any of my work. I was not willing to have to redo more than and hour of work so I up every hour or so.
Regards, Vince Cockeram NEC Track Team Author of the NECv4 Route
Vince,I agree with you, but it also depends on what the pieces are. One of the crazy things about RE is that you cannot display the blue boundary lines while editing, and so it is awful easy to cross one, and I suspect I have done it a bunch.On the particular sim I am working on, I am dealing with roads down in canyons (with a river there too), and so I am laying 10m, 22degree, 45degree, and that sort of stuff mostly, hence 8-10 pieces moves me less than 1/4 mile. Now when I am laying track, especially straight track, where I use as many 500M pieces as I can, then I often saved after each piece, likewise with dynamic track. Tonight I found one error, where I had connected a rt. lane to a left lane, but it is in a curve, outside of a tunnel, so it won't show except in RE, and I will probably put a prominent boulder there with some construction equipment "trying to clear the slide".I just bought another 200 CDs, and usually do a complete backup, as long as the sim will fit on a CD every 2 days, and semi-complete snaps ever hour, sometimes less. Once, the sim goes beyond 1 CD in uncompressed form, then I will only back up textures and terrtex, and shapes, when changes to those have been made. Often times, I keep a scratch directory, where I add new stuff at the same time I put it in the sim. But the stuff that changes a lot, yep, as often as I can.J. H. Sullivan