A road became a route... A warning on copying assets between Trainz versions!

[JCitron]

Well I did it. I took an innocent custom road and turned it into a route, and not quite the results I expected.

I had found a route in my backups which I had started working on ages ago in TS2006. I thought maybe I'd bring it up to T:ANE standards and see what it was that I thought was so great about it. I opened the route in TS12 and then cloned it to create a new version then exported it to a CDP and imported into T:ANE. The route, wasn't bad it's George Fisher's Morristown & Erie route.

The process generally works, however, I got a warning and as we say around here, I YADIT on the open for edit and submitted the installed asset instead of reverted, the road mind you, and ended up with the route installed and now a missing road.

So now the problem is I now had a missing dependency, the customized road, on other content so I took the route I installed and upped the Kuid to the highest one in my content and added one to it. I did this by sorting by my Kuid. The highest Kuid listed is the latest in the series so I took the one after that. With the route open for edit, I copied the folder to my desktop, edited the Kuid in the config.txt file and reimported. That got the route up to a higher Kuid and out of the way. This is what I should have done and where it was supposed to have been in the first place.

Now the road issue. I went to backups and restored the road. That didn't work as it kept restoring the route. Yes! Even though the folder said the road's name and kuid, its contents were not the road. Hmmm... I went to the data backups, but that asset was a .tzarc which I couldn't import or anything.

By now it's 3:00 am and I was tired so I picked this up this morning and the problem is solved. I went to another clone of my data - a test data copy for Trainz Dev and other testing. I found my road there, opened for edit and imported the folder into production copy.

So the warning here is:

1) Be careful when importing across from versions. Don't just save as a CDP and bring it in. Instead get your latest Kuid in the version you want to bring the content into and add one to it. Instead of creating a CDP, open the folder for edit first, copy to your desktop, put in the new kuid - one higher than your highest number, and import that open folder.

2) Don't just YADIT on everything. READ the messages.

3) Don't do stuff that requires too much mental work before going to bed. Your thinking isn't quite where it should be and you'll mess up.

This is no fault of Trainz or a way that N3V handles the data and is a human fault. The disparate versions of Trainz we may have installed have no way of knowing what the latest Kuid is going to be in another version. Ideally it would be nice if there was a separate table for tracking Kuid numbers, but that's never going to happen, besides, who is going to have multiple active versions anyway except a handful of the users so it's up to us to keep track of things ourselves.

John

 

[Mick_Berg]

Well I did it. I took an innocent custom road and turned it into a route, and not quite the results I expected.

I had found a route in my backups which I had started working on ages ago in TS2006. I thought maybe I'd bring it up to T:ANE standards and see what it was that I thought was so great about it. I opened the route in TS12 and then cloned it to create a new version then exported it to a CDP and imported into T:ANE. The route, wasn't bad it's George Fisher's Morristown & Erie route.

The process generally works, however, I got a warning and as we say around here, I YADIT on the open for edit and submitted the installed asset instead of reverted, the road mind you, and ended up with the route installed and now a missing road.

So now the problem is I now had a missing dependency, the customized road, on other content so I took the route I installed and upped the Kuid to the highest one in my content and added one to it. I did this by sorting by my Kuid. The highest Kuid listed is the latest in the series so I took the one after that. With the route open for edit, I copied the folder to my desktop, edited the Kuid in the config.txt file and reimported. That got the route up to a higher Kuid and out of the way. This is what I should have done and where it was supposed to have been in the first place.

Now the road issue. I went to backups and restored the road. That didn't work as it kept restoring the route. Yes! Even though the folder said the road's name and kuid, its contents were not the road. Hmmm... I went to the data backups, but that asset was a .tzarc which I couldn't import or anything.

By now it's 3:00 am and I was tired so I picked this up this morning and the problem is solved. I went to another clone of my data - a test data copy for Trainz Dev and other testing. I found my road there, opened for edit and imported the folder into production copy.

So the warning here is:

1) Be careful when importing across from versions. Don't just save as a CDP and bring it in. Instead get your latest Kuid in the version you want to bring the content into and add one to it. Instead of creating a CDP, open the folder for edit first, copy to your desktop, put in the new kuid - one higher than your highest number, and import that open folder.

2) Don't just YADIT on everything. READ the messages.

3) Don't do stuff that requires too much mental work before going to bed. Your thinking isn't quite where it should be and you'll mess up.

This is no fault of Trainz or a way that N3V handles the data and is a human fault. The disparate versions of Trainz we may have installed have no way of knowing what the latest Kuid is going to be in another version. Ideally it would be nice if there was a separate table for tracking Kuid numbers, but that's never going to happen, besides, who is going to have multiple active versions anyway except a handful of the users so it's up to us to keep track of things ourselves.

John

What's YADIT?

Mick

 

[JCitron]

What's YADIT?

Mick

Click on Yes or Okay without paying attention to the actual situation. I Yessed it or YA'd-it.

 

[itareus]

...Don't do stuff that requires too much mental work before going to bed. Your thinking isn't quite where it should be and you'll mess up...

In my case that would apply, as would doing anything before Breakfast, around lunchtime if hungry, and also at dinnertime (7 or 8pm here). I'd better just do nothing then .

Good point about just pressing OK without looking, and the more times you have done something the more likely you are to do it and then live to regret it ! Also it's easy to miss or forget what replies you gave and so blame the software for being rubbish .

Mind you some of the message windows that you see (not just on Trainz) can be extremely poor in their wording, for example with double negatives - 'Don't you want to not delete this' (Y/N).

John you will remember the days when you got "Delete *.* Y/N" did you ever automatically press "Y" and regret it for days afterwards when the backups took a week to restore ?

Chris M

 

[Mick_Berg]

I used to have fun making little requesters in Visual Basic where the yes and no buttons would swop places, or both say yes, and silly things like that.

Mick

 

[Mick_Berg]

Click on Yes or Okay without paying attention to the actual situation. I Yessed it or YA'd-it.

Ah, OK. Never did that ever..........

 

[JCitron]

In my case that would apply, as would doing anything before Breakfast, around lunchtime if hungry, and also at dinnertime (7 or 8pm here). I'd better just do nothing then .

Good point about just pressing OK without looking, and the more times you have done something the more likely you are to do it and then live to regret it ! Also it's easy to miss or forget what replies you gave and so blame the software for being rubbish .

Mind you some of the message windows that you see (not just on Trainz) can be extremely poor in their wording, for example with double negatives - 'Don't you want to not delete this' (Y/N).

John you will remember the days when you got "Delete *.* Y/N" did you ever automatically press "Y" and regret it for days afterwards when the backups took a week to restore ?

Chris M

Most of my time when I shouldn't be doing these things is usually when there's no coffee available.

I sure remember those DOS days... Heck Unix has rm * Never, ever do that with root privileges at the root, or least that was the rule years ago. rm is for ReMove... and * of course like does means everything. Unix being what it is would remove directories too! Oh no!.

Backups... They were on floppies. I had stacks of floppies for backups. The worst part was getting into disk 24/25 and running into an unreadable one. I had that more than once and so welcomed CDs and now DVDs for backups. At least if they're treated properly, then you're all set.

Spot on regarding the not so less than cryptic messages. I used a CRM and business package called Scala 5. The company was either Swedish or Danish that wrote it so their English wasn't exactly their native language. Every year we would have to create the next fiscal year, and each year we would scratch our heads, even after reading our notes, as we stepped through the options.

Ah this was all lessons learned.

John

 

[HiBaller]

MS Operating Systems are filled with cryptic messages. What I hate are the ones that tell you of impending disaster and cheerfully offer "OK" as the only option. Hey! Wait! It ISN'T "OK" with me!

So I devised error messages for my software like: "I know you aren't going to like this, but I couldn't save the file. But, to get rid of this message, click the OK button anyway"

When I go between versions, I do pretty much the same thing, John. I "open for edit" and import the directory(ies) using CM. I usually get the right results.

Bill