newbie Mom intro and questions

muniman

*walking in slow-motion*
[I wasn't sure if I should post this here or in the technical forum - hope I got it right]

This is Muniman’s Mom :wave:. Muniman is my 11-year old son, a train fanatic since he was two years old. Nice to meet you all! We live west of Chicago – anyone else here live in Chicagoland?

We’ve been running TRS2006 and Trains Classics on our computer for a while now, but for convoluted reasons I’m going to uninstall them and install Trainz Railwayz. I thought I’d run this by you and see if there was anything any of you would do differently. The plan is:

-back up our current Trainz and TC to my external hard drive
-uninstall TRS2006 & TC
-run CCleaner
-restart the computer
-run CCleaner again (I want to make sure all traces of the originals are gone)
-restart computer again
-install Trainz Railwayz
-defrag if necessary

How’s that sound?

Once that’s done, we want to bring over a layout my son has created in ’06 (which will at this point be on the external hard drive) into the new install of TRS2006. How do I do that? Cut and paste the file? Paste it where specifically? He’s spent hours on this layout and it’s gorgeous – I would *hate* for him to lose it somehow or have it not work correctly. He told me he’s used only elements that are in ’06 (ie. not anything we downloaded) so theoretically it should work, but….? One problem he’s having with it is nasty lagging – could that be because he put too much detail in, or is there something we can look at specifically to see why it might be lagging so terribly?

Also, I wanted to run our computer specs by you and see if anything stands out as not being the greatest for TRS2006 and TC. We have:

- Dell Dimension 5100
- Windows XP SP2
- Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00 GHz - 1 GB of RAM
- Radeon X300/X550 Series graphics card (with latest updates)
- 144 GB hard disk space with 94 GB free

I’m thinking of adding RAM and was wondering if any of you have good/bad opinions of this? –

http://tinyurl.com/28gd5j

So, to summarize, my questions are:

-would you uninstall/install any differently?
-how do we bring over an existing TRS2006 layout into a fresh install of TRS2006?
-what can we do about nasty lagging?
-would more RAM be advisable? What do you think of the RAM I’m thinking of buying?

THANK YOU so much for any and all help you can give!! We both appreciate it!
 
if you back up the "local" folder from your current TRS2006 location. after you reinstall TRS2006(from trainz raiwayz) all you have to do is copy the local folder back over overwriting any files. then delete the assets.tdx file and your cache folder -- These files contain a listing of the assets, not them themselves; no files should be lost. Finally open up CMP and let it rebuild the Trainz Asset Database; depending on the amount of assets you have this may take a long time; during which CMP may appear to Windows to not be responding. It is working, its just to busy to respond to Windows.

peter
 
What a great Mom helping out her son like this. :)

You will get good advice here from other Trainzers.

Cheers

AJ
 
Hi muniman's mom,

The ram you linked to is DDR2 ram. Do you know if that is what you already have in your computer? If on reboot the ramcheck says DDR then I don't think DDR2 will work. You may have to get the model number of your motherboard and check if it will accept DDR2 ram. One good utility to find the motherboard number is Belarc Advisor, It is a free download, you can find it with google.

Cheers,
Bill69
 
I've uninstalled Trainz 2006 on several occasions, and then re-installed, and I've never lost anything. I use the same method Peter described in his post, so I'm sure it will work just fine.

As for the lag issue, while more RAM will probably help, in my experience, lagging usually happens when you enter a highly detailed area. When I first started with Trainz, I really went all out and created a city area with dozens of different houses, street lights, trees, roads and pretty much every other detail imaginable. Needless to say, this route was not exactly "high performance" in these areas. I've actually come to enjoy trying to "tweak" routes, so here are a few suggestions that I have found over the years (although I'm sure there are others on the forum who know more than I do).

1.If it is a city or town scene, try to limit the amount of individual buildings or objects. Houses and other buildings in most neighborhoods often look similiar anyway, so placing the same object ten times (rather then ten different objects) can help quite a lot, as Trainz only has to load one. I've found that this also applies to the actual trains as well. That's why I try to use engines with alpha-numbers whenever possible. One object can be placed ten times, each with a different number.

2.Sometimes objects, regardless of how often they are placed, can be very highly detailed. If they have an extremely high poly count, this can cause lagging. If it's a real problem, perhaps the best bet is to try and find a less-detailed alternative. You can check the poly-count of an object in CMP, by clicking on "View Mesh Details".

Hope that helps. Good luck with the re-installation.

Patrick
 
Muniman's computer has much the same spec as mine (though mine's a Compaq) including the X300/X550 graphics card. I get lag on very detailed layouts, or detailed parts of layouts.

As PatrickTaylor89 says, tweaking and taking care when you're building your own routes is a good approach, but high-detail downloaded routes are more of a problem (UK_Somewhere for example), and the only thing (short of editing them in surveyor) you can really do then is to downgrade the graphics performance of the sim via the Options setup.

Having said that, I rarely need to do it in practice, except when making videos with Fraps.
 
On your uninstall/install procedures, I would run the defrag before installing Railwayz. It will run faster before you put all the Trainz data out there, and will hopefully make a big, open space for Trainz. Other than that, it sounds like you very much know what you're talking about.
 
then delete the assets.tdx file
Where is that file? In the local folder, or elsewhere?

On your uninstall/install procedures, I would run the defrag before installing Railwayz. It will run faster before you put all the Trainz data out there, and will hopefully make a big, open space for Trainz.
Excellent point. I'll do that.

Thank you, Patrick and Heaton, for the info on lagging - it was very helpful!

The ram you linked to is DDR2 ram. Do you know if that is what you already have in your computer?
According to the specs Dell gave me when I bought the computer, we have "1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 400MHz" - so it looks like we have a match, right? Thank you for that input - I know nothing about RAM yet and really wasn't sure what to look for.

Is there any sort of maintenance you perform regularly on Trainz to keep it running optimally? I've heard cache mentioned, but I'm not sure what it is exactly and how it affects/doesn't affect things. Sorry if this has been answered before - I have been reading through the forums as time permits, but haven't hit everything yet. And what exactly is a poly-count, and mesh?

Thanks again, everyone, you've been a big help.
 
I'm technical so you may need to clarify or ask for an explanation.

On the memory, you're buying Crucial so go to the Crucial web site

http://www.crucial.com/

and run their "Crucial System Scanner tool" it will detect what you have and what is the best type of memory for your system. www.newegg.com might be better for prices. Crucial is top quality and memory prices are much better than they have been but Kingston, Corsair, G.Skill are all worthy of consideration. Newegg also has a memory configuration guide by the way.

2.5 gigs would be the technically optimum, more works but 2 gigs should give you a reasonable improvement and is what most people probably run.

The video card is not the most powerful, there is a benchmark thread here
http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=17294&highlight=benchmark

where you can compare your existing system with others.

As far as I can see you have a
PCIe slot for the graphics card, with a P4 cpu at 3.0 I think tomshardware.com thinks a 3850 $159 is as fast as it can cope with but a 3870 512 mb is only $169 at newegg.com. I'd stay with ATI unless you don't mind reinstalling the operating system or finding some other way to remove all traces of the old driver. You'll probably need a new power supply.

There is another thread here that talks about performance.

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=23629

where the video card was replaced with a substantial increase in performance.

>
could that be because he put too much detail in, or is there something we can look at specifically to see why it might be lagging so terribly?

11 year olds probably may not have the optimum layout skills but then neither do many others, there are a fair number of things to balance to get a layout to perform well. Dropping in the more powerful video card would help balance out his selection skills.

In crude terms look for smaller .im files, items that have lod (look for the presence of a xyz.lm.txt file where xyz can be anything. Items with a single texture file ie .tga or .bmp file are to be preferred, and keep the variety down, many different trees have a much larger machine impact than two or three repeated.

Also to improve performance run TC but copy in the .ja files that are missing from the TRS2006 folder.

Welcome to Trainz and have fun. There is a fair bit of history and geography floating around in Trainz, some of the early Locos etc.
Turks Castle 1892, is an early UK layout, there are a multitude of european other layouts as well as ones such as Darjeeling Himalayan and the MURCHISON layouts.

Cheerio John
 
And what exactly is a poly-count, and mesh?

Thanks again, everyone, you've been a big help.

The models are made of a mesh made of polygons, here are some of the meshes.

http://forums.auran.com/trainz/showthread.php?t=4412&highlight=GMAX

Then you apply a texture to the mesh. It's possible to use polygons to give detail or sometimes we use photo textures on a simpler mesh which lowers the polygon count. An example would be "Milwaukee 60 foot boxcar 4297", I have some other 86 foot box cars but they use a different technique for the number on the box car that is a slightly heavier machine load.

Steam locos have many small detailed parts and each puff of smoke or steam takes resources so in general diesels have a lower machine impact. Having said that cowboys steam locos are well worth upgrading the graphics card for.

The bigger the textures the more graphics memory you need but the better it looks.

Cheerio John
 
What a cool mum!
CheerZ! :wave:

I must agree totally !!
Too bad some other "mums" are not taking the time and effort to help guide their little "folks" into the world of trains sims and forum etiquette !

Good show munniman, I applaud you ---DLR
 
Hi there Muniman's mom. One other thing in terms of maintaining/managing your son's layout is to remember the importance of backing up. He needs to keep regular backups of his layout as he goes along, just in case of mishap (which, sadly, does happen in TRS).

Content Manager Plus allows you to save the layout to a .cdp file - bring up the layout in the 'my content' tab in CMP, right click, 6th option down, then save it to elsewhere on the hard drive.

If you ever need to re-install the layout: double click on the .cdp file (with CMP open) and it should install itself.

Hope that makes sense! :eek:
 
What a great Mom helping out her son like this. :)
What a cool mum!
Good onya mum.
I must agree totally !!
Too bad some other "mums" are not taking the time and effort to help guide their little "folks" into the world of trains sims and forum etiquette !

Good show munniman, I applaud you ---DLR
You sound like an intelligent, thoughtful mother.
You Go Mom!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You're killing me! I'm blushing. Thank you so much.

[though I did make sure to read your comments to Muniman so he'd fully appreciate my efforts on his behalf :D]


assets.tdx is located in the main TRS2006 folder; default: C:/Program Files/Auran/TRS2006/

peter
Ah. Excellent. Thank you, Peter.


there are a multitude of european other layouts
That's good news. European layouts are some of our favorites. Muniman loves tram & city routes (light rail in general)(hence his name, for the Muni in San Francisco) and we all love the European electric trains.

As far as I can see you have a PCIe slot for the graphics card, with a P4 cpu at 3.0 I think tomshardware.com thinks a 3850 $159 is as fast as it can cope with but a 3870 512 mb is only $169 at newegg.com.
Is this the one you're referring to? :

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161218

Is it just me, or does figuring out graphics cards (which will work with what, power supplies, what you really need versus power you'll never use, etc.) seem like one of those things you need a 3-month college course in? Yikes.

2.5 gigs would be the technically optimum, more works but 2 gigs should give you a reasonable improvement and is what most people probably run.
Cool. Turns out we have four slots and Dell shipped the computer using 256mb in each of the four, so I'll have to remove two to put the 1GB set of (2) cards in, netting 2.5 GB when all is said and done. I ordered the RAM from Crucial today - thank you for the link and info!

One other thing in terms of maintaining/managing your son's layout is to remember the importance of backing up. He needs to keep regular backups of his layout as he goes along, just in case of mishap (which, sadly, does happen in TRS).

Content Manager Plus allows you to save the layout to a .cdp file - bring up the layout in the 'my content' tab in CMP, right click, 6th option down, then save it to elsewhere on the hard drive.

If you ever need to re-install the layout: double click on the .cdp file (with CMP open) and it should install itself.

Hope that makes sense! :eek:
Yes, it does, and thank you, and I'll do that. I plan to do regular backups myself of his stuff and when he's older (read: a little more mature and hopefully better able to remember to do it) I'll show him how to. This is what we're working on now: "Hey Mom, come look!" - "Ooh, wow, that's great, I like what you did here and here - have you saved it?" - "No, not yet." - "WHAT! My god, child, have I taught you nothing! Save it this instant!!" (this is after he's been working on something for 45 minutes)

Thanks again, everyone. I'll be doing this uninstall/install this week, and putting the RAM in when it gets here - I'm sure I'll be back with more questions, especially because I've been reading about 3D graphics programs lately :)

I'll leave you with a couple of drawings my son drew wayyyyyy back when he was 7 years old:


2376564770_286a6ebeba.jpg


2376564338_ba265b3a56.jpg
 
What a great Mom helping out her son like this. :)

You will get good advice here from other Trainzers.

Cheers

AJ

Yeah a lot of moms I know need their 11 year olds to show them how to run the computer. :D

I think you will see an improvement with the added RAM. When I first installed TrainZ I had a lot of lag and stutters. I installed a second GB of RAM and now TrainZ is smooth as silk. Now if I can just get CMP to work.
 
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