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"I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3"

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Simerjoe (125 posts)
Feb-03-02, 09:48 AM (EST) "I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3" I am getting very depressed. I've been working on a new route for quite a while now. Been working on it for a least 4 to 5 months. After every session, I even backed it up. I wish I had a dollar for every time I backed it up. I had lots of problems learning the route editor while working on this route. With the help of many of you I persisted and came up with a pretty good looking route. The route is called The MBTA or should I say it was called THE MBTA.
Well, I needed to reformat my hard drive this week but before that, I backed up my route on a CD. Before the reformat, I made sure that all the folders and files were correctly backed up on the cd.
Feeling confident, I pulled the switch and reformatted.
After rebuilding my computer, I reinstalled MSTS and copied my route back into the routes section.
Well (choke) when I try to run the simulator using yhe new route, I get the message "Send report.....". When I try to acces the new route in the Route Editor, I get the message "Send report.....".
I deleted all activities and created a new one. Still the same results.
I don't think I have the patience to restart recreating this route again. I had to do that many times before for other reasons.
I was getting very proud of the way the final version was coming out. I wanted to upload it soon so that all of you could enjoy but now, all I have is a piece of ##### that won't work.Before I completely lose my mind, is there something I should know before I shoot myself? Can it be saved? I wish to thank all of you who helped me in the past for your gracious help.Simerjoe.
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Table of Contents

Subject Author Message Date ID RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3 whockin Feb-03-02 1 RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3 rgarber Feb-03-02 2 RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3 sniper297 Feb-03-02 3 RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3 lwhelan Feb-03-02 7 RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3 railnut Feb-03-02 4 RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3 highball5 Feb-03-02 5 Been there .... Done that.. This wa... lwhelan Feb-03-02 6 RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3 jleslie Feb-03-02 8 RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3 sniper297 Feb-03-02 9 RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3 Simerjoe Feb-03-02 10 RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3 sniper297 Feb-04-02 11 RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3 OkrasaGhia Feb-04-02 12

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whockin (42 posts)
Feb-03-02, 10:16 AM (EST) 1. "RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3" Hmmm, lets see if we can figure this out.
Did you save all files and folders under the route name?
Did you remove all files refering to your old activities (traffic, paths, services, activities, consists) Have all of the cars and locos in the new activities got all of their necessary files(cabview, sound, eng, wag, etc) with all of the references within those files going to the right place.
Start with one loco that works on a default route in a test activity and build from there. If that on loco does not work, the problem is not with an activity. There may be a missing shape file or texture somewhere else.
Try this for a start. Good luck. Come on all you route hackers out there, lets help this guy out.
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rgarber (1154 posts)
Feb-03-02, 11:51 AM (EST) 2. "RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3" I've had that happen too. You name it, if it can happen, it happened to the Metro. I think a lot of windows products do this too. You reformat, put it back in, and bammo, nothing.First thing I would do is make sure you can run the default routes with no problems. If they work, then you know for certain its something about your route.Check to see if you've left out something like xtracks or a third party do-hickey (technical term for thingamabopper) object. Just keep hunting for what makes your route different from the default.Back it up to CD and send it on to somebody whose willing to help you...but whatever you do, don't trash it! If it worked once, it'll work again. You just gotta figure out what you did along the way that makes it different from the defaults.Oh... you might want to check to see if that 'something missing' turns up on the PO&N... I've had that happen several times. Walk outside the door, no engine. Had a girlfriend ... she disappeared. Turned up on the PO&N. Had a town... leveled by the PO&N. Rich Garber Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
sniper297 (1498 posts)
Feb-03-02, 12:14 PM (EST) 3. "RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3" LAST EDITED ON Feb-03-02 AT 12:17 PM (EST)Technical term for a thingamabobber is actually a hooby-doo, a doohickey refers to a whatchyamacallit. Or is it a hoosits? Never mind, not important.
Simerjoe, that's a real beast, if you can't get a concrete error message you don't even know where to start.
Any custom objects? If you prep it for packaging (delete \envfiles \shapes \sounds \textures \terrtex. Do a tools, find in explorer (STARTING IN THE ROOT OF YOUR ROUTE) for *.BK , *E.RAW , and *N.RAW . Select all, delete all.), and zip it up, is it smaller than 10 megabytes? If so, you could email it to me (or break it down into two zips smaller than 10 megs each, send one and wait for a response after I clean out the mailbox) and I could take a stab at troubleshooting it for you. Oh yeah, Crown Royal works much better than prozac, and is available without a prescription. Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
lwhelan (49 posts)
Feb-03-02, 04:17 PM (EST) 7. "RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3" oh, and Sniper?What is Crown Royal? and how are the 'dead trees'?Cheers,
Laurie Whelan Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
railnut (148 posts)
Feb-03-02, 02:59 PM (EST) 4. "RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3"
Just a thought from one who has used a CD for back up. After you did the restore, did you reset the attributes of your files to normal? When files come off of a CD, they are usually set to read only and this will prevent a loy of things from working properly. You may have to set the attribs using properties from the folder directory. You can also do this by stretching a box over all the files in a folder and right clicking: properties. You willpossibly see that the read only is checked. Un check it and hit apply/ok. Do this for all the directories you restored from CD. Hope this helps... I was doing the shiny iron form South Station to Attleboro and Old Colony south, down through Braintree to Middleboro to Taunton back up to Attleboro. Also the Plymouth and Greenbush branches. THe Route Editor decided it was too good and thrashed it. I was going to start anew but decided to take a break and let you do the Main line and I could/would possibly just do the Old Colony as an add-on to yours. I was into this for about 7 weeks when it ate it. @#$*#%^&#^ !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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highball5 (70 posts)
Feb-03-02, 03:41 PM (EST) 5. "RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3" Though this might not be directly helpful, it sort of ties in. I too have always backed up my route to CD, and also set the server up to back up the entire MSTS stuff to tape during it's nightly backups. Recently I had the route I'm working on cough up a lung and basically become useless. I too restored from backups, both from the CD and from tape. Even going back in time to 3 old backups the problems didn't resolve. What I finally ended up doing was restoring some of the MSTS core files and folders. For what ever reason, when I resotred the \global\shapes folder everything started workng again. I don't know exactly what got hammered in that folder to cause my problem in the first place, but that fixed it. So I guess the moral of the story is, not every route problem is associated with the route's individual folder or files. There can be some global things that will casue headaches too. Now in your case, considering the reformat and reload, I'd suspect something isn't there that was before. One problem I had with backups early on, (going to tape at least) was that the Linux server that did the back up was munging up long filenames. THISISAFILE.S became THISISA~1.S on the tape, and when restored. The truncated filename just won't work in many cases. Also as someone else posted, the read-only attribute possibility when restoring from CD is a very good point to check. Bottom line, don't give up... move forward slow and methodically and you'll get it fixed. You'll like the feeling of trading the Valiium for handsprings when you finally find the magic bullet that sets it all right again. Good luck! Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
lwhelan (49 posts)
Feb-03-02, 04:11 PM (EST) 6. "Been there .... Done that.. This was what I found....." Simerjoe,I will assume the following...........You backed up your entire route folder with all it's contents.If so them I doubt the problem lies therein.You re-installed MSTS, and as highball5 suggests in his reply the Global folder is the most likely culprit.In my case it was 'tsection.dat' because I had added some custom track shapes and track sections (250r curves) and now they were missing after MSTS was reinstalled.The other clue is that if a track piece is missing from that file when you try to run the Route Editor or whatever all you get is the 'phone home' dialog - nothing to tell you what is missing like a texture or shape file.Anyway that is my suggestion - I hope it helps....Best of luck,
Laurie Whelan
Brisbane, Australia
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jleslie (53 posts)
Feb-03-02, 06:14 PM (EST) 8. "RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3" Yup, same thing happened to me, Xtracks was the culprit. All I had to do was re-install Xtracks and it worked fine again. Jeff Leslie
jleslie@neo.rr.com
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sniper297 (1498 posts)
Feb-03-02, 06:57 PM (EST) 9. "RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3" Hey, Laurie! The dead trees are currently dead, I'll possibly revive them after I'm done with PO&N5 (couple more weeks, I hope, last minute cleanup always has one more thing to do). I've been so busy I didn't even respond to your last email, sorry, shame on me. "What is Crown Royal"? You mean to tell me them Canucks don't send their finest export (besides John Fowlis) to the land down under? Smoothest thing to come out of the Seagram's distillery, even better than VO, IMAO. Maybe they figure you guys can't drink it without a straw, since you're all standing upside down like so many flies clinging to the ceiling. That's why Americans are always trying to make better X-ray machines, so they can look up your skirts thru 8000 miles of dirt!
Laurie is right, guys, there are whole bunches of odd things that can happen to a route in the backup/restore process. Here's part of a reply from another thread;"One of the problems I had with EZstuff4 was after a route editor crash that destroyed my working copy, I restored from a backup, ran EZstuff4 to re-stuff the backup, and got "failed to load track database". Whiskey Tango Fox? After almost an hour of troubleshooting, it turns out the problem was the fact that I used Hank's NA switchstand signals on the route, and EZstuff4.bat automatically copies all the compiled DAT files from the \stuffed folder, which overwrote Hank's sigcfg.dat and sigscr.dat files with the big ones, which don't have his signal scripts in them. You'd think the error message would have mentioned signals instead of just "track database", but it also gives the exact same error message when the problem is in the road database and there's nothing actually wrong with the track database itself. I'm looking at the TDB file, and the problem was in sigcfg.dat and sigscr.dat!"Here's a link to a route folder structure discussion (what DID happen to all the posts in this forum from 11/25/02 to yesterday?);
http://www.train-sim.com/dcforum/DCForumID3/6122.html
Again, tho, there are also other things that can go wrong outside the route, and one little mis\*.*\take in copying can leave enough files out of the route to make it impossible to run. I forgot to ask, simerjoe, are you getting the same error trying to open it in the route editor as you do in the sim?
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Simerjoe (125 posts)
Feb-03-02, 11:09 PM (EST) 10. "RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3" I really appreciate all the responses. Nothing seems to help.
At least the other routes run ok.
I'm not giving up though. I put in too much work to let this thing go. Maybe I'll find the magic bullet somewhere.
So fat I tried deleting all the contents of Texture, Terrtex, Sound and Shapes folders and recopied all those from the default folders like I did when I started to build this route. To no avail.
I think I would like to upload this some if they might want to look at it. I would be in their debt.Thank you all.Simerjoe Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
sniper297 (1498 posts)
Feb-04-02, 00:03 AM (EST) 11. "RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3" Nil Desperandum, Simerjoe. Again, did you add custom objects? Do you have signals? Roads? Car spawners? Do all the DAT files in the root of the route match what you have? If you can't figure it out, I'm sure one of us can, so don't give up on it yet. Like I said, delete the common files, and if you can get it to zip under 10 megs, zip up what you got and email it to me as an attachment. I got an AMD 1.5 ghz with 256mb of DDR RAM, so I usually get specific error messages I can troubleshoot from instead of that useless send/don't send. And having a DSL I can download custom objects that are missing. Remove | Alert Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
OkrasaGhia (230 posts)
Feb-04-02, 05:23 AM (EST) 12. "RE: I need a PROZAC or 2 or 3" Whatever you do, don't throw it away!!
As said by others changes in the global folder can disrupt a route pretty badly.
I too have gone through my share of problems with the route editor and I think I'm above average when it comes too salvaging routes. If you can pack-it up in reasonable size (remove shapes, textures etc) I'm willing to have a look.

//Okrasa
Chief Engineer
okrasaghia @ yahoo.com
http://www.geocities.com/okrasaghia



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