Slow Burn ( saving issues )

I am having a recurring issue when I go to save, losing hours of work. Would like to know if anyone is having the same ? With TANE set to save work at 30 min , I'm still losing this work and more when I go to save manually. The SIM will just shut down, this wouldn't be such a big deal. But the work that is supposedly saved automatically is also lost. Almost like I never open the route for edit . At first thought it was my PC running out of memory, but have plenty to spare. And doesn't seem to be connected to time or changes made ?

1 Is anyone else having this problem
2 If so what's the fix
3 If not any suggestion to a cause


Matt

Well then, seem it me.

Think I'll be going back to 2012

Matt,

I turn off the Autosave and do lots of manual saves. I find that the autosave produces so many interim versions that it's confusing and also I find that what was autosaved is not quite what I remembered I was doing so the manual saves often give me a better go-to location.

The other things I have found are:

1) Disable power management options in your control panel. In particular the one for turning off the display after 15 minutes.

2) Don't browse the web.

I also run the profiler so I can watch the frame rates. When my frame rates get a bit wobbly, like down to the single digits, I know it's time to exit, reboot the computer, and come back in again.

Also, I forgot to mention... If you do suffer a crash, reboot your computer before doing anything else. The crash is usually a memory issue, I have noticed in the logs, which means the memory has now been scrambled in your PC. Reloading the game now only makes it crash more often.

John

Thanks for your response, but I've tried this and more. Just today I worked 45 min saved no problems without auto saves ( I always due manually ), then went back after a run to do more changes. Saved after about 40 min's with two saving points between and shutdown with loss of all work. Like my question in my first post, I'm of the opinion that game is failing to open the route for editing, and there no indication to this until the crash. I have had this occur only after five min, and two hours. driving me Cazzie with the loss of work. If I'm the only one experiencing this, I would think it's a problem with my PC and the sim. My first thought was the auto saves, or memory. But all my test are showing no. Since I don't go online when working this wouldn't be a issue, but I did try turning off the games online chatting, no effect

Rebooting my PC or clearing ram hasn't worked ether.

At a loss

Matt

Matt,


There's one more thing to check...

I had that issue too the other day. I noticed the other day that my editing folder had garbage folders in it. These are from editing my route but they had nothing in them except for the map.bmk files in them. After removing those, I've had no problem with the save.

What might be happening, and this is just some thinking here, is the program already died, but the interface is still there. When you go to save, it then executes that part of the code, but crashes because there is no place to return from. The going through the motions part means nothing gets saved.

I know that none of these answers solve your problem, but I only state what has worked so far for me. Now keep in mind always what works for me may not work for you.

I do have another question. Are you running full screen or windowed?

This could be display driver related that's causing the crash... Again, at a loss too and thinking about possible causes and things to try.

John

Again Thanks, John. I'm at a loss also, but you have experience this ? A question, do you ever remember this happening before the hotfix ? Again I'm not sure, but does seem to getting worse in my opinion. And just would like to know why, or what is causing the issue. Shutting down and restarting seems to be the only option, and I'm not convinced this is a fix

Always run full screen, expect when game does a reboot ? and default settings made


Matt

Railwoodman said:

Again Thanks, John. I'm at a loss also, but you have experience this ? A question, do you ever remember this happening before the hotfix ? Again I'm not sure, but does seem to getting worse in my opinion. And just would like to know why, or what is causing the issue. Shutting down and restarting seems to be the only option, and I'm not convinced this is a fix

Always run full screen, expect when game does a reboot ? and default settings made


Matt

Click to expand...

Hi Matt,

I did experience the same. I know exactly what you are talking about. Hours of work only to have it poof off into bit heaven when the desktop shows up!

The issue is actually better with HF2. At least I can work in Surveyor and even drive for much longer. In the HF1 release, I was looking at the desktop after only a few minutes. Yesterday I drove for 5 hours and only crashed my train when I hit a broken track segment that the AI told me was there because he wouldn't drive past it. I thought it was a direction mark issue and BOOM! I saw the ground and the message about derailing. I was also in Surveyor all day too before that and then an hour afterwards before I gave up for the night. The day before that, I was in there for 17 hours. Yup that's a marathon of Trainzing, and I wonder why I dreamt about it when I went to bed!

A reboot is recommended after the crash because the memory is scrambled. Let me explain... In the olden days of Windows, we would get a GPF - remember those? These were in fact a similar situation. In the old days, however, Windows didn't recover well and the machine would eventually crash or crash other programs imediately. What was happening was, and this maybe the issue now too but caused by many, many factors, is memory gets overwritten by mistake due to a coding error. Usually it's not the program that you are running now that causes the problem; what has happened, let's say for example you are running Internet Explorer. You browse the web then decide to run Trainz. Trainz will work until you do something that requires more memory. The problem is IE had left stuff in there and hadn't flushed completely out - like you know what in the drain. Trainz then runs and mixes this wrong stuff with its own data, gets confused and crashes.

The other issue too is sometimes another program could be running at the same time. This will then overwrite some memory that Trainz is using. Trainz doesn't know this occurred and then it reads in garbage, or stuff that doesn't quite add up to what it's supposed to be doing and that crashes the program. This was a common problem with old MS Word 2.0.

In the olden days, this would actually cause the computer to crash, but with Windows 7 and up, even XP could tolerate this, the computer could recover and keep operating. This now is a dual edged issue. Sure the computer keeps ticking, but the program memory cache is now messy. This means that if you try to run the same program that died before, you run the risk of crashing again because the data is really messed up. This can also affect other programs as well, and eventually cause them to crash.

Now, I'm not saying that T:ANE is completely innocent here either. It could be something that it's doing as well that can cause it to crash. This is why it's so difficult to find the problem and big tracing programs need to run at the same time which will write logs for the programmers to read over. (My eyes glaze over when I see this stuff!). The issue too could be some of the content we're using. Remember not all the content is all graphics and pretty stuff. There are tons and tons of scripts, driver commands, session add-ons, and so on, even interactive industries, signals and so on all are talking in the background. These too could have an issue. Perhaps one of the scripts is faulty? It could tell Trainz to go jump in the lake which it so kindly does. The problem is the content will show no faults because the errors are semantical, meaning they are spelled correctly but the meaning is wrong. It's like having a direction marker in the wrong direction on a route. We can spend hours looking for it, but can't see it because it's a direction marker where it should be, but the problem is it's facing the wrong way.

So HF2 does run better, after all this, but it's still wobbly. A save more than often is good and when it crashes, reboot.

John

John Thanks, your help has been greatly appreciated for the information and advice. I'm the kinda the person who hands you a hammer and nails, and thinks it's self explanatory as to use. But sometime a few suggestion are helpful, tends to speed up the learning curve. And to limit frustration for both, you have done that for me Thank you again


Matt

Now, I don't know about Trainz above 2009 (which is my favourite). If I do a long run in Driver and then go back to Surveyor to make a change and exit with save, more often than not the game will crash. The reason? Memory doesn't flush in Surveyor. Now I exit direct from Driver and restart Trainz. That empties the memory. When I'm about to make a change or have made a change, I ALT+TAB to the desktop, open Content Manager and save the current working route to CDP. Then I exit with save.
This has two benefits:
1. I can reload before the change and try another way.
2. If the game should crash, the CDP can be reloaded with no loss of current position once an Extended Database Repair has completed. This because I've found generally the route doesn't match the database and red flags plus open for edit.

Hope this helps?

stationmistress said:

Now, I don't know about Trainz above 2009 (which is my favourite). If I do a long run in Driver and then go back to Surveyor to make a change and exit with save, more often than not the game will crash. The reason? Memory doesn't flush in Surveyor. Now I exit direct from Driver and restart Trainz. That empties the memory. When I'm about to make a change or have made a change, I ALT+TAB to the desktop, open Content Manager and save the current working route to CDP. Then I exit with save.
This has two benefits:
1. I can reload before the change and try another way.
2. If the game should crash, the CDP can be reloaded with no loss of current position once an Extended Database Repair has completed. This because I've found generally the route doesn't match the database and red flags plus open for edit.

Hope this helps?

Click to expand...

Hi stationmistress,

That's a bit of a complex approach to keep things stable for yourself! The crashes like that from Driver were a known problem in TS2009 and I think TS2010 if you went in using the quick drive option in Surveyor by pressing the F2 key. What I used to do is save everything, exit completely back to the menu then run Driver. I never had a crash running that way.

Making interim copies to CDP files is not a bad idea though. That at least creates a good return point should things really go bad.

John

IT'S back .... Along with other content showing up in unexpected places , or disappearing altogether . Saving seems to be a take a chance and see if it will thing ? This has caused big issues after textures are done with more then one spine used , and adds hours to already long process . Has anyone else running into this .

Matt

I would like any suggestion on how to stop this !!!






Have done two data repairs to no avail . And now saving session is having the same effects . Any help or ideas of whats causing this would be greatly appreciated .

Matt