Render dll failure solved. I think!

[JCitron]

This is a case where sometimes the simplest things can solve what appears to be an undaunting problem, so we give up and walk away.

Over the past few months, my big route, that I've worked on since the beginining of time it seems, wouldn't load properly. The route would crash immediately or sometimes last for a few hours in Surveyor with Render3d.dLL errrors. I tried the usual things such as look for bad content, and delete suspicious items - usually very old content that may have been corrupt. Besides, I had better replacements anyway because the newer content is so much better.

Anyway at first this happened with my very complicated session. The buildings would start to load, then the program would crash to a window and would need the three-finger-salute to quit! I deleted the session and attempted to create a new one. This worked at first, then the same thing started happening in Surveyor. It got to a point where I was going to give up, salvage anything if I could, and get on with a new route.

Well before I took out the virtual hacksaw to cut out parts for salvage, I decided to try a few things. I tried the delete missing assets thing in Surveyor. This helped once in a session, but that wasn't long lasting as soon as I overwrote the route, which by the way was giving me the read-only error.

I went as far as to try the latest and greatest, not necessarily always the greatest video driver for my 8800GTS. This didn't work, much to my chagrin.

So in a last ditch effort of try something for nothing, I thought since this is a display error, why not try default settings. Perhaps I have a video card problem that is causing the crashes, maybe the card can't handle the load. Well the good news is this worked! I was so happy, I was just about singing in the street! I couldn't believe it. It was that simple a fix.

After using the default settings, in driver mode, I upped the graphics details to the previous settings, and so far so good nothing has crashed in either Surveyor or Driver. This also solved the read-only error much to my amazement.

John

 

[leeferr]

Thanks for the information. That will be good to keep in the back of my mind.

 

[Bloodnok]

Well before I took out the virtual hacksaw to cut out parts for salvage, I decided to try a few things. I tried the delete missing assets thing in Surveyor. This helped once in a session, but that wasn't long lasting as soon as I overwrote the route, which by the way was giving me the read-only error.

The "Read only route files" error is actually a case of "generic failure, don't know what's wrong". In the case I have seen, when inspected with a debugger, it actually turned out to mean "Trainz has run out of memory address space" - i.e. trying to allocate memory for something (in this case, something to do with saving the map) failed.

Reducing the detail drawn on the screen (and thus the load on system memory) will help alleviate this problem, but if you keep adding detail to the route, it will come back. The only real solution is to keep the detail level of the route under control. Are there baseboards away from the track that you never see, that could be removed? Ditto scenery or splines that are too far away from the track to be seen can be usefully thinned out without affecting the appearance.

 

[JCitron]

The "Read only route files" error is actually a case of "generic failure, don't know what's wrong". In the case I have seen, when inspected with a debugger, it actually turned out to mean "Trainz has run out of memory address space" - i.e. trying to allocate memory for something (in this case, something to do with saving the map) failed.

Reducing the detail drawn on the screen (and thus the load on system memory) will help alleviate this problem, but if you keep adding detail to the route, it will come back. The only real solution is to keep the detail level of the route under control. Are there baseboards away from the track that you never see, that could be removed? Ditto scenery or splines that are too far away from the track to be seen can be usefully thinned out without affecting the appearance.

Thanks for the input, Blodnok. That's interesting from a programming point-of-view. Why didn't they just say that Trainz ran out of memory? That would make more sense I would think. This is like some other error messages I've seen from other programs that say "Error!" with no indication of what went wrong.

I reset my display back to the default then boosted the graphics up to my normal levels again. It's interesting to note that the error hasn't reoccurred again. This makes me wonder if something was corrupted in the display driver in the game.

I do have a few baseboards that are fillers, if you want to call them that, but for the most part I removed plenty of them after I realized that they weren't any use other than wasting resources. I did end up putting one back though because I rerouted one of my lines through it.

John