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"Batch file install - duplicate file names."

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sniper297 (245 posts)
Aug-23-01, 11:02 AM (EST) "Batch file install - duplicate file names." I think we're all aware by now of the problems involved in using old DOS batch files to copy all the shapes and textures into our routes. Jim has mentioned it often enough, and I showed one illustration of it in the thread about port ogden and northern version 2, after it occurred to me that everyone who managed to get version one running by copying the missing files from Europe 2 was looking at European track textures instead of USA2 track textures. I could tell by some of the responses that some people are having trouble understanding how this works, so here's a way to show it more clearly. Open up paintbrush, draw a stick figure of a boy. Save it in \my documents as "kid.bmp". Now start a new picture, this time draw a girl. Save it in \my pictures as "kid.bmp". Do a "tools, find" in explorer for "kid.bmp" and it will come up with two files with that name in different directories, and both files have the same name, are the same size, and unless it takes you a heck of a long time to draw a stick figure will have the same date, with the times only a minute or two apart. Both files appear to be identical, but copying one file over the other into another directory will yield two different pictures depending on which one you copied last. Here's another example from the version three I'm working on, before I decided to go with the Europe 1 track texture, which has the best looking ties and ballast for my purposes. This is what it looked like with the first INSTALV3.BAT, which is an unmodified rename of EZSTUF2.BAT, which copies the USA2 files last. The track is USA2, the texture filename is ACLEANTRACK1.ACE. The fir tree forest region texture is US2AUTOFIR.ACE. Then I hacked the batch file to put Europe1 last, so the ACLEANTRACK1.ACE would be the one from Settle and Carlise, and this is what I got. As you can see, the track texture is the one I wanted, but look what happened to the pine trees. Opening Windows Explorer and doing the "tools, find" for US2AUTOFIR.ACE yields a whole bunch of files with that name in \texture, and all its seasonal subdirectories, in all six routes. So just because the object you're placing starts with Japan2 or Usa1 or whatever, don't assume the texture is unique to that route.Hopefully Jim will cure all of this eventually for us, and my biggest wish is that somebody can come up with an install program for distributing routes that finally does away with DOS batch files completely. I can't do it, I barely learned BASIC, and with C language I never got beyond following the tutorial to make that 64k "hello world" com file. Anytime I tried to make anything that was actually of any use in either C or Visual Basic 3.0, I always came up with a bunch of "missing library files" errors, so eventually I decided that programming was beyond me and went back to playing games. I downloaded the Swedish Little Da last week, and it had the slickest self extracting installation I ever saw in a freeware file, with all the pretty blue and gray windows type screens. Double click on the EXE, watch the show, start the sim and drive the train. I'd like to find out where they got the utility for making that thing, because it would simplify things amazingly.
Keep pluggin' guys, we're gonna get this!Jim Ward
Windy City
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