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"Route editor, why do you hate me??"

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mrawek (56 posts)
Aug-18-01, 11:23 AM (EST) "Route editor, why do you hate me??" I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I can have a good working route one day. Successfully update the track data base. Next morning I'm adding some streets. Make a street tunnel under my station, save it and then get this kind of errors:"Error: continue?
Unable to get the track database instance for a signal head
This indicates that the world files and track database file(s) are out of sync
Lon: .....
.... )
Yes No"Usually this window follows a smaller one to confirm deletion of the signal not laying on the track.If I delete the signal, then I loose, various other route objects too. I don't know why.
The other mistery is why all the objects on the track, like grain loaders, platforms or signals are suddenly missplaced after having only placed forests or roads. What is going on with this program?It's so bad to loose 20 % of the time reconstructing the route by hand or with backuped files instead of making some progress.
Have you other route designers the same problems or am I alone?
Regards,Daniel
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Table of Contents

Subject Author Message Date ID RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... Hannes44 Aug-18-01 1 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... mrawek Aug-18-01 2 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... JMSteven_W98 Aug-18-01 3 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... Hannes44 Aug-18-01 4 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... mrawek Aug-18-01 5 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... jkcooney Sep-09-01 8 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... landnrailroader Aug-30-01 6 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... sniper297 Aug-30-01 7 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... jkcooney Sep-09-01 9 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... mrawek Sep-09-01 10 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... jkcooney Sep-09-01 11 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... mrawek Sep-10-01 12 RE: Route editor, why do you hate m... jkcooney Sep-10-01 13

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Hannes44 (9 posts)
Aug-18-01, 01:41 PM (EST) 1. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" Hi!Same here. I'm a very patient man but I have experienced all these errors and sometimes simply give up. I began my route three times from scratch try to avoid the things that seemed to be dangerous (landscaping seems to be the worst) but sooner or later I'm again in a state of despair. Signals vanish or can't be loaded and must therefore be removed, pieces of track move on their own in positions I never put them before, track definitions can't be loaded must be removed etc etc. Let's hope for the Abacus editor although I must say I had to shell out nearly 1000.- ATS for the program which promises that one can build his own routes and I'm certainly miffed to have to spend another 700.- or 800.- for an editor that allegedly is part of the original program.Where is an institution that protects us from such ripoffs?Hans Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
mrawek (56 posts)
Aug-18-01, 02:00 PM (EST) 2. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" Oh glad I'm not alone here.The last two hours I was searching the cause of my latest activity editor crash. Always when I wanted to make a new consist and add a diesel engine, the whole program crashed. The send error report program loaded and the editor was gone. After deleting and reinstalling diesel engines from my backup drive I found an modified KIHA31 Engine with a wrong entry. Instead of: Wagon (BR153
Type ( Engine )
WagonShape ( BR153.s )

I had there:Wagon (KIHA31
Type ( Engine )
WagonShape ( BR153.s )
Sure it was my fault when I installed this engine and somehow forgot to rename that entry. But why does the program crash without any hint? Didn't they have time to program a loop going back and opening a window, that there's a problem with a diesel engine named BR153.eng?Now I hope I can help with this lines someone having the same troubles one day.Daniel Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
JMSteven_W98 (329 posts)
Aug-18-01, 02:53 PM (EST) 3. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" The biggest problem with the Route Editor is that it relies on Object Linking and Embedding and most home users don't have proper hardware to support it.The OLE technology was designed to allow a word processor to display a pie chart in the document. So it was never intended to handle a complex list of items.A route map is a single document with thousands of embedded items. So it's like opening a word processor and pasting in several dozen documents from each program on your computer.I've not experienced most of the issues our users have had with the program because as a developer I understand the technology know it takes a lot of RAM.I would not run the editor with less than 512 MB of system RAM and I would not run the game on a system with less than 300 MB of system RAM after Windows has started up.I've completed 200+ routes in nine months and lost only one.My current route shows 1500+ objects per tile (320 tiles total) so that map has over 300,000 shapes on it. I'm maintaining a 12-18 FPS rate in the dense areas and typically see 40-50 FPS elsewhere.I have many programs on my home systems that cost more than $1,000 each. Using things like AutoCAD and Adobe Photoshop made Train Simulator a simple product to master.Product marketing should have positioned the software differently. At $50 you attract people who may not understand spending fifteen grand for a home computer and need more guidance than users who are familiar with high-end systems.
Jim Steven, MCSE
Sr Microsoft Windows Application Developer Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
Hannes44 (9 posts)
Aug-18-01, 03:21 PM (EST) 4. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" LOL. We'll see when Abacus' editor is out if it's possible or not to have a program that simply works ok with TS. And the questio that comes into mind is: when Abacus can do it why not MS or Kuju???
May be MSTS is a program intended only for the cream of the software gurus but then they shouldn't sell it to average people.I want to have fun with a TS I don't want a program where I first need a university degree in CAD, software development etc. You can't make me believe that all that super-duper equipment makes a lousy program run better. Btw I have a AMD Athlon running with 1.2 Ghz with 512 MB RAM (as far as I know the maximum W98 can use but as I here there are roubles enough running MSTS with W2000) W98SE two 40Gigabyte Harddrives and a ASUS 7100 Graphics adapter with 64 MB RAM all settings checked triple for effectivity 'cause I use to work with video on my system. What system do you think is the system good enough for MSTS if not this??
The impression remains it's not the hardware that lacks performance it's the software that's ..... Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
mrawek (56 posts)
Aug-18-01, 03:48 PM (EST) 5. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" Well I have the 512 Mbyte, but the editor runs out of memory sooner or later. The program seems to reserve memory and not freeing it up after use. That's an old known programming problem. It's hard to find those memory holes and I guess the developers of the software just didn't expext the users to go that far until the patch comes out.Daniel Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
jkcooney (489 posts)
Sep-09-01, 01:32 PM (EST) 8. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" Jim.... I've enjoyed and learned from your posts. But one fundamental is being lost in all of this. The promises made when the program was marketed and delivered! It is one thing to accept and respect that computer technology is highly complex and quite another to make fraudulent and misleading claims about what the "Average Consumer" of this product may do when he or she gets it home. That's where the real problem lies. A rush to market a product to meet an arbitrary deadline without giving serious consideration to the puffed up promises that mislead thousands of consumers. It is very discouraging to put in 4 or five hours work, have the program run properly for several days with my own route, and then begin getting the cascade of error messages suggesting that the World Tiles and TDB "may be" out of sync. Maybe or maybe not. I've tended to just ignore these messages and plug on....anything else you could suggest about restoring backup files from an earlier session when things WERE ALL IN THEIR PROPER PLACE???? that would be helpful.
Joe Cooney, ocala, fl Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
landnrailroader (27 posts)
Aug-30-01, 10:04 AM (EST) 6. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" Gee, after reading Stevens reply, I might as well put away my toys and do something else. My system has 64M of RAM, and cannot be expanded past 128M. However, it runs the program fine, just not faster than about 3fps.I have no problem with Microsoft writing the program to require so many linked objects, although I seem to get in trouble after about 5 miles and have had the "dreaded sync error too". I think Microsoft should just put on the box what the program requires to run, and then an addendum box that says, IF YOU WANT TO CREATE-------.I plan to upgrade the whole system next year anyway, but the problem that I see as the most severe, is the necessity to copy all of those objects to a new directory, everytime you start a new route. Although disks are cheap these days, it would be a lot better to access all of that stuff from a central directory like the global or some such.J. H. Sullivan, P.E. (retired from CSX Engineering) Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
sniper297 (432 posts)
Aug-30-01, 09:53 PM (EST) 7. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" Actually the route editor hates you because I curse it constantly, and it thinks I'm you. Some good tips here, I started with 128mb ram, now have 512, and altho I still get error messages I get them less often and it don't crash so i can go thru all the error messages to try to figure out what's wrong. I also blew all the cobwebs off my wallet and pulled out 130 bucks in moth eaten US currency to get a fast 40 gig hard disk so I can backup, backup, backup. Even if I do something wrong and the error don't show up for two days I can go back about 8 backups and restore something that DON'T have the same error in it, and not lose the whole route. I screwed up and lost a dozen routes before I figured that one out. Anyway, we do what we can with it and pray for the day someone else writes a train sim with the quake 3 or unreal engine instead of this hacked together reject from lotus 123. Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
jkcooney (489 posts)
Sep-09-01, 01:36 PM (EST) 9. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" I lost the message on this forum that suggests how to go back and restore those backup files. I am tired of the error that suggests my world tiles and tdb are "out of sync". How do I go back to an earlier backup when things were working?
Joe Cooney, Ocala, FL Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
mrawek (56 posts)
Sep-09-01, 11:37 PM (EST) 10. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" Have a look at the files in the world directory. Look at the .w files with the newest time stamp. Is there a .bk file with the same name and different time stamp? If yes remove the .w and rename the .bk to .w (w-005802+014721~w.bk to w-005802+014721.w)
If it has the same time stamp and size, you don't have a backup here. Then you need a backup you made yourself. Copy this file in if you have it.
Then the same for the database files.
.rdb .rit .tdb and .tit They also have backups in the route directory. Maybe (probably) the editor has already replaced your working database with the corrupted one. If you have your own copy it in. If you have none, move the corrupt files out.
You can try to manualy delete the last entries in the defect .w file. Then try to rebuild the database selecting this option when loading the route into the editor. You can alse remove the complete .w file (loosing your work on that tile) and try to rebuild the database afterwards.I can work fairly good, since I rebuild the database every day, I'm working with the editor. After clicking away the success message, I make a backup of all the database files, the world files and the tiles. The tiles are not that important to make a backup everyday. It's just for convenience, if you make a mistake with your terrain.
When I work and memory gets low, I save and quit the whole program and then restart it and load the route without rebuilding the database.
To avoid track database errors wait with signals, platforms, level crossings sidings carspawners sounds on tracks etc. until the track is completely finished. If you have to change track where signals are around, delete the signals first and make them new afterwards. Make a backup before you do this.If you get the out of sync message, click always yes to remove the signals etc. After this save the route and have a look at the .w file which had the error (the one with the latest time stamp, if you saved). Did the size compared with your backed up .w file decrease dramaticly or just some kBytes? If it's just like 187 kb to 183 kb, you just lost some signals e.g. If it's 93 kb you lost a lot more. Time to restore the backup and run the rebuild database again.Hope that helps.Daniel Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
jkcooney (489 posts)
Sep-09-01, 11:45 PM (EST) 11. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" Yu've given me mucho information but it is all helpful. I'll just have to get more comfortable working with backup files. I've noticed that all the folders in my homegrown route (NYOW) are empty! The only folder with any content is the Activities folder. that being the case, where is the sim getting my specific route building information from???? Is it storing it in the root folder for the overall sim? this is puzzling to me since you would think your own route would be self-contained!
Thanks for the help..
Joe Cooney Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
mrawek (56 posts)
Sep-10-01, 00:29 AM (EST) 12. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" That's really strange. There should at least be tiles in your route's tiles directory. Did you ever run the geometry extractor to begin your route?
Search the .trk file of your route and have a look at it.
You can search for .w files generated recently with the windows file search (start, search) defining the routes directory as startpoint. Search for *.w and sort the result list from the date. Where are the latest .w files stored. Do they have your areas coordinates?
That's really a tough one. I think I can't help you with this over the ocean. I've never heard before of a route not saved in the route directory.
Dan Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
jkcooney (489 posts)
Sep-10-01, 07:01 PM (EST) 13. "RE: Route editor, why do you hate me??" I just double checked and it is definitely NOT in my own Route's file. It must be somewhere else. Who knows. Yes, I ran the RGE and have been working on the route and running on it for about 2 weeks! This mystery is one for Sherlock & Co.
Joe C. Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

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