System hangs when painting ground

S

sniper297

Coconut God
Did a search for this, nothing relevant. When I'm painting textures on the ground in TRS2010 build 42203, the screen often freezes. Not related to any specific texture, almost seems like it don't want me painting more than a few hundred yards at a time. Sys specs;

OS: Windows XP Media (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2 (2600.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)
Model: Dell DXP051
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 2046MB RAM
DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

Video: Radeon X550 256.0 MB
ATI Driver Version: 6.14.0010.6925

Sound: SigmaTel Audio
sthda.sys Driver Version: 5.10.4823.0000 (English)

Hard Drive: Maxtor 6L160M0 147.8 GB

Nothing else does it, laying track, sculpting terrain, placing trees and buildings don't give me any grief but painting the ground always does. Usually requires a hardware reboot, sometimes causes corrupted files. This latest after I rebooted and tried to launch trains got a "Unable to acquire write access to UserData folder" message. Got lucky on that one, looked in the UserData folder to see if it got deleted or something, there was a zero bytes .tmp file in there. Deleted that file (I know from experience most programs choke on zero bytes files, and .tmp is a temp file extension) and it ran again after that. Most often nothing is damaged or corrupted, but a couple of times I've had to do a quick database repair before the game would launch. Anyone else get this, or am I The Chosen One? :'(
 
Sniper,

Just lost a route that I was 2 months and 22 days in. Whole file, corrupted, due to an error in some unknown file. Happened to me to, I guess we just have some bad luck?

Take care,

Ryan:wave:
 
Yikes!

Well, I'm just tinkering and learning how at the moment, but even so at least once per day I go into content manager, select the route, save to CDP with today's date for a filename. Old habits, I've worked with game editors that were even buggier than the MSTS route editor before. Backup backup backup, always make backup copies. :cool:

Odd thing here, it's the paintbrush tool itself apparently - I've been trying the rectangular selection flood fill, and covered some very large areas without it freezing.
 
Did something get snarfed?

I hate to say it, but try reinstalling the program and see if that works. Backup your Userdata folder (SP2) before doing this so you don't lose your stuff.

John
 
That happened to me with the old trainz from 2004, too

All the German, swiss, and Australian items and patterns were corrupted, and the game crashed if i tried to use it. After a reinstall on a different computer everything went smooth though
 
Hee-hee, thanks, but reinstalling is the last resort, I'd have to go thru all that EDR nonsense again. In any case none of the texures look corrupted, and they all check out in content manager with zero warnings. Odd thing I just did it again (naturally when I'm TRYING to duplicate the problem it takes a lot of time before it happens), noticed that everything except the cursor arrow is frozen - that responds to mouse movements normally, so it's not a total system lock. At first I opened a one tile route, sprayed all over, then tried changing to different textures and spraying those all over, no freeze. Changed to a different route where I had gotten it before, sprayed hither, changed textures, sprayed yon. Okay, so if this is a problem where it's not releasing memory, try adding a couple buildings, lay a couple sections of track, NOW go back and spray paint again QUANG! there's the lockup. Possibly why it's not well documented, maybe most route developers spray the ground in one session and don't fool with anything else while they're doing it.
 
Okay, that ain't it either - after setting the filter in CM to Category - Textures (Environment), Location - Local, Built in - False, I found I had about a dozen non default textures. Saved those to a CDP and deleted them, created a new one tile route in surveyor, proceeded to paint the ground and it locked up. This has to be something in the paintbrush tool itself.
 
Well the autosave does have that effect, but I have the same problem with 2010 and I think it is related to the increased draw distances on highly detailed routes (like I like to do). When you are texturing you are usually moving the camera around at the same time and I think the processor gets overwhelmed with trying to both calculate the new longer viewpoint and the new texture at the same time. I usually don't have the problem unless I am moving the viewpoint, but of course I do that a lot. It can become a real nuisance at times.
 
Thanks Mike, but the autosave was set for the default 30 minutes, and I did try disabling it completely. This is happening after one to five minutes of painting on a single tile empty of anything else. Nothing but default built in textures installed, no errors or warnings on any of those. Not the anti virus or firewall, it still does it with those disabled, nothing at all running in the background - screensavers, power schemes, and all automatic updates are off.
 
It may be completely irrelevant, but it was after starting to paint terrain textures (as opposed to the ones Transdem places at the start) in TS2010 that my Surveyor slowed to a single FPS crawl. Even after upgrading the Nvidia drivers, trying a route with all 10m grid rather than 5m, reducing the draw distance, comp/non-comp mode and trying Direct X rather than Open GL the problem persisted, forcing a retreat to TS2009 or even TRS2006.

All I can assume is that certain tasks Surveyor needs to perform do not agree with certain hardware combinations.

Re autosave this certainly used to crash TS2009 after three or four times so I disabled it and, although it didn't solve the FPS issue, was the first thing I switched off in '10.
 
Yeah, I got that off now. Something specific to my system tho, because I just had my son try it on his computer, painting ground all over creation and switching back and forth between other tools and the paintbrush for 20 minutes, no problem there. Hopefully a reinstall will fix mine since I don't have the buckazoids for a new video card at this point.

OS: Windows XP Media (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2

(2600.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)
Model: Dell DXP051
CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 2046MB RAM
DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)

Video: NVIDIA GeForce 8400 GS 512 MB
NVIDIA Driver Version: 6.14.0012.5721 (English)

Sound: SigmaTel Audio
sthda.sys Driver Version: 5.10.4823.0000 (English)

Hard Drive: Maxtor 6L160M0 147.8 GB

That's my son's system, note that it's identical to mine except he has a better video card. :'(
 
Are we having fun yet?

Okay, since I knew from the other adventure that uninstalling and reinstalling takes a long time, I decided to update my video driver before trying a reinstall. That's another tedious task, hunt up the original executable to make sure I can reinstall the old driver if the new one don't work, download the new driver and have it ready, uninstall the existing driver, install the new driver. As long as I'm going thru all that, why not have the latest Nvidia driver ready and use that instead, see if that 8500GT that I repaired the fan on actually works or not? No time like the present, I never got around to testing it after fixing the fan, so here goes.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_system_tools_6.06.html

Downloaded the tools from there so I can monitor the GPU temps, installed the card, uninstalled ATI drivers, installed Nvidia drivers, away we go. First thing is to try Oblivion to see if the card works, I haven't been able to run Oblivion with HDR lighting in almost a year. :cool: Okay, back to Trainz 2010, paint paint paint freeze. :'(

Alright already, uninstall TRS2010, reinstall TRS2010. Later (MUCH later!) the game is ready, before reinstalling my content I tried painting in one of the default routes. Paint paint paint freeze, this time after waiting a couple minutes I got a popup;

63940562.jpg


Dunno what that means, but it might be a clue to this fiasco. Going to bed now, 3:30 AM here in God's Country (Wisconsin), gonna start the extended database repair before I hit the rack and see what it looks like in the morning. :sleep:
 
Yikes. I have had the same problem as well. Except for me it is more changing the terrain than paint and it doesnt happen all the time. All I have to do to fix it is exit game and come back or even restart my computer and it doesnt do it. Im not asking for help, just saying you not alone. I blame my old computer (It was brand new when MSTS came out!:hehe: ).


Guessing by it, I would say it would be a format error on the part of trains or format reading error on part of your Computer. My $.2
 
Yeah, hard to pin it on the system, after installing that 8500GT it's even closer to identical to my son's system, and he don't have the problem. I went ahead and submitted a ticket to the help desk, see what they say. Has the help desk always been this helpful?

45342529.jpg


Methinks someone needs to tune up that "wizard". :hehe:
 
In the meantime, it might be worth checking what operating system (including service pack) your son's system is running. (If it is XP, definetely check what service pack it is running)

Shane
 
Same thing, these are two identical Dell XPS400 (DXDIAG reports as "DXP051"), only difference no is he has an 8400GS, I have an 8500GT. Both running the operating system that came with the computer, XP media edition SP2. DXDIAG reports it as XP Pro, but from what I understand there are some differences in XP Media Edition, dunno what they are. These are five years old, about three years ago I attempted to upgrade to SP3, and Windows Genuine Advantage said this ain't a genuine Windows OS.

(2600.xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158)

Three years ago this was a very common problem for anyone trying to install SP3 without an actual disk copy of Windows XP. I really really really really really really really really really really really really hate to go thru all the aggravation, but I suspect I'll have to take a month off and find out if there's been some kind of fix or workaround for SP3 on Dell OEM versions. I still wanna know exactly who "Windows Genuine Advantage" is advantageous to.
 
The answer to that is probably Microsoft - unfortunately, TS2010 does mention SP3 as the minimum XP service pack(see http://www.ts2010.com/) - as people always say, if a system is not up to the minimum requirements, expect trouble.

(The main differences between XP Pro and XP Media Edition is that XP Pro is designed for businesses, XP Media Edition is for home entertainment systems).

I am also interested in finding out why SP3 doesn't like your system - looks like I will have to do some research myself.

Shane
 
This might be a long shot, Sniper, but have you tried any system diagnostics such as a hard drive check, or memory test?

Hardware problems such as a bad spot on the hard drive, where the program happens to sit, can cause problems like this. Bad memory too, can cause weird .DLL errors. The error will indictate that some program bit is hosed, but in reality it's a DIMM that's bad. It happens to be that the program loads that module into a certain, hard-coded, memory location, so when the program goes to read the information, it's garbled and causes the program to crash.

John
 
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