FED UP!!!!

[acelejalde]

After working on a significant portion of my IRT Lexington Av line, I saved three copies to a flash drive and one copy on my computer. I closed Trainz earlier this evening and just opened it up to take a test drive of the route and---

--everything in the map is GONE!!!!

This is the same thing that happened to me last time--it's true for all four copies---there is NOTHING left on the map except ground textures, height displacements and rulers, that's it!

I have no idea how this has happened AGAIN, but I'm completely fed up and have given up hope on trying to get the route back -_-

It seems like my routes are cursed.

-A

 

[cascaderailroad]

Possibly you were working on a layer ?

Reworking is sometimes disheartening.

I restarted my work at least 5 times, from scratch.

You will get faster, and faster, from all your past experiences.

Test your route work frequently to see if it takes hold and saves.

 

[stagecoach]

You may have put it all on the wrong layer. If you have a session attached to your route open that one. You may find all content is on the session layer instead of the route layer.

 

[Daniel53e]

Something similar happened to me. My layout and all backup versions just disappeared! But still I can access it by saved sessions, but no way to get in and work on it in Surveyor. Houndreds or thousands of hours just lost. Anyone know a sollution, please?

 

[Thierry_St_Malo]

This does happen to me also, from time to time. I don't know why. So, I have made it a practice, the days when I use Trainz, to start by saving the route and its sessions into a single .CDP. Thus I lose at most a few hours' work.
But I agree with you: it is quite frustrating and completely abnormal. Losing a whole layer (this is what happens to me) is something that should have been fixed long ago. But that kind of work is not attractive and rewarding enough for young developers, I suppose.

 

[davesnow]

I always open a route I'm working on with "Edit Session"--- then, IMMEDIATELY after it opens, I merge my Session Layer into my Route Layer. Have never lost anything this way.

I HATE layers. They're great for Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, but (IMHO) useless in TRAINZ.

Cheers,

Dave

 

[sniper297]

Frankly I don't think layers have anything to do with it, the problem is TADDaemon.exe surfing the internet for pictures of female robots (or whatever it's doing, apparently a closely guarded secret) while the game is running, and unless you have 100% static free cable broadband it hogs so many system resources that trainz.exe loses track of what it's supposed to be doing.

Got that one recently, found one of those "spline that thinks it's a fixed object" bugs;

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=82164

And since the last backup without the problem was five days earlier and I didn't want to lose that much work, I fixed it instead of restoring the backup. Then I started replacing the turntables that got nuked in the process, TADDaemon.exe shot up to 50% CPU usage and trainz.exe dropped to zero, program froze, I got disgusted, shut down and went to bed. Following day I discovered a whole bunch of other stuff missing, mostly fixed objects with attached track - the track part was still there but the engine shed or passenger station part was gone, for example. I backed that up and restored the previous backup and tried again, worked the second time. Note in the screenshot the backup before the freeze is 4838 kilobytes, the one with all the missing parts is 4686 kilobytes, not a dramatic difference but lower by over 100 kilobytes than the average backup file size. Backup backup backup, when you start thinking "hey it's been a while since I did a backup" is usually when a program decides to crash or freeze. At least once per day, save to CDP and add today's date to the end of the filename and make sure you have a bug free backup before deleting old backups.

 

[belgian46]

Hello everybody,

Using win xp sp 3 and trainz, I also had the same feature that my created work was gone, when re-opening the route ( edit route ). I worked with saved sessions

Since then, I started trainz from within content manager. After doing changes to the route, I used saved as and took the option save new route and session.

Since now, in windows xp I'm using this method and every time I save my route with a different name.

for ex route251111. When I edit the route I save it as route251111a.

When I finish with Trainz on a specific day, I also take a complete backup of the auran folder ( and subfolders ).


When I wanted to edit the route on Nov 26th 2011, I opened the route251111a, executed some changes, and then saved the route as route261111. A change within route261111 would become route261111a, etc etc.

Since using this method, my route has presented itself without a loss when re-opening ( editing ).


But I can't say if this is the method to use. If, by using this method, Trainz presents again a non saved route, I will let it know with a post.


ps1. With win7 the issue that a route has lost some elements has not been presented up to now. But in Win 7, I'm also starting trainz from within content manager.

ps2. After closing trainz, I also wait before Taddaemon.exe is gone from within taskmanager ( has closed down ).

ps3. On Nov 4th I created the thread changes to route and the saving process http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=81226

Best regards

Kurt :wave:

 

[JCitron]

I save and save often too to a CDP file so I can restore. The problem is I sometimes get "into" editing something in Surveyor, and forget to save as I'm going along. That's usually when something goes blitz! It's like TADD knows when you've gotten busy and forget the housekeeping!

I have a very consistent naming convention which includes both the route name, revision count and date started - like this:

E&E-Rev 5.0.3 ---- 11-29-12

E&E is my Enfield and Eastern. Rev 5.0.03 is the current revision, and the date after the ---- is the current save date.

If I make minor, but notable changes, I will up the .03 to .04 on the next save.

If I make some major changes, the .0 number goes up to 1, and if I really make some major changes, like lopping of baseboards, the 5 goes up to 6.

Anyway, the thing is we all need to come up with a safety net that works for us. I'm using a method I learned while editing documentation.

I've noticed to some other fluky things happening lately. I can't pinpoint exactly what happens, but it's as though the old track disconnect from fixed objects like MO-crossings is happening again. Periodically I find that my track and roads have disconnected from a railroad crossings, or sometimes just roads have disconnected from a road intersection. Where this happens is random, and no there was no editing done. When I usually notice the track problem is when an AI driver pops up a message about no path to destination while in driver.

John

 

[LIneAxe]

used to have similar experience

When I first started creating routes/sessions I had that problem crop up. I googled the problem and found out about merging all your route layer stuff onto the session layer. I use this all the time and it seemed to clear up any missing stuff on my map. I also lock the route layer and work on session layer as much as possible. Since I have been doing this ,I don't seem to be missing any assets.

 

[Daniel53e]

I always open a route I'm working on with "Edit Session"--- then, IMMEDIATELY after it opens, I merge my Session Layer into my Route Layer. Have never lost anything this way

I'll certainly try that from now on Dave, thanks. And also thanks for your great Miyabi Coast layout. After losing my own, The Miyabi is my favorite

 

[clam1952]

I do it the other way round, use a session layer only for editing and merge with Route layer on completion.

In the case of completely missing routes, you may find them in the Trash folder now replaced by the backup folder in TS12.

Whatever, the most important thing is to backup, preferably on a different PC or media such as external HD, memory sticks, DVD'S. I also clone the route I'm working on every so often and delete the previous clone so I have a quick backup I can get to. Not that I have ever needed to since I have been using Trainz.
Incidentally cloning a route for me often clears up any minor problems that start occuring with it.

I learned the backup lesson the hard way a few years back now, pre Trainz, when I lost some 4 years of work on an FPS I was working on and some irreplaceable no longer available software, when something, probably a static or power surge, took out my PC including main and two internal backup drives.

 

[davesnow]

I'll certainly try that from now on Dave, thanks. And also thanks for your great Miyabi Coast layout. After losing my own, The Miyabi is my favorite

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoy it.

I also have an External Hard Drive that I use to back up my route(s) occasionally... just in case.

Cheers,

Dave

 

[acelejalde]

Thanks for all of the replies/suggestions guys. I didn't expect this to get so much feedback! I did find a .cdp from the 20th of November that I uploaded and only the portion from 149 St to 125 St was missing as I hadn't built it yet--so the route is saved!

How does layer locking work? I never really understood it--and to reference an earlier post, I always open the session and when I go to save, merge it with the route file.

I'll have to look in this "trash" folder in TS2010 and see if any "goodies" are lurking in there.

Thanks again for the replies and support!

-A :wave:

 

[geoffwilliams]

Frankly I don't think layers have anything to do with it, the problem is TADDaemon.exe surfing the internet for pictures of female robots (or whatever it's doing, apparently a closely guarded secret) while the game is running, and unless you have 100% static free cable broadband it hogs so many system resources that trainz.exe loses track of what it's supposed to be doing.

Got that one recently, found one of those "spline that thinks it's a fixed object" bugs;

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=82164

And since the last backup without the problem was five days earlier and I didn't want to lose that much work, I fixed it instead of restoring the backup. Then I started replacing the turntables that got nuked in the process, TADDaemon.exe shot up to 50% CPU usage and trainz.exe dropped to zero, program froze, I got disgusted, shut down and went to bed. Following day I discovered a whole bunch of other stuff missing, mostly fixed objects with attached track - the track part was still there but the engine shed or passenger station part was gone, for example. I backed that up and restored the previous backup and tried again, worked the second time. Note in the screenshot the backup before the freeze is 4838 kilobytes, the one with all the missing parts is 4686 kilobytes, not a dramatic difference but lower by over 100 kilobytes than the average backup file size. Backup backup backup, when you start thinking "hey it's been a while since I did a backup" is usually when a program decides to crash or freeze. At least once per day, save to CDP and add today's date to the end of the filename and make sure you have a bug free backup before deleting old backups.

If you remove your username and password using options the TAD Demon is tamed a little. Also gets rid of the lags. Won't mention sloppy programming, but it does leave a lot to be desired.
Geoff

 

[sniper297]

No, I tried that, separate installation with no username or password, internet cable unplugged, same problems and the monitors show TADDaemon.exe hogging 150 megs of RAM and hammering the CPU and otherwise hogging system resources even when denied any access to the internet. I can understand why it needs to access the download station at the moment you save a new route or session, it needs to get a new KUID number and has to check the DLS to make sure it's not creating a duplicate of an existing KUID. But it would have been better designed to do that ONLY when saving a new route or session, whatever it's constantly doing when surveyor or driver is running it does not need to be doing at that time. If redesigning it to run only when it needs to run means more delay while saving that's fine, preferable to the constant short delays and freezing.

I bought TS2009 since I keep hearing my problem is hardware, and my system specs may not be good enough for 2010 but they exceed the 2009 specs by enough that it wouldn't be a valid excuse in 2009. TS2009 SP3 has several bugs that make it unusable for my purposes, but TS2009 SP4 is the one that spawns the daemon, TS2009 SP4 cuts the framerates in half and has the exact same problems as TS2010. This;

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=59346

Was never resolved, every version of TS2010 and TS12 does it every time on my system, and after I got TS2009 I tested on that - it does it in TS2009 SP4, it does NOT do it in TS2009 SP3, conclusion there's something wrong with TADDaemon.exe, it was apparently never tested on anything except cable broadband.

 

[acelejalde]

New (annoying) Issue

So, I recovered the file and have been saving every ten minutes (or after a complex route-section build) and I am experiencing a new issue. I am continuing to work in the session layer and merging into the route layer when saving. However, when I go to save after the merge, I get a warning window that says "Trainz could not overwrite read-only route files. Try saving under a different name." This shows up twice before it allows me to successfully merge and save.

Any ideas?

-A :wave:

 

[H222]

I HATE layers. They're great for Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, but (IMHO) useless in TRAINZ.

Cheers,

Dave

I love layers, have you tried creating a tight city environment or a big station? Lock the structure you don't want to use in another layer and move other objects easily

Jamie