My name is Ozymamdias....

L

lewisner

Well-known member
......"King of kings.Look upon my works ye mighty and despair" I know now what Coleridge meant.I started work on my one and only route 4 years ago with TRS2004.I had a couple of minor crashes and lost a lot of work.Then, last year , disaster struck;I opened Trainz to find that all textures had disappeared and ground levels had returned to Zero, except for the first baseboard I had built, and the one I had been working on the night before.Fast forward to last night, and I was on a roll;having great ideas, executing them, and admiring the results.At midnight I was exhausted and shut the PC down.This morning I opened Driver and gradually got the feeling something was wrong; it always took a long time to load, but the textures wouldn"t show.You"ve guessed it, the entire route had been trashed except for the 1st and last boards.Splines are hanging in the air; tracks are buried underground.Solid objects are lying on the surface.So ,I have three questions: #1) Does anyone know what causes this? #2) Is there any way to reverse it? #3) Should I attempt to rebuild it or simply throw Trainz in the bin and find a more rewarding hobby? P.S This ISN"T a PC problem - when it happened before, it was on my old PC.
trainz2007112014222101mo8.jpg
 
I hate to say it, but:

Backups, backups, backups!

Backup onto CD or DVD depending on how much data there is. Frequently. Disks cost next door to nothing these days and burning them doesn't take long. If you use RW's, use them in a cycle of at least three rotating sets of copies.

You can never have too many backups and to lose months of work is a tragedy.

Needless to say, also regularly backup anything else on the computer which you value.

Here endeth the lesson.

John
ps Get your tail out of your mouth, it looks rude :) Ooops, sorry, no, that's Ouroborous.
 
Last edited:
"nismit" I have TRS2006 set to auto save every 10 minutes.My PC has a 600Gb RAID hard drive and 2 Gb RAM with 512 Mb SLI graphics. No shortage of space, though I"d gone over the top on detail recently and the route was loading very slowly.John259 , I KNOW.....:'( ......but I recently had a Fatal Error and as it happened everything came back exactly as it was when I shut the PC down.
 
P.S. I could understand it if EVERYTHING was flattened but why are the first and last boards left unscathed? And BTW in the photo of the docks you should be looking at the North sea.Why has all the water disappeared?
 
Maybe An Incomplete Save....

I had a similar disaster where I lost hundreds hours of work due to the fact that the save process was corrupted. :'( I went to save and it did not completely save the file and stopped part way through resulting in missing assets etc. I LEARNED A VERY IMPORTANT LESSON! I save the route I am currently working on twice. Once by the road name and second with road name with the word "back". Therefore it is saved twice.
 
I haven't yet had any problems in TRAINZ, but because of a problem a couple of decades ago, caused mostly by user error, but compounded by failure of the autosave to work as it should have. I got in the habit of making duplicate, incremental backups on everything I do. If I'm working on a route, everytime I leave the computer, I'll do an explicit save, and save the route to a new name, in the form, "Name n", where "n" is 1 more than the last number I saved it as, and I don't just save it to one type of medium, but to two, either two separate hard drives, or a hard drive and a thumb drive. This has advantages besides just meaning I don't lose hours worth of work. Occasionally I try an idea, and find after spending a quantity of time on it that it just doesn't work the way I hoped it would. It is then trivial to go back to the last back-up before I began developing the idea, and thus, not have to "undo" anything. Storage space is cheap.

ns
 
lewisner said:
And BTW in the photo of the docks you should be looking at the North sea.Why has all the water disappeared?
Click to expand...

I'm sure the water is still their, just underneath the ground surface.

My only guess is that the ground file (.gnd) has become corrupt or the like, I don't know how, never seen this happen before.

Auto save just saves it over the same name, you should really save it incrementally under different names.

Sorry for the loss.
 
Thanks for the input guys.Alan, I guess if you don"t know nobody will.However I"ve just checked and all the water has gone - evaporated? But I still can"t see how if this is all one layout , everything can be flattened except the first and last board?
 
This phenomenon - loss of ground textures and flattening of terrain - has been reported before and happened to me last year on my previous layout.

Some people think excessive use of ctrl-Z to undo changes may play a role in this.

Either way, it feels like a tragedy, and incremental back-ups, ideally each time you work on the layout, offers the only insurance policy. :(
 
Hmmm...I do use the Undo button quite a bit , sometimes to roll it back even 3 steps.To add even more irony I saved TRS2006 in its entirety to a mini Hard Drive a few weeks ago just before I got a Fatal Error, but I deleted it except for the Cache ,Local and World folders.Is there anything I could do with these folders to repair the route?Like what would happen if I deleted the current folders and replaced them with the old ones?
 
Thanks nismit I think I just about understand that lol.I"ve been thinking a bit bit and reckon that if I clone the route "as it stands" and delete all baseboards except the last area I concentrated on (Sunderland town centre) that"ll leave me with a "mini route" where the only things missing will be ground levels and textures.Then, if I resurrect the route as it stood a few weeks ago and delete the area covered by the Mini Route and then Merge the 2 I should then have a reasonable compromise between the two.Does that make sense?
 
I DON"T BELIEVE IT! as Victor Meldrew would say....As I said earlier, I saved my route on October 20th (as a CDP).After a quick pint tonight I Searched my PC for "Sunderland" and found that although I sent it to the Recycle Bin I DIDN"T delete it! I"ve restored it and Imported it as a CDP and I now have it as it was 4 weeks ago, so I should be able to repair it, although I will still lose the 1000s of items of JVC vegetation in the countryside and a large housing estate at Hylton.
 
That IS GOOD news!

lewisner said:
I DON"T BELIEVE IT! as Victor Meldrew would say....As I said earlier, I saved my route on October 20th (as a CDP).After a quick pint tonight I Searched my PC for "Sunderland" and found that although I sent it to the Recycle Bin I DIDN"T delete it! I"ve restored it and Imported it as a CDP and I now have it as it was 4 weeks ago, so I should be able to repair it, although I will still lose the 1000s of items of JVC vegetation in the countryside and a large housing estate at Hylton.
Click to expand...

Glad to hear that you didn't lose everything. I still remember that sicking feeling when I lost a route I worked hundred of hours on. The good news is I started over and made a better route. Practice does make perfect!
 
Lol I wouldn"t say practice makes perfect - it makes "a little bit bette!" But the status quo now is that I have knocked an 8 baseboard hole in the 4 week old route and merged an 8 baseboard section of the latest route into it.So, instead of losing everything I have had the proverbial kick up the backside...:p .....I"ve also found that a previous problem I had when trying to delete baseboards ( I could only delete 2 or 3 then I had to Save) doesn"t happen now...;)
 
You were lucky. :D

I've had this kind of luck once before so that prompted me to put in the 2nd drive to copy things over to prior to edits. This works so I don't have to go back too far if things go poof on me.

I'm glad you're back in business. I know that awful sick empty feeling as you watch 100s of hours of work magically disappear in front of your eyes.

John
 
The good news is I"m now a dedicated Saver! Mind you , thats what many Northern Rock customers used to say.......:'( My PC has two hard drives with C Drive partitioned at 30 Gb.I learnt the value of this the hard way when I had (my own fault) a PC crash and the 30 Gigs was wiped....I"d installed Trainz on D Drive so it was safe, as was all my music and photos.What I plan to do now is save my route every night to the Mini Hard Drive as Route + Date and to keep at least 3 days.Every week I"ll save the latest one to D Drive.Fingers crossed, that should do it...:cool:
 
In addition to copies on hard disk, I'd very highly advise you to also copy everything you care about to CD's or DVD's regularly for additional safety. This involves very little cost and very little effort.

John
 
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