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My foray into Bizarro-World continues. I just re-numbered ns3909, John Peterson's Southern U23B, to ns3910. When the new loco did not show up in the sim's drop-down menu, I rounded up the usual suspects, re-checking my edits of the file names and the appropriate lines in the .eng and .sd files. I finally found 3910 masquerading as a consist under ns3909's drop-down consist list. Clicking on it did nothing. I opened the ns3910 consist file and found the line EngineData ( ns3909 ns3909 ). I changed the line to EngineData ( ns3910 ns3910) and it now works. Quesion is, why and how did this happen? Where did ConBuilder even find the 3909 reference in the 3910 folder?
Hi Sooner,Frankly: I wouldn't have thought MSTS had that much of a brain From your description I cannot see any point where MSTS could have developed such an amount of creativenes. One point to start: If one of the various references inside the ns3910.eng file still called for ns3909, e.g. in the first line or the wagon line, then you could theoretically load the faulty .eng file into the consist editor and create a consist with that engine. As soon as you saved the consist however, the engine's entry in the consist file ns3910_whatever.con would read:EngineData ( ns3909 ns3910 )with the second entry being the name of the folder the engine sits in. The reason for this is that the consist editor uses the name from the first line within the .eng file when creating the consist, and not the name the file "ns3910.eng" actually has. If these differed, you had created a problem here - yes, I know, you checked it and the references are ok but let me still state this for other readers: As MSTS does only find a file called ns3910.eng in said folder, you will immediately get an error message of the "train database; ns3909.eng not found" type, already when exiting the consist editor. But what could & should never happen is that the consist editor changes the name of the folder, IMHO. So if your consist read EngineData ( ns3909 ns3909 ) then you probably did by mistake really create the new consist with the 3909, thinking you selected the 3910. As the consist editor is sometimes a little unstable and takes his time gnawing on a selection, this might well have happened without you realizing it. Be also aware that the consist editor (and ConBuilder, for that matter) draw the name they display in the list of available cars from the name line - i.e. this time neither from the actual filename ns3910.eng, nor from the first line inside the .eng file, but from that line Name ( "NS Loco #3910" ) or whatever description & nomenclature you chose, which line can be found way down in the .eng file... Do also check this line to make sure that you edited it to the correct number, otherwise it could be that you actually select the ns3909.eng file with the proper reference in the first line, while in the editor it appears as, say NS Loco #3910? (Although logic would rather have it the other way round, given that you created 3910 from 3909?)That's about all I can think of. If these points do not resolve the mistery, I step down baffled Lukas a.k.a Swissie
Thank you very much for a great response, Swissie; highly instructive. I'm going to paste and save it. What really had me scratching my head was the loco ending up in the consist menu. Anyway, on about the fifth or sixth pass through an .eng file I start hallucinating, so I wouldn't bet on the reliability of my account of the events.