Coal Country - 192 missing items

[boleyd]

Purchased ,from JR, a of Coal Country copy several year ago. Heavily modified for TRSnn. Periodically look at it just to see if anything bad happened. It did, 192 items now labeled as needed to be downloaded. Mostly vegetation. I have no idea why someone should do this. N3V has enough to do. Why would N3V suddenly mark about 75% of the visible assets as Download, on a route that has not been opened for several weeks? This has happened before at roughly 4-to 6 month intervals. That is why I occasionally check on it.
BUILD_111951

Two successive download of files marked for download both showed over 200 download errors.
Will try the backup next.

Installed the backup but same sea of red
Reloaded the Operating System also known as W10.
Same display of almost total red due to the amount of foliage I used.
Yes, the greenery seems to be the problem. I used to get very upset when this happened. But it is not worth it. I can only hope that a stable update may be available at sometime and magically the route will be ok. But, given the dozens of fixes N3V tried in one go this time, it looks like a timely stable version of the program may not be imminent.

Back to the route I was focused on. If it also turns into a red mess I may be back. The Gentleman in Belgium will need to get his delete key, and banned for 30 days button, dusted off.

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Well, that did not take long. The Red Sea has not opened. It has filled my working route with probably 80% of the foliage being red. Probably the Ultra trees. They have been the favorite target, in the past, of the Adjusters of The Data.

Very unfortunate that I can't go back to TANE since backward changes are blocked. I will invest some time trying to stage a resurrection but may be the same as the Coal Route. Probably all Ultra vegetation. I will use Sam Trees and copy/paste of block of trees so It may be no more than three days wasted.

Now my question is, would the next pending update have prevented this or was this just another adjustment of the database in an attempt to bring the product up-to-date?

 

[JCitron]

If you are missing the assets, go back to your original downloads from JR and install those, or redownload them from JR if you need to.

The updates that are available, are for the payware version with some assets also used in other routes as well. You may or may not have some of those assets already installed. I have my original, highly modified and merged into something else route installed without issues.

What errors are you getting? You know the drill, saying something is broke doesn't helps us attempt to fix it. That's like the olden days with obtuse Apple OS error message. "An error occurred". That's like a well, Doh! we know that! What occurred that caused the problem.

 

[boleyd]

The problem is that my modified route is now calling for Ultra style trees. An unmodified route would probably use the original JR trees as replacements but everything from trees, to elevations, to many assets have changed and the route no longer has any mapping specifying the original trees. My guess is that "planting" any trees that are not specified in the current mapping would not work. If it was possible would it require a recompile?

I did not even think about attaching a supporting info. The assets are changed in the Database. Since I had seen this before it took a few months but the Ultra trees magically appeared in a usable status. I was stupid enough to use them once again feeling that N3V would not alter their condition.

I had the route where I wanted it visually and had the running of a portal sending trains into the route. Dump the consists in the yard and exit into the portal. Then distribute the dropped cars. All I had to do next was to do a timed schedule and add more train sin/out of the portal. Disperse cars and collect empties. Then add a passenger and fit the freight around it. I can do that on a different route. I did not expect a repair.

 

[JCitron]

Go to the Today folder and delete all the updated assets you downloaded. This will revert your content to the previous version, unless you also deleted the backups too as we need to do periodically. When done, don't update the trees and be done with it. If you need to, you can go through various days until you find the one where the updated trees were installed.

The cardboard trees shouldn't matter if they were updated because the don't have anything to do with the Ultra-trees you substituted them for.

This is one of the things I don't like about the current system we have with updates. There's rarely an explanation as to what the update is. I too have gotten burned with updates such as textures going from the old ones that work perfectly fine to the PBR with jellyfish guts and blobs. The problem with updates, such as textures, is this will break older routes including built-in ones and others that can't be altered and updated.

With that said, content creators and N3V alike need to think ahead and come up with a new version of an asset and not just an up-versioned upgrade

 

[boleyd]

Indeed, providing some background of the Updates during the test or planning phase. - ALL ULTRA TREES WILL BE LOST . Replace with substitutes ASAP.

I almost finished manually updating the trees. The vast majority of the land was green fields/forests - planted and not planted. I just populated an area with SAM trees and a PBR forest 12 texture. Created a block of a reasonable size (trees & texture) and placed them accordingly to "my belief" of crop fields versus grass areas with SAM trees. Just finished about 75% of the route. Looks ok until the next mystery update. Avoiding ranting and raving, and accepting my fate, was positive. Maturing late in life. Thanks for your help. Although I did not use that approach, just the time to think about it was medicinal.

Now N3V needs to be aware that even a backup ain't no good if the database has changed.

THANKS