Message Areas - "1 beta tester please… "

Train-Sim.Com Message Areas

"1 beta tester please..."

Email this topic to a friend
Printer-friendly version of this topic
Bookmark this topic (Registered users only)
Previous Topic | Next Topic Conferences MSTS Route Design (Protected) Original message
rgarber (53 posts)
Sep-15-01, 01:30 AM (EST) "1 beta tester please..." I need someone to test the install routine for my East Metro RR route. It's a one file download about 5.5 meg. Includes the route, pdf and install text file. The installation is automated and includes an uninstaller. A menu shortcut is created to both the uninstaller and pdf file (you still need a pdf reader). The installation includes a heavily modified Stuffit.bat by Jim Ward (edited as per his instructions on a post here) to copy all the objects from the six default route to its own folder. I'm ready to go public on this and would like someone who will beta the install and let me know if it went okay. It's been tested already but I made a slight change and would like someone who hasn't tried the route to give me some feedback on how it installs with this change before I upload it tomorrow.ThanksRich Garber Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
Table of Contents

Subject Author Message Date ID RE: 1 beta tester please... rgarber Sep-15-01 1 RE: 1 beta tester please... CSXALine Sep-15-01 2 RE: 1 beta tester please... CSXALine Sep-15-01 3 RE: 1 beta tester please... dranck Sep-15-01 4 RE: 1 beta tester please... rgarber Sep-15-01 6 RE: 1 beta tester please... Xerxes Sep-15-01 5 RE: 1 beta tester please... Xerxes Sep-15-01 7 RE: 1 beta tester please... rgarber Sep-15-01 8 RE: 1 beta tester please... Xerxes Sep-15-01 9 RE: 1 beta tester please... rgarber Sep-15-01 10 RE: 1 beta tester please... Xerxes Sep-15-01 11 RE: 1 beta tester please... GandyDancer Sep-15-01 12 RE: 1 beta tester please... rgarber Sep-15-01 13 RE: 1 beta tester please... sniper297 Sep-15-01 14 RE: 1 beta tester please... rgarber Sep-16-01 15 RE: 1 beta tester please... Xerxes Sep-16-01 16 RE: 1 beta tester please... rgarber Sep-16-01 17

Lobby | Topics | Previous Topic | Next Topic
Messages in this topic
rgarber (53 posts)
Sep-15-01, 01:34 AM (EST) 1. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." Here's the link...www.edmfamily.com/msts/index.htm Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
CSXALine (208 posts)
Sep-15-01, 03:43 AM (EST) 2. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." I tried it on windows 2000 and it did not work, error creating directories - and i followed the instructionswill download again and see
Jason Webb
The Seaboard Coast Line/CSX A Line from Tampa Florida to Jacksonville, FL
As featured on Orlando's WOFL FOX 35 E-News
http://roaddoc.dnsq.org/scl-csx/
Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
CSXALine (208 posts)
Sep-15-01, 04:08 AM (EST) 3. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." never mind, i downloaded here a second ago 4AM EDT - and it installed fine , now i am going to check it out
Jason Webb
The Seaboard Coast Line/CSX A Line from Tampa Florida to Jacksonville, FL
As featured on Orlando's WOFL FOX 35 E-News
http://roaddoc.dnsq.org/scl-csx/
Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
dranck (2 posts)
Sep-15-01, 08:36 AM (EST) 4. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." The install routine works great but I have the following suggestions:Make the default install path match the default install of MSTS (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Train Simulator\routes). When I clicked the browse button and navigated to my install location (the default as above), \msts\ was added to the end of the path. I had to delete this manually. This could be confusing to some folks.By adding the routes directory to the path, you make people feel more comfortable that the install routine won't overwrite any important files in the main MSTS directory.Great job on the route, by the way! I think you have set a standard by which other routes will be judged!Dave Ranck Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
rgarber (53 posts)
Sep-15-01, 10:45 AM (EST) 6. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." Thanks for testing the installer. I thought I had that problem fixed with it remembering the default path. I think it's a small adjustment I have to make and then it will be okay. Thanks again! Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
Xerxes (29 posts)
Sep-15-01, 09:31 AM (EST) 5. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." OK, I tried it. I'm sorry, but you have made incorrect assumptions. When I went through the install program I entered the path where MSTS is located. I.e., I:\games\Microsoft Games\Train Simulator\ .The install program then installed to a subdirectory under TrainSim called 'msts'. This is incorrect as the route SHOULD go into the ROUTES directory. When stuffit ran it errored out since stuffit makes assumptions about WHERE the folders are located based on the ROUTES folder. I now have a truncated route in the 'msts' directory which I assume I can just delete. If it matters, I'm running Win ME with 7 hard drives/partitions. I have room but this didn't work as it is set up. There is ALWAYS the possibility that I did something wrong but I can't see exactly what it could be. When/as you look at the install program, I'd like to hear from you. I did look at #11 route and have it installed currently. Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
Xerxes (29 posts)
Sep-15-01, 11:09 AM (EST) 7. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." ...>The install program then installed to
>a subdirectory under TrainSim called
>'msts'. This is incorrect as
>the route SHOULD go into
>the ROUTES directory. When stuffit
>ran it errored out since
>stuffit makes assumptions about WHERE
>the folders are located based
>on the ROUTES folder. I OK, I spent about 20 minutes or so moving things around and then went in and used Stuffit to copy the files. Then opened the .PDF file. I'm in shell-shock. That is one gonzo file. Kudos and hats off. Then I started the route and took the tutorial to look it over. This just raises the bar on d/l routes. It's really beautiful. Not the scenery, the mechanics of the thing. If all who are creating routes would look at how this works we'd all benefit. I do hope that you can get the bugs worked out of the installation system, and I saw from the post above me that something has already been done. I look forward to more from you. Any thoughts on route specific skins?
Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
rgarber (53 posts)
Sep-15-01, 11:45 AM (EST) 8. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." The problem with the default directory is coming from the installer I use. I'm not sure if it's a bug in the installer or I'm just not doing it right. It works fine if you correct it before continuing but I'm like you, I like things to work perfectly so I sent an email off to the author of the installer. I originally wanted the install to be include the routes folder name too. However, this can't be done unless I get the user to manually install the consists into the Trains/Consist folder. Either way I'm gonna get a complaint from somebody if you know what I mean. Thanks for the really nice compliments! I'm really only halfway done with the PDF. What I wanted to include was voice and original music to go along with some of the pages.Skins for a route? Whatcha mean? Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
Xerxes (29 posts)
Sep-15-01, 03:10 PM (EST) 9. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." I mean that you SHOULD have some loco's and cars outfitted with the road name. Would be way cool. I'm not suggesting that there is something lacking, just that it would be nice if there WERE some skins for the route. Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
rgarber (53 posts)
Sep-15-01, 04:10 PM (EST) 10. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." Shoot. I don't have a clue how to do that stuff. I wouldn't know where to begin. Maybe if we can get one of the 'skinners' to do it that would be nice. But E. Metro was just a test route for me. I'm wanting to do a steam route next. Too many great looking steamers coming out. I'd like to do a route based on real life too. If they ever put multiplayer into MSTS, I would like to expand the TC and BC lines for that. Now that would be some fun stuff. Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
Xerxes (29 posts)
Sep-15-01, 06:21 PM (EST) 11. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." Does this mean that you're abandoning more development on this route? I just finished the tutorial and I like it a LOT (the route, that is). I did see a huge amount of ground which could be used for realestate development. Must be a lot of farming up around the northern end. All those big, wide open spaces. I'm not much for the steam lines. I know that I like to see and ride them but I tried Settle and Carlisle and know that I don't like to DRIVE them. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
GandyDancer (13 posts)
Sep-15-01, 07:22 PM (EST) 12. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." Rgarber;Just tried out your new installer, and had no problems, except for those that have been previously posted. I am running on WindowsXP, and the Batch file to copy the textures works properly.I enjoy your route and documentation very much. Thanks for the hard work you put into this. It has become a standard to egg on the other route developers.Sam Schulenburg Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
rgarber (53 posts)
Sep-15-01, 08:11 PM (EST) 13. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." Those big open spaces up north, they were designed to be that way. If you use the external views you'll see they are not so wide open and big. That route was a means for me to learn how to use and place scenery as efficently as I could. Take for instance the southern parts, close, lots of objects, also harder on frame rates. Pretty though. Up north I created a longer space between the cities so I wanted to learn how to crank out miles of scenery faster. Like Kuju must've had to.I'll probably keep creating some activities for the route but that's it.I love the diesels too, but steam engines are like older prop planes. Move moving parts, more to keep you interested, especially on longer runs. My idea of a steam line is just like E. Metro, pickup and deliveries, some passenger. Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
sniper297 (499 posts)
Sep-15-01, 10:52 PM (EST) 14. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." Hey, Rich, ya ask for one beta tester ya git 86! Which is actually better, the more the hairier, get enough people testing they'll find enough stuff to keep ya working for a year chasing bugs!
Thought I'd throw my two cents in, looks great as is, a lot cleaner and neater than mine, and working signals yet!
I don't skin equipment very well either, I dabbled at it for a while, but with so many guys coming out with really talented repaints there ain't much sense in playing with it until I need something nobody else has already done. You don't need to screw around making private road stuff either, you upload that route the way it looks and eventually one of the skinners who really likes it will do it for you. Here's my private road paints:The two SD40s and the coal hoppers were reskinned by Kevin Shea, the "Cadman", and the Alcos with the orange livery were done by the great John Fowlis himself. The logo, for those of you who don't have kids watching nickleodeon, is "CatDog", a mutant siamese twin combined cat and dog, two heads no tail. Perfect symbol for a route that don't know if it's coming or going, started as a small switchback route, added coal mine, logging areas, and turned into a hybrid mountain route cuz I went crazy and couldn't stop. In fact I ain't done yet, V4 is gonna be a lot bigger.Yeah, that self extracting thing is a beast to get it right, one of the things I'm gonna look into is making sure the zip is contained in at least one folder, cuz I got two people who are having trouble with it, one of them has it trying to access that 2-6-6-2 that I accidently put in the activity patch for V3, and the other is getting the train world initialization failed error. I suspect both might be caused by the odd places they may have gotten extracted to, if you recall I originally made the zip with all the path info stored inside it, so it had to be extracted to the root of C:\ to send everything to the right place, and doing that with the V3.1 would leave a whole bunch of orphans to chase down and delete.
One thing I'm gonna do is add to the readme and fileid.diz is "go to www.train-sim.com for the latest version", cuz altho I never uploaded any of the four versions anywhere else, I'm getting email from overseas and everywhere else, and I've seen a bunch of different versions on other websites. As good as yours looks it's gonna travel pretty fast too, so I'd advise you to do the same so you don't get email from a guy in Germany asking about version 2, and another from someone in France asking about a bug in version 1 a week after you uploaded 3.1. Gets confusing, and who wants to register on a whole bunch of different websites just to make sure everybody has the latest version.Couple other suggestions, once you clone combined.ref it don't need to be in there anymore, you could also lose the \envfiles and save a meg. I don't know how else you could make it smaller, I knew about deleting the e.raw and n.raw files, but where did you hear you could delete the y.raw too? I never heard that one, but it looks to me like you did it, and it works! At 128k per tile that's a lot of space.
Oh, and the batch file. I wrote stuffit cuz all the early routes except Cyko's came with the instructions to copy and paste all this stuff, so I just automated it, and it occured to me others might find it easier too, so I uploaded it. Then when I was getting PO&N version 1 ready to upload, I cloned the install bat, made it a conditional batch to check for the presence of Train.exe two directories up, so it wouldn't go trying to copy if it was run from the wrong directory. That became Ezstuf2, and both are still available in gitstufd.zip, altho I'm probably gonna steal your enhancements and make a Ezstuf3, unless you beat me to it. You can copy and paste the following, which adds the reference to the \envfiles and has the conditional switches in it too. Essentially Ezstuf2.bat with your streamlining, but edited for E Metro, so if you save it as something other than "Metro.bat" you'll have to change the references in the error return instructions. Here it is:echo off
if exist ..\..\train.exe goto start
goto error:start
call xcopy ..\..\TEMPLATE\Envfiles\*.* .\Envfiles\*.* /s /y
rem call xcopy ..\..\TEMPLATE\Envfiles\Textures\*.* .\Envfiles\Textures\*.* /s /y
rem call xcopy ..\..\TEMPLATE\Shapes\*.* .\Shapes\*.* /s /y
rem call xcopy ..\..\TEMPLATE\TerrTex\*.* .\Terrtex\*.* /s /ycall xcopy ..\europe1\shapes\*.* .\shapes\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\europe1\terrtex\*.* .\terrtex\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\europe1\textures\*.* .\textures\*.* /s /ycall xcopy ..\europe2\shapes\*.* .\shapes\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\europe2\terrtex\*.* .\terrtex\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\europe2\textures\*.* .\textures\*.* /s /ycall xcopy ..\japan1\shapes\*.* .\shapes\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\japan1\terrtex\*.* .\terrtex\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\japan1\textures\*.* .\textures\*.* /s /ycall xcopy ..\japan2\shapes\*.* .\shapes\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\japan2\terrtex\*.* .\terrtex\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\japan2\textures\*.* .\textures\*.* /s /ycall xcopy ..\usa1\shapes\*.* .\shapes\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\usa1\terrtex\*.* .\terrtex\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\usa1\textures\*.* .\textures\*.* /s /ycall xcopy ..\usa2\shapes\*.* .\shapes\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\usa2\terrtex\*.* .\terrtex\*.* /s /y
call xcopy ..\usa2\textures\*.* .\textures\*.* /s /ygoto success:error
echo Your zip extractor unzipped this file into the wrong directory.
echo *
echo 1. Close this window.
echo *
echo 2. Open windows explorer
echo *
echo 3. Click tools, find, files or folders named E Metro RR
echo *
echo 4. Single click on the folder named E Metro RR, click on copy
echo *
echo 5. Scroll down the left window to find
echo * C:\program files\microsoft games\train simulator\routes\
echo *
echo 6. Paste the E Metro RR folder into the routes folder.
echo *
echo 7. Click on E Metro RR
echo *
echo 8. double click on Metro.bat
goto end
:success
echo *
echo *
echo *
echo *
echo ALL FILES COPIED, Click on X in upper right corner of window to exit.
echo *
echo *
echo *
echo *
echo *
echo *
echo *
echo Original file by Jim "Sniper" Ward. (modified by Rich Garber via Jim's instructions).
echo *
echo *
echo From the days of DOS and dinosaurs.
echo *
echo *
:end
echo Click on the X in the upper right to exit.
Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
rgarber (53 posts)
Sep-16-01, 00:24 AM (EST) 15. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." Thanks for the compliments Jim, and for all that extra credit I didn't deserve. As far as the y.raw files not being there, they better be ,because I included them. I only took out the e and the n raw files I saw you suggested in one of your most recent posts. The same really goes for the stuffit.bat file too. I only took the idea of streamlining it cause you said it needed to be done. It's been too long for me and DOS, so I just followed your suggestions and that's where the /y and /s came from. I knew about those things years ago but I wouldn't have remembered them if you hadn't mention it.I'm using a 'fancy' installer. It allows for me to do some things I couldn't do with the winzip extractor. I only used winzip so I could package the readme separate from the actual installer. It's a bit redundant but I was looking to keep everything in one file. This 'fancy' installer is also responsible for that bug which is causing the default to stay tacked onto the end of the Browse induced path. There's a newer version I needed to download which they said will correct that problem. I'd have it now, but they didn't send me the password to get into the bloody thing! Progress. Ptooey!I'm not gonna have that version problem with this route because I really have gone as far with this as I wanted to go with this one. It was just to learn MSTS. Someone else can alter it and take it from here if they want to. Great opportunity to expand the two larger railroads to the north and south of the Metro line. All they have to do is load up the quad tree and include more tiles in whichever direction they want and populate the new tiles. I was in the process of adding a small logging line from the saw mill when the NYC thing happened. I lost interest and decided to wrap it up as it is.One thing that baffles me about all of this, is why I don't see anyone talking about the activities except the tutorial? That is to me, where all the action is. Just exploring a route is like getting on a plane in a flight sim and just looking around. The activities is where you get into the real railroading.Rich Garber Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
Xerxes (29 posts)
Sep-16-01, 09:09 AM (EST) 16. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." LAST EDITED ON Sep-16-01 AT 09:10 AM (EST)I haven't done anything else but the tutorial 'cause I just haven't had TIME. Today is the first day I've had for any of that. I'll try to start working myself through the activities.I'm gonna start adding. I just wanted to find out if you are doing anything else with it yourself. I haven't added to the PO&N because the Sniper is still working on it. I do have some things to do, I hope. I want to expand the logging end of the PO&N up in the Timber Valley corner but as I say, he's still working/expanding that route.I DO like the freight routes. I'm not much for passengers.
Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
rgarber (53 posts)
Sep-16-01, 10:05 AM (EST) 17. "RE: 1 beta tester please..." Let me know how you make on the routes. I wasn't meaning to scold by the way. More so, the many messages I've read that most folks gear their efforts towards exploring routes. Since I've been building my route most of my effort has been pushing towards completing it. So I haven't had much time for activities myself. Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Lock | Archive | Remove

Lobby | Topics | Previous Topic | Next Topic