Strange Surveyor anomaly

[HiBaller]

In the latest turn of events, I seem to have lost the capability to produce cars on a route. In surveyor, there are cars all over the place, running red lights, passing one another, and generally running amok. However, when I go to Driver the cars are completely absent. Nada. Niente. No carz.

I changed to a region in KNEW had cars running, and still nothing on this route. The route I took the region from has cars running, but nowhere near the amount it normally has. What on earth would stop cars from running even though they are all over the place in Surveyor?

Under Surveyor, when editing the Route, cars are 'Enabled'. I can click to Disabled and they disappear, Enabled, they come right back.

(TS2012/SP1/HFwhatever)

Bill

 

[JCitron]

This sounds like something has become corrupted. You might want to bite the bullet and run a QDR and see if that helps.

John

 

[HiBaller]

I've made a little progress. I changed roads, but in the process, the cars in Surveyor disappeared. Then, just as I added a useless vertex in the road, they started again. Just for the heck of it, I plopped another vertex into the road and they disappeared. It was a sort of compulsion to see what was happening so I ended up with 10 vertexes in a row, and each one of them stopped or started cars., In Driver, there were no cars, but I hit the "Windows" key (which minimized Trainz) and when I brought Trainz back, I had cars. Once again, each time I went into and out of Trainz, the cars alternated between visible and none.

This is really strange behavior. I'll try a QDR this evening because they take around 4 hours to complete. Best to do that overnight. No idea why it's called "quick".

Bill

 

[ffccnn]

I've made a little progress. I changed roads, but in the process, the cars in Surveyor disappeared. Then, just as I added a useless vertex in the road, they started again. Just for the heck of it, I plopped another vertex into the road and they disappeared. It was a sort of compulsion to see what was happening so I ended up with 10 vertexes in a row, and each one of them stopped or started cars., In Driver, there were no cars, but I hit the "Windows" key (which minimized Trainz) and when I brought Trainz back, I had cars. Once again, each time I went into and out of Trainz, the cars alternated between visible and none.

This is really strange behavior. I'll try a QDR this evening because they take around 4 hours to complete. Best to do that overnight. No idea why it's called "quick".

Bill

I am having also the same issue with no cars in Driver mode as I pointed out here. So far no solution yet.
As per the database repair, there are two of them, extended and quick, the extended is the one I choose when I go out, it takes a long time. Quick is not so long. Please let us know if you ever find a solution to the car-less driver mode.

 

[HiBaller]

I think there is something that got broken with one of the Hot Fixes or possibly as far back as SP1. Somehow, the car/nocar has become a toggle within a given Surveyor/Driver session. When I originally installed TS2012, I used a non-standard location off my Drive C root called "\Installs". I use that for everything instead of letting it default to Program Files (this is a 32-bit system). I am the Administrator, and I always turn off UAC, but this just makes the creation of directories much easier without the hassle of dealing with privileges.

I took my time, but I re-registered each and every DLL in the \bin directory. Now, I can usually count on cars appearing at least 80 or 90 percent of the time. It isn't back to 100%, but much better than starting a route and finding out three minutes later after it finally loads that you haven't got cars. It also seems to be connected with specific roads within the game. I haven't narrowed that down yet, but I imagine I will if I get ticked off enough to really dig into why this is happening. I might even dash of a note to the "help" desk and see what they say.

Bill

 

[JCitron]

I wouldn't doubt that a hot fix broke something. I noticed that things really haven't been all that well since SP1 myself including overall performance and the loading of assets when they come into view. If you registered your DLLs, they may have become unregistered when the HFs or SP1 was installed. I'm not sure how the registry or system tracks the DLL versions.

Running as administrator allows full access to the folders as well as to the loading and unloading of programs as well as the ability of programs to save and execute subfunctions. Changing your UAC may not do this, so you might want to modify your TS12 shortcut to run as Administrator on execute. Being the administrator on a 'modern' version of Windows, doesn't necessarily make you full administrator. This is more like a super-user account on a Unix or Linux system. The true administrator, which has program execute permission is the equivalent to a root login, and by you giving this administrator account permission to run programs at this level, your are using the equivalent of executing an su - in a terminal then executing the application.

The difference between a QDR and an EDR. The QDR only checks for valid content and does not touch other parts of the database. The EDR does extensive checking and repairs. Both of these can take some time and I too usually run a QDR while I'm off doing something else. It's less painful than watching a progress bar.

John

 

[HiBaller]

I know about the differences between being an "administrator" and "The Administrator". You can turn on the Big Boss account using the command "net user administrator /active:yes" and then log off. The Logon screen will have a new icon marked Administrator that requires NO password (unless you set one up when you installed Windows). I use that account to install ANY software that is likely to be troublesome, or will need SU account privileges. As for UAC, I always turn that off because it is so very annoying. You turn the SU account back off with the same command, but use "no" instead of "yes".

The SU account comes in handy if I get a problematic computer to fix and can't log on normally. On boot, keep hitting the F8 key until you can get to the Safe Mode choice screen. Then choose "Command Mode with Prompt" and enter the above command. It is highly unlikely that the SU account has become corrupted so you can go in and fix things as SU. You can find out who the users are on the machine, create a new account, and even set/reset passwords for existing accounts. All of this is done before the OS even boots up.

I ran an EDR last night (took 6.5 hours) and this morning I see that nothing has really changed. Cars still toggle on and off depending on the whims of software.

Bill

 

[JCitron]

It's the software then and not surprisingly so.

It's good to know about the command prompt login. Thank you for that. I used it once and forgot about it. I used to live by the net commands when I administered an NT 4.0 network!

The F8 key sadly has gone away the way we've used it for decades. Windows 8.x and up use a different method for logging in, making this obsolete. Instead the safe mode menu is some stupid wizard screen which I found to be absolutely useless!

John

 

[HiBaller]

I only have one computer that is full Windows (7 Professional) and not dual-boot with Ubuntu/Xubuntu. The rest, including my 64-bit gaming machine, are dual-boot and if I do nothing at boot, they will come up in Linux. Once Windows 7 goes under, I will toss everything Windows and go strictly with Linux. This is one of the reasons I am so dismayed at N3V for not porting Trainz to Linux. They've ported it to everything else. Most modern, forward-thinking companies are creating a port to Linux just to hedge their bets. When Windows 8 came out, there was a huge upswing in Linux installations. It is hard to get a handle on how many because the whole enchilada is totally free. Thus no clear statistics on "sales".

NET commands are really powerful. I use them all the time to do arcane stuff.

Bill

 

[JCitron]

I only have one computer that is full Windows (7 Professional) and not dual-boot with Ubuntu/Xubuntu. The rest, including my 64-bit gaming machine, are dual-boot and if I do nothing at boot, they will come up in Linux. Once Windows 7 goes under, I will toss everything Windows and go strictly with Linux. This is one of the reasons I am so dismayed at N3V for not porting Trainz to Linux. They've ported it to everything else. Most modern, forward-thinking companies are creating a port to Linux just to hedge their bets. When Windows 8 came out, there was a huge upswing in Linux installations. It is hard to get a handle on how many because the whole enchilada is totally free. Thus no clear statistics on "sales".

NET commands are really powerful. I use them all the time to do arcane stuff.

Bill

At the moment I only have one computer running Windows 10 TP. This is really a great OS and too bad MS hadn't done this in the first place. I too wondered that about N3V myself. There's no reason why they couldn't port this over to Linux especially now that they have the Apple OSx version available. This I would think is a good hunk of the code already done since OSx is BSD if I'm not mistaken.

In the past I ran a Sun SPARC Ultra 10 as a file server to support my brother's business. I then became a Unix admin and really enjoyed Solaris 9, which was all the machine could handle physically due to its age. The robustness, reliability, and stability of this OS and hardware too is a real joy to work with. We never, ever, ever had an issue with the machine even with its age. I installed SAMBA for the Windows clients to connect and that required using a make file to compile the binaries and then a pkgadd to install them. Once I got the hang of untarring files, and the rest of the command line structure, it wasn't so bad. You have to remember I came from the CP/M, DOS, and VMS world prior so this was almost second nature once I got used to the syntax.

John

 

[HiBaller]

Been there, done that. I started back in 1963 when the Navy taught me programming and repair. Back then, there was no real distinction between building/repairing and programming them. When Heathkit came out with their H-8 (8080A) computer, they also sold the complete sources to their DOS, Assembler, Linker, Editor, and other auxiliary bits and pieces. I bought them, typed them into files, compiled them and created my own DOS, leaving out what I didn't like and adding things I liked. My best effort was aimed at hooking two Shugart 10-inch floppy drives to the computer to augment Heath's little 5.25 disk drives. It was wonderful! Since I had been a ham operator since I was 11, I was also able to build an interface between the computer and my 100WPM TTY and use it as a printer. Heath had one, but it was clunky and tended to break down from heat (not enough fins on the heat sinks, actually).

On the professional side, the navy sent me to Maynard, Mass. (I expect you've heard of it in passing ) where I attended a DEC school for PDP-11's and, later, VAX's. VMS was wonderful also, and I came back and trained around 40 other men (and 7 women) on how to deal with it. When I was about mid-career (the 10-year mark) the navy sent me to work with eggheads at NRL (Naval Research Lab) where I came into contact with Captain (later Admiral) Grace Hopper as we worked on a super-secret project using PDP-11/34's in parallel for FFT's in signal processing. I guess they were the forerunners of the equipment in use at NSA today. We used a language (NELIAC) that Ms. Hopper helped design.

But, enough of that. It seems that re-registering all the DLL's did help quite a bit. Way back in my brain, covered in cobwebs, I retrieved a memory of having transferred my unpatched version of TS2012 by simply copy/pasting it from another computer to my gaming computer. This can be done, but I suspect that over time and updates from both M$ and N3V, the DLL's kind of got fuzzy around the edges.

One of these days, I might feel adventurous enough to completely rebuild TS2012 from the ground up and then reload my routes to see if they behave themselves any better. But only if I have a spare week to do it in.

Bill

 

[HiBaller]

Follow up:

TS2012 seems to be behaving itself now. The cars appear when I want them to and go away if I explicitly toggle them off in 'Edit Environment'. Once in a while, it will mess up, but hitting the Windows key and returning back to Trainz will cure it.

Bill