As of late, there have been numerous questions regarding patching and updating. If people are installing a brand new digital download, there's a possibility that this doesn't need to be applied. The version I downloaded recently, to save me a gazillion hours of program patching, came already up-to-date to the latest version. This may not be the case with other versions, however. There are perhaps those people who have rediscovered their Trainz versions, perhaps due to winter coming, or the new mentioning of T:ANE in the news and forums. These people may opt for the automatic patching, which is not always a good thing, or go about the process manually. Anyway... I hope this is helpful.
With patches, fixes, and even upgrades, you need to plan ahead of time. This is why I hate now, and always hated before, those awful auto-patching processes. Yup you power things up one day, and things don't work, why? Can't tell... Why, after checking stuff, sometimes for days, you find out that the operating system, fill in the version, company, etc., to your suit, did an auto-patch overnight without warning. This isn't always the operating system that this happens to. In the past I've seen this with graphics applications, antivirus applications, utilities, and even games. Sometimes the patching works as planned and we have few problems, however, sometimes the patches "fix" things, and we don't know about the issues until after the fact. It's worse when there's no recourse due to automatic patching, without the ability to turn this off, only to find out later that it stuffs up the systems totally. This is usually more of a problem in the corporate world where patches are downloaded to the workstations from a server. McAfee, the most hated antivirus company I believe, had an updated a few years ago that caused thousands of corporate customers angst when their workstations all blue screened due to a bad patch. I can't recall what their answer was to the problem, however, many companies were left in a lurch as their users were essentially dead in the water, probably for days until they could be updated.
Having said that, with some software, there's no choice, while with others, well we can get around it by manually patching and testing prior to updating. There are steps that we can take to make this as painless process as possible.
So before patching:
* Clean up your disk to ensure there are no temporary files. Use Windows Disk clean-up, or your favorite system clean-up suite.
* Defrag your hard drives, if you are using old-fashioned hard drives to ensure the best performance.
* Have a backup in place
* Turn off the Antivirus
* Run the patching utility as administrator.
* Turn off power management so the system doesn't go to sleep in the middle of the patching.
* Follow the on-screen instructions for database repairs, etc.
* Be prepared for a lot of down time.
* Find something else to do, but plan on checking things periodically.
Always, always, always, have a back up in place should stuff go Kahfootz and drop off a cliff. With the duplicate in place, you can always go back to the previous version just by overwriting the folders. It might take time, but it's done quite easily. Without out this, you're driving blind in a snowstorm.
Remember that patching takes a long time, a very long time. This has been repeated more than once in the forums here, just like the suggestion to backup stuff too. Let the process run... Progress bars may freeze, show not responding, etc. but it's doing stuff in the background. Sometimes, if you can see a hard light flashing, you can see stuff is busy. Find something else to do while the patching is taking place, but check in periodically. Think of this as making a boiled dinner. Those of us from the northern climes, have a dinner made up of a pot roast, corned beef, or chicken, that's thrown into a pot with potatoes, onions, cabbage, turnips, carrots, and sometimes parsnips. To ensure it's cooked well, so the meat isn't tough and the potatoes haven't turned to mush, we periodically check on it. Do the same with your patching. Check that the drive light is still flashing, blinking, etc., and or perhaps the process is asking for input. There's nothing worse than having something sit there for hours awaiting input, and all that is needed is a mouse-click!
Follow on-screen instructions like doing database updates if requested, or even system reboots. Not doing these things at the time of the prompting, may mean the process can become corrupted later, or delayed . Stacking updates one after another can cause temporary files to be overwritten since each installer may use the same temporary_file.tmp name for some files. This isn't so much a problem with Trainz patching, but comes up more often than not when building PCs and installing a bunch-o-applications.
With Trainz TS12, SP1 HF4, we have asset validation. Let this complete after the patching. As I can tell you, the very hard way, let it complete even if everything appears to be done! This process completes in the background, and can take hours to do if you've got a lot of assets. With 177,000 - plus assets installed, this can take several hours. Even a 44,000 assets, which I've had when there are database update issues, has taken 3-4 hours to complete. Let it run, to repeat again. Trying to run TS12, doing stuff in Content Manager, Driver, or Surveyor is a futile attempt and leads to more frustration. This is due to the system being too busy to answer your I/O, meaning keyboard, screen updates, and mouse. The disk and software background tasks are keeping, an otherwise spiffy system, from doing multiple things.
Cleaning up afterwards. Even with the patch complete, there are going to be things to look out for. Sure, we're eager to give things a try, but before you do so, I suggest going into Content Manager and checking assets to ensure there are no missing or faulty assets, or missing dependencies that may need updating. With HF4 there was the sound issue that came up with many assets. For many of us, this was only a handful of broken things, and this only took a few minutes to repair.
Once all this is done, go in and enjoy the new patch. Remember that nothing is perfect, there will always be issues to be aware of, which means finding new workarounds and sometimes new ways to do the same things. This is true of any updated application and not just TS12.
John
With patches, fixes, and even upgrades, you need to plan ahead of time. This is why I hate now, and always hated before, those awful auto-patching processes. Yup you power things up one day, and things don't work, why? Can't tell... Why, after checking stuff, sometimes for days, you find out that the operating system, fill in the version, company, etc., to your suit, did an auto-patch overnight without warning. This isn't always the operating system that this happens to. In the past I've seen this with graphics applications, antivirus applications, utilities, and even games. Sometimes the patching works as planned and we have few problems, however, sometimes the patches "fix" things, and we don't know about the issues until after the fact. It's worse when there's no recourse due to automatic patching, without the ability to turn this off, only to find out later that it stuffs up the systems totally. This is usually more of a problem in the corporate world where patches are downloaded to the workstations from a server. McAfee, the most hated antivirus company I believe, had an updated a few years ago that caused thousands of corporate customers angst when their workstations all blue screened due to a bad patch. I can't recall what their answer was to the problem, however, many companies were left in a lurch as their users were essentially dead in the water, probably for days until they could be updated.
Having said that, with some software, there's no choice, while with others, well we can get around it by manually patching and testing prior to updating. There are steps that we can take to make this as painless process as possible.
So before patching:
* Clean up your disk to ensure there are no temporary files. Use Windows Disk clean-up, or your favorite system clean-up suite.
* Defrag your hard drives, if you are using old-fashioned hard drives to ensure the best performance.
* Have a backup in place
* Turn off the Antivirus
* Run the patching utility as administrator.
* Turn off power management so the system doesn't go to sleep in the middle of the patching.
* Follow the on-screen instructions for database repairs, etc.
* Be prepared for a lot of down time.
* Find something else to do, but plan on checking things periodically.
Always, always, always, have a back up in place should stuff go Kahfootz and drop off a cliff. With the duplicate in place, you can always go back to the previous version just by overwriting the folders. It might take time, but it's done quite easily. Without out this, you're driving blind in a snowstorm.
Remember that patching takes a long time, a very long time. This has been repeated more than once in the forums here, just like the suggestion to backup stuff too. Let the process run... Progress bars may freeze, show not responding, etc. but it's doing stuff in the background. Sometimes, if you can see a hard light flashing, you can see stuff is busy. Find something else to do while the patching is taking place, but check in periodically. Think of this as making a boiled dinner. Those of us from the northern climes, have a dinner made up of a pot roast, corned beef, or chicken, that's thrown into a pot with potatoes, onions, cabbage, turnips, carrots, and sometimes parsnips. To ensure it's cooked well, so the meat isn't tough and the potatoes haven't turned to mush, we periodically check on it. Do the same with your patching. Check that the drive light is still flashing, blinking, etc., and or perhaps the process is asking for input. There's nothing worse than having something sit there for hours awaiting input, and all that is needed is a mouse-click!
Follow on-screen instructions like doing database updates if requested, or even system reboots. Not doing these things at the time of the prompting, may mean the process can become corrupted later, or delayed . Stacking updates one after another can cause temporary files to be overwritten since each installer may use the same temporary_file.tmp name for some files. This isn't so much a problem with Trainz patching, but comes up more often than not when building PCs and installing a bunch-o-applications.
With Trainz TS12, SP1 HF4, we have asset validation. Let this complete after the patching. As I can tell you, the very hard way, let it complete even if everything appears to be done! This process completes in the background, and can take hours to do if you've got a lot of assets. With 177,000 - plus assets installed, this can take several hours. Even a 44,000 assets, which I've had when there are database update issues, has taken 3-4 hours to complete. Let it run, to repeat again. Trying to run TS12, doing stuff in Content Manager, Driver, or Surveyor is a futile attempt and leads to more frustration. This is due to the system being too busy to answer your I/O, meaning keyboard, screen updates, and mouse. The disk and software background tasks are keeping, an otherwise spiffy system, from doing multiple things.
Cleaning up afterwards. Even with the patch complete, there are going to be things to look out for. Sure, we're eager to give things a try, but before you do so, I suggest going into Content Manager and checking assets to ensure there are no missing or faulty assets, or missing dependencies that may need updating. With HF4 there was the sound issue that came up with many assets. For many of us, this was only a handful of broken things, and this only took a few minutes to repair.
Once all this is done, go in and enjoy the new patch. Remember that nothing is perfect, there will always be issues to be aware of, which means finding new workarounds and sometimes new ways to do the same things. This is true of any updated application and not just TS12.
John