Oh, what a long Auran week it t'was. Last weekend, I copies by local folder to a removable hard drive. Prophetic? Didn't think so at the time, but now....
Despite nothing odd happening to forewarn of this, Trainz (2006) would not run on Monday. Hit the "Start" button on the main menu, it would turn green and just sit there. Eventually, if I was patient or distracted enough, it would tell me the program was not responding. Well, no kidding! But I have had this happen before, but it cleared itself up on its own, and I figured this was what was happening again.
Tuesday comes and still won't run. If I clicked on "Manage Content", CMP would open but would immediately lock up. Warm reboots, cold reboots, nothing seemed to matter; it still froze.
Well, come Wednesday and it STILL wouldn't run, I knew I was hosed. I uninstalled the game and reinstalled it and off and running it went. I was delighted to see that all of the routes I had downloaded or created were still there. In fact, everything was still there, so it clearly didn't overwrite my local folder on the reinstall.
But when I added a new asset via CMP, I noticed a TON of assets under the Open For Edit tab. In fact, there were almost 1400 of them! So I selected all of them and hit Ctrl+M to commit them, then went to eat dinner, since I knew it would take a while.
When I eventually made my way back to my laptop, I saw every one of those assets failed to commit because they were missing their config.txt files! I tried to open one for edit in Explorer, but it would only open up My Documents, not the asset's folder.
Well, thankful that I had backed up my local folder, I attached the USB cable from the removable drive and began the long process of recopying the saved folder back into the Trainz folder. More than two hours later, I was happy (yet still dismayed) to find that this restoration dropped my missing config file assets from almost 1400 to an even 300.
Heavy sigh....I copied that screen and pasted it into Excel, so I would have a list of assets I would have to go back and download. It was NOT a task I was looking forward to!
And seven-plus hours later, I had MOST of the 300. There were some that couldn't be found. I started this search on my laptop, using DLS and CMP, but gave up quickly after four of the first eight were found on DLS but CMP couldn't find it. So I did it from work, downloading via FTP to a flash drive.
Now I went through all of this because I assumed it an asset was missing its config file, then it wouldn't work. But when I got home with a flash drive full of assets, I decided to check my route to verify that these assets were no longer there. The easiest to check was the sugar mill complex, of which five parts were allegedly missing those files. But the mill was intact. The vehicles were there; the signs were there. The buildings that I remembered as having to redownload were still there!
Needless to say, I was perplexed. Is the config file really not important? When Edit in Explorer wouldn't work, I just went to my local folder and opened one of the asset folders. Sure enough there was no config.txt file, but there WAS a config.chump file, Auran's way of laughing at me for all of the time I wasted, cuz I sure felt like a chump.
Sometimes I think it would be easier to build and run a REAL railroad!
Despite nothing odd happening to forewarn of this, Trainz (2006) would not run on Monday. Hit the "Start" button on the main menu, it would turn green and just sit there. Eventually, if I was patient or distracted enough, it would tell me the program was not responding. Well, no kidding! But I have had this happen before, but it cleared itself up on its own, and I figured this was what was happening again.
Tuesday comes and still won't run. If I clicked on "Manage Content", CMP would open but would immediately lock up. Warm reboots, cold reboots, nothing seemed to matter; it still froze.
Well, come Wednesday and it STILL wouldn't run, I knew I was hosed. I uninstalled the game and reinstalled it and off and running it went. I was delighted to see that all of the routes I had downloaded or created were still there. In fact, everything was still there, so it clearly didn't overwrite my local folder on the reinstall.
But when I added a new asset via CMP, I noticed a TON of assets under the Open For Edit tab. In fact, there were almost 1400 of them! So I selected all of them and hit Ctrl+M to commit them, then went to eat dinner, since I knew it would take a while.
When I eventually made my way back to my laptop, I saw every one of those assets failed to commit because they were missing their config.txt files! I tried to open one for edit in Explorer, but it would only open up My Documents, not the asset's folder.
Well, thankful that I had backed up my local folder, I attached the USB cable from the removable drive and began the long process of recopying the saved folder back into the Trainz folder. More than two hours later, I was happy (yet still dismayed) to find that this restoration dropped my missing config file assets from almost 1400 to an even 300.
Heavy sigh....I copied that screen and pasted it into Excel, so I would have a list of assets I would have to go back and download. It was NOT a task I was looking forward to!
And seven-plus hours later, I had MOST of the 300. There were some that couldn't be found. I started this search on my laptop, using DLS and CMP, but gave up quickly after four of the first eight were found on DLS but CMP couldn't find it. So I did it from work, downloading via FTP to a flash drive.
Now I went through all of this because I assumed it an asset was missing its config file, then it wouldn't work. But when I got home with a flash drive full of assets, I decided to check my route to verify that these assets were no longer there. The easiest to check was the sugar mill complex, of which five parts were allegedly missing those files. But the mill was intact. The vehicles were there; the signs were there. The buildings that I remembered as having to redownload were still there!
Needless to say, I was perplexed. Is the config file really not important? When Edit in Explorer wouldn't work, I just went to my local folder and opened one of the asset folders. Sure enough there was no config.txt file, but there WAS a config.chump file, Auran's way of laughing at me for all of the time I wasted, cuz I sure felt like a chump.
Sometimes I think it would be easier to build and run a REAL railroad!
) it happens again, I won't have to search the forums.