Hi everyone. My name is Forester1, and I am a trainzaholic.
I started with T:ANE, and within a few years I had taken advantage of the TMR plugin, the deluxe bundle add-on, and free and paid routes and assets to where I was soon consuming a Terabyte of hard drive space. I moved my install to an external drive but found things slowing down considerably.
When TRS19 came along, I thought this would be my chance to break the habit. I would perform a "Lean and mean" install, installing the platinum edition, with DLC I had already purchased, and not expand with more routes and assets until I had thoroughly explored everything I had. But over time, I found myself once again taking advantage of all of the wonderful things available: Philskene's wonderful routes, the megaroutes, assets by Dave Snow, MSGSapper, and a host of others, and now I have TRS19 taking up A TERABYTE AND A HALF on an external drive! Again, I am noticing big slow downs in trying to load routes. Yesterday I waited maybe an hour(?) after selecting "Create Session" for the small route "Chiyoda Branch Line". Large routes are becoming untenable.
I am finding that once I have built a huge install it is very difficult to try to reduce it. There are a lot of dependents and dependencies, and it becomes difficult to know what can be archived off to CDPs without eventually missing something. Especially when some of the largest files are just libraries and mesh files for really small assets!
So, what I would like to do now is start over again with a "Lean and mean" install but have the current install available as a sort of "Archive", to keep from having to search out and re-download a world's worth of assets that I already have (not that I want to do a lot of thar right away!
). My idea is to back up the current data folder, then uninstall TRS19, then reinstall TRS19, using the default data folder on the C: drive, but be able to point the launch window setting to the current install if I need to. It is very hard to extract something unless I can bring it up in CM, so I would want to be able to kind of point TRS19 back and forth at infrequent intervals.
Does that sound possible or even logical? Any ideas are welcome, except starting over with TRS22. I am not ready to buy the beta and hope to hold off until there is a platinum version of 22 offered. If I could do what I am proposing would installing the upcoming SP5 affect it? or does that only impact the executables folder?
I started with T:ANE, and within a few years I had taken advantage of the TMR plugin, the deluxe bundle add-on, and free and paid routes and assets to where I was soon consuming a Terabyte of hard drive space. I moved my install to an external drive but found things slowing down considerably.
When TRS19 came along, I thought this would be my chance to break the habit. I would perform a "Lean and mean" install, installing the platinum edition, with DLC I had already purchased, and not expand with more routes and assets until I had thoroughly explored everything I had. But over time, I found myself once again taking advantage of all of the wonderful things available: Philskene's wonderful routes, the megaroutes, assets by Dave Snow, MSGSapper, and a host of others, and now I have TRS19 taking up A TERABYTE AND A HALF on an external drive! Again, I am noticing big slow downs in trying to load routes. Yesterday I waited maybe an hour(?) after selecting "Create Session" for the small route "Chiyoda Branch Line". Large routes are becoming untenable.
I am finding that once I have built a huge install it is very difficult to try to reduce it. There are a lot of dependents and dependencies, and it becomes difficult to know what can be archived off to CDPs without eventually missing something. Especially when some of the largest files are just libraries and mesh files for really small assets!
So, what I would like to do now is start over again with a "Lean and mean" install but have the current install available as a sort of "Archive", to keep from having to search out and re-download a world's worth of assets that I already have (not that I want to do a lot of thar right away!

Does that sound possible or even logical? Any ideas are welcome, except starting over with TRS22. I am not ready to buy the beta and hope to hold off until there is a platinum version of 22 offered. If I could do what I am proposing would installing the upcoming SP5 affect it? or does that only impact the executables folder?