NEWBIE ADVICE PLEASE

[alanruss]

Am new to Trainz, but have become an ardent fan.
My problem is regarding Content MAnager plus, trainz 2006.
Up until a few days ago was downloading with no problems.
Its stopped downloading. I can view all items in download station with pictures etc. When I select the item to download it appears in the list on the left but download speed only shows as 00.00kbs.And no matter how long I leave it nothing happens. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.:'(

 

[WillPac]

CMP problems

Believe me, you are NOT alone in issues with CMP. It might be the worst, most frustrating piece of software I have dealt with since the days of Sierra's Front Page Sports Football.

What I have found works the best (still far from ideal) is I d/l the main file (engine, rolling stock, building, whatever) via FTP, as this bypasses the buggy CMP.

Unfortunately that still leaves the dependencies, and some of these items have a TON of them that are required. I add those to the DLCart, and a few seconds later, they SHOULD show up in the CMP's list to the left. Hit START and cross your fingers.

The good news is that even those with ? as unknown deps show up in this list and CMP will d/l them. The bad news, at least for me, is that CMP will freeze a lot, and I do mean A LOT. Last night I added several cars from Western RRs (MoPac, UP, Espee, GN, etc.). First boxcar I added, a 40' Missouri Pacific, had a ton of deps it required. And it took me 23 times of closing CMP, emptying my DL Cart, reloading my DL Cart and restarting CMP to get all of these deps d/l'd. TWENTY-THREE times CMP froze.

The good news was once I got those deps for the MoPac car, all of the rest of the box cars and many of the flats needed nothing, as they used many of the same deps.

It would be nice if everything could be downloaded without DLS and CMP. It is easily the most frustrating part of what is essentially a sweet program.

 

[JCitron]

Am new to Trainz, but have become an ardent fan.
My problem is regarding Content MAnager plus, trainz 2006.
Up until a few days ago was downloading with no problems.
Its stopped downloading. I can view all items in download station with pictures etc. When I select the item to download it appears in the list on the left but download speed only shows as 00.00kbs.And no matter how long I leave it nothing happens. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.:'(

Alan,

Did you hit start to download your files? This isn't completely obvious at first. Sometimes you still have to wait a minute or so for the connection to clear if the DLS server is busy. The program is going out to the DLS and searching for dependencies (Watch the status bar at the bottom of the screen).

Welcome to the very addicting and time-consuming and life-consume world of Trainz. Your life will never be the same again!

John

 

[epicmek]

If your problems persist have a look at:
http://trainz-downloader-pro.software.informer.com/3.2/

It works very well in my opinion and it does a trawl for all the necessary dependencies on the DLS.

Martin

 

[EdrickV]

Don't know if this is the same for the TS2006 CMP as it is for the TS2010 one I have, but one thing I've noticed is that it can take some time for it to check items for dependencies. (The items will show up with the collapse/expand dependencies arrow followed by a ? and then the item name.) Once it finds the dependencies, (if any) then it'll start downloading and the ? will dissappear. the dependency hide/show arrow will also vanish if the item doesn't have any dependencies that aren't on the download list and need to be downloaded.

If you have added a lot of items, it may take a /long/ time to search them all for dependencies. Again, this is all based on the TS2010 CMP so things may be different for TS2006.

Just thought of something, seeing the comment about CMP "freezing" reminded me of something. There are times when the TS2010 CMP will seem to freeze up (aka screen won't update and it won't look like it's doing anything) but it's actually just too busy working on something to spend any time redrawing the screen. Usually this happens when I've got a really long list of items in the Assets filter of the search panel. (That's usually the result of viewing dependencies for one or more items, especially Routes/Sessions and then clicking "View in Main List.") The TS2006 CMP might do this behavior more often. So if it seems like it's frozen, but Windows itself and other unrelated programs aren't, then I'd advise letting it sit for 5-10 minutes and then check on it. And I'd also advise against trying to view the dependencies of 5 different routes in the Main List at the same time.

 

[WillPac]

CMP in '06

Edrick: CMP in TRS2006 does indeed take some time to find stuff. And I have learned to add just ONE dependency at a time for CMP to d/l. If CMP is merely busy when it appears to lock up (and I know that Vista has a tendency to claim a program is "not responding" when it's doing most of its in the background), but if that is the case, it gives a solid showing that it's frozen. The little blue triangles that zip back and forth stop moving, the d/l speed never wavers as it should, and oftentimes the item being d/l'd disappears from the list. If I so much as breathe on it at that point, it goes all faded and accepts no mouse clicks or keystrokes. To me, that is a frozen program. And CMP is the Ice Queen.

 

[seeseeme]

I have also read about this "sort" of problem that Yes CMP is doing something in the background. There have been many times in 2006 and 2009 (CM2 is much better) where I have been downloading a number of items and then it seems to stop on one item after downloading it, the little blue line stops and appears to be finished. What someone once mentioned was that in the background, CMP/CM2 is compressing the file to "remake" it to the standards that 2006/2009/2010 now requires. So if this is a big/difficult item then there may be a noticeable time difference compared with other items.

In the past what I have done is to stop the download process and then restart it and for the most times this works well, though I often wonder if this is the best as I may actually corrupt the download process and the item I am downloading.

Just a thought.

Craig

 

[xcrossi]

Its what I use...I also use "Download them all" ((FREE but donate)( No ADDS or popups)) couple of DTA tips when 1st window pops up (Add URL.(s) use the Add paused button until you have added all the assets then /select all/ Resume/. If you get a red bar on one or more downloads just restart when rest of DL finished. You may also Resume at a different time and you don't have to be logged on.
xcrossi

 

[EdrickV]

Edrick: CMP in TRS2006 does indeed take some time to find stuff. And I have learned to add just ONE dependency at a time for CMP to d/l. If CMP is merely busy when it appears to lock up (and I know that Vista has a tendency to claim a program is "not responding" when it's doing most of its in the background), but if that is the case, it gives a solid showing that it's frozen. The little blue triangles that zip back and forth stop moving, the d/l speed never wavers as it should, and oftentimes the item being d/l'd disappears from the list. If I so much as breathe on it at that point, it goes all faded and accepts no mouse clicks or keystrokes. To me, that is a frozen program. And CMP is the Ice Queen.

Not sure what you mean about "little blue triangles" but the kind of freezing while busy I'm talking about will cause stuff like the download speed to stop and if you tried switching to another window and back via alt-tab (or do some other things) the program's window (or part of it) may actually show up as a blank white space. Graphics "corruption" can also occur. It can also cause the program to show up as "not responding" in Windows.

Here are a couple examples of what I'm talking about:



In the first one that big white square is where the View Dependencies window would be, except I clicked View in Main List while viewing the dependencies for several routes. That closes the window but Trainz is busy and hasn't redrawn the part underneath the window.

The second one is a case of the program resizing windows and moving text around, but at that moment it had moved some text from one spot to another but had not erased the original text yet. The reason it gets bogged down so much I think is due to the amount of text in the box for the Asset KUID search filter. An edit box just wasn't built to store that much text. (There should be around 2000 or so KUIDs in it.) These went by relatively quickly, but then I've got a Core 2 Quad running at 3Ghz. Slower CPUs may take longer to process the same amount of items.

Edit: Forgot that Dual View was on, you can ignore the section on the right.