The problem is back and I may have to admit defeat

[rjhowie]

I am having really serious problems with my build of the NIR now. This all started when I moved up from Vista to 7 or a coincidence?? I discovered that all my bridges where roads went under the track have all been flattened - nearly 3 dozen. Those bridges over the tracks are fine. Roads in the surrounding areas have also been effected, housing, towns, general scenery. Most of the 300 boards so far have been painted but the paint had gone. In Belfast I have a River Lagan that went and the sides of the river re heights altered to. Streets at a different level and so on. So I started the slow job of repainting starting with the Bangor Line then fixing the 10 bridges on that line, levels that were cock-eyed, houses, etc. When I went back into this first route what did I discover yet again it has all went cock-eyed as it was before. So I have now went through this massive rebuilding and painting for a third time and yep yet again when I go back to Trainz it has reversed back to the catastrophe level again time after time

Now I am getting really cheesed off changing the heights of Belfast city, and all the rivers, streams, canal, etc. Every time I do this long drawn out process and save it then go back the next night it is almost as if I have done nothing to fix anything. This is the third damn time I have done this drawn out rescue and getting nowhere. It means I just cannot go on building the whole of the NIR network if each time I am going to do ground hog day every time I log in to it. I save everything in short spells and looks okay until the next time I am in. The route is going nowhere fast and although i have done so much I cannot keep redoing all the paint and the heights and sort out effects on stations, surrounds, etc.

I have put a damn lot of effort into this to have something modern from across the sea but I am now beginning to feel it is going to be wasted. It just refuses to let me go on building because I have to go groaning into this repeat mode. Thought things would be fine but they are not.

 

[Euphod]

That has to be maddeningly frustrating, you have my sympathies. It's not normal for a new OS to have such an effect, is it?

 

[lewisner]

I had this problem frequently with TRS2006 although in my case it completely flattened and deleted texture from all boards except the first and last ones I constructed. The reason I was told at the time was that it was caused by overuse of the "Undo" button and/or shutting your PC down by using the Power button. It never happened in TC3 or TRS2009.

 

[clam1952]

I am having really serious problems with my build of the NIR now. This all started when I moved up from Vista to 7 or a coincidence?? I discovered that all my bridges where roads went under the track have all been flattened - nearly 3 dozen. Those bridges over the tracks are fine. Roads in the surrounding areas have also been effected, housing, towns, general scenery. Most of the 300 boards so far have been painted but the paint had gone. In Belfast I have a River Lagan that went and the sides of the river re heights altered to. Streets at a different level and so on. So I started the slow job of repainting starting with the Bangor Line then fixing the 10 bridges on that line, levels that were cock-eyed, houses, etc. When I went back into this first route what did I discover yet again it has all went cock-eyed as it was before. So I have now went through this massive rebuilding and painting for a third time and yep yet again when I go back to Trainz it has reversed back to the catastrophe level again time after time

Now I am getting really cheesed off changing the heights of Belfast city, and all the rivers, streams, canal, etc. Every time I do this long drawn out process and save it then go back the next night it is almost as if I have done nothing to fix anything. This is the third damn time I have done this drawn out rescue and getting nowhere. It means I just cannot go on building the whole of the NIR network if each time I am going to do ground hog day every time I log in to it. I save everything in short spells and looks okay until the next time I am in. The route is going nowhere fast and although i have done so much I cannot keep redoing all the paint and the heights and sort out effects on stations, surrounds, etc.

I have put a damn lot of effort into this to have something modern from across the sea but I am now beginning to feel it is going to be wasted. It just refuses to let me go on building because I have to go groaning into this repeat mode. Thought things would be fine but they are not.

If an EDR doesn't fix these problems, try cloning the route, that's clone in CM, not save as, that may sort it out, does here when anything odd happens.

 

[stagecoach]

Have you saved the route as a CDP and found out if anyone else might get the same problem. Might be a glitch that needs an extended database repair.

 

[Vern]

That is just awful, the thought of all those months of work possibly lost (one reason I no longer build long routes or spend months on one project).

Now I'm racking my brains where I heard about this problem before, wasn't there an issue with S&C 2009 when installed on certain machines at some locations where there should have been bridges the road was laid flat across the track? It's possible the discussion about that was on UK Trainz which unfortunately is now lost to us.

The only other thought is a memory issue. Also, as you may recall my Mallaig route built in TRS2006 suffered from vanished textures which was after I used a third party utility to swap them around. In that case, you could see the swirling of the baseboard grid but the colours were missing.

Anyhow hope you can sort it out, might be worth reverting to an earlier backup to check if the fault persists.

 

[pcas1986]

Don't like the sound of this. I've just spent the last 3 days backing up and re-installing Windows 7 onto faster hard disks including an SSD for the O/S disk. I'm tempted to put Trainz on that disk as well but the disk isn't large at 120GB. SSDs are expensive!

Some questions - at least one has been asked before:

Did you back up everything? I usually have at least a couple of backup CDPs of my development routes. I also kept the old hard disk with Trainz still installed. I'm paranoid about this but routes are a lot of time and work.

Is your re-installation of Trainz at the same level as that when you last saved your route? Loading a route created at a newer level might be a problem. Though, on thinking about that, I guess that problem would be common for CDPs downloaded from the Download Station.


I've gone through several variations of Trainz and O/S's with my Island Route (not uploaded yet) without seeing problems like yours. Though my route doesn't seem to be as big as yours. i.e I've never counted the baseboards.

I intend reloading Trainz tomorrow (1st Jan or after the hangover goes ). I've only just reloaded Win7 and some programs.

Good Luck

Paul

 

[rjhowie]

I always back up - fact I do two copies on 2 separate portable HD's. At one point when I had finished working on it it told me it couldn't save it in that name so I had to do it in a completely different name and of course do copies of that. I have now done the route morphed into it's 3rd re-incarnation. Being the third time i have had to re-height Belfast the river, streets, and beyond other rivers, ditches, underpasses, under bridges, whole villages and move things never mind all the repainting this is really very frustrating. What is an added puzzle is that out of curiosity I went into my city tramway build and can paint away without hiccuping redraws or delays in the paint appearing. The Belfast-Bangor Line is 12 miles and you can imagine how I have felt having to sort out all the scenery and bridges, water, etc over and over again. Being a commuter route it is well housed adding to my frustration. The Belfast-Border Line is a 50 minute drive and that I haven't even touched yet as far as fixing is concerned. With 2 dozen felled bridges and scenery effected and all that mileage with bare fields for such a distance is awful. At least 3 other started routes are just bare bones so a tiny comfort.

I don't live in Ulster I am in Scotland and have taken the effort to go over there twice now and stay in a hotel to do train recce so you can guess the effort and cost I am putting in to try and provide something from across the Irish Sea. Even managed to get hold of a jotter style book that gave me linear plans of the system and travelled the complete system. I am going to see if the re-doing in this third name is being kept or reverting. If it holds then even with the redrawing nightmare each time I paint or do the least wee thing I would persevere. Running a test train sees part of the route so bad at redrawing that the blue nothing appears before adjusting. Spent hours today getting things back yet again so will wait until Saturday night and go in and see what happens. Obviously I don't want to throw in the towel after all my hard work two jaunts across the sea and so on. Must say I was happy moving up from 06 to 09 taking my stuff with me and the upgrade to Windows 7 was fine but this business has knocked my motivation a wee bit. Now for a short break before I hold my breath and go back into it to see if the disaster repeats itself a fourth time.

 

[rjhowie]

Just noticed on another thread someone having an appearance problem with items being seen through and a comment on the graphics card. Wondering if that might be something that is effecting me? The built-in stuff on TRS09 works fine and the giant tramway I built is generally okay it is just this latest project on the railways of N. Ireland that is a headache. Maybe I am stretching the card?? It is holding me back tremendously this problem.

 

[pcas1986]

On re-reading your original post it seems that your changes/fixes are not being saved.

Have you tried a test route with a couple of bridges and roads to see if the same problem occurs?

Can you reload an earlier save of your NIR route and, if so, does it have the same problem?

Re the video issue. You could try swapping DirectX to OpenGL to see if that makes any difference. Or try an updated driver. I've occasionally had troubles with using OpenGL but it working fine now.

Paul

 

[Vern]

It does sound like a memory issue, either that or permissions on the folders. I may be teaching granny to suck eggs here, but it's worth checking the Auran folders aren't in read only status and "write" is enabled for named users.

 

[Scottish]

I dont want to jump in on this thread, especially since those contributing to it are experienced people, but if you have recently patched 2009 with SP4 I am convinced there is a problem with the Save command in Surveyor sometimes not saving changes or alternatively saving but changing map and session kuid numbers without permission. I therefore also suspected there was a problem with file permissions. Therefore using Windows XP folder permissions, I have changed from the 'read only' default setting for the Local folder but it keeps returning to 'read only', which I suspect is causing a lot of problems which have been the subject of a number of recent posts by me.

I am sorry if this is not relevant to your problem but I noticed Vern's comment about file permissions and thought I would mention this.

Scottish

 

[JCitron]

Bobby,

Are you running the program as an Administrator?

Right-click on the shortcut.
Choose Run as Adminsitrator

and see if that works.

If it does fix your problem, right-click again choose properties this time.
Change to the Compatibility tab and check Run as Administrator to make the procedure permenant.

In general I always install and run programs such as Trainz as an Administrator. This has solved many weird issues.

If saves are taking an undue long time, check your disk space. This can affect the performance and saving of large routes, or one with lots of content.

A good disk clean-up and defragment will also go a long way. I have found that a very fragmented drive is very detrimental to the performance of Trainz because the program has to constantly read in content even when in driver.

John

 

[rjhowie]

Apologies all for delay in replying - intermittent health probs.

Both Direct X and OpenGL been switched to see if any difference. In all the machiniations I have had something does come to mind that at one point I did get a message up about not being able to do anything with read only files so maybe knowing how to get into that in practice may be a help. When the route was in TRS06 there was no problem at all about saving. In TRS09 where it is now it did indicate that it couldn't save in the name "Northern Ireland Railways". Think was at the time of the read only query.

On the matter of Administrator when I loaded Trainz after I had upgraded to Windows 7 there was again from memory a problem and I had to set it for compatibility is that the same as "administrator" or am I confusing myself? My tramway runs fine in comparison and no zilches at all unlike this project which makes the whole thing odder. It is now saved under it's third morph "NIR" and has seemed to save okay as the bridges, rivers, over the road bridges have remained intact so far. However the fixing is terribly slow and annoying tortoise like. Sometimes I can get paint in right away and other times I have to wait after a delay and it will appear. Having to wait for that and see how it is increases the delay. Each time I work on altering a height, bridge, roads, etc the thing is very obviously redrawing the whole thing and more often than not I get spells where sky blue nothings happen at times apart from the splines. There I have to zoom back and forwards a couple of times to see how I am doing. Obviously this is damn time consuming. You can imagine the groan this is as it is painfully slow trying to do corrections and there are scores and scores of them as I indicate.The pc indicates 336GB free of 447GB.

Having went over the 12 mile Bangor Line and Belfast City/subrubs for the 3rd correction, I am now very, slowly (no choice) crawling down the Border line which is about 70 miles with 23 bridges, fields, and heights to correct. The other lines are not very far worked on so they aren't a prob yet.

 

[pcas1986]

You said your pc had 337gb free of 447gb. That sounds like hard disk space to me. How much RAM do you have?

With TS2010 running on Win 7 plus Internet Explorer and other background stuff, Task Manager says I am using 2.57GB of memory. Watching Trainz in Task Manager, it's ram usage varies significantly and it sounds like your pc is swapping ram out to disk. That would definitely make Trainz run slow.

Paul

 

[rjhowie]

4 Gigs of RAM
Intel (R) Core (TM) 2 Duo CPU E8500 @3.16GHz 3.17GHz
The graphics card is Radeon HD4600 series

Trainz actually runs fine in general. The built-in routes are smooth and I have downloaded Along UTA lines and that runs okay as does my own tramway. Even with this problem a test train itself runs smoothly on the track in my NIR project it is the redrawing as it goes. Also the nightmare of fixing miles of scenery, hundreds of boards with again redrawing delays as well I can repaint only slowly and a very long and drawn out process trying to fix the scenery disasters and thus stopping me building the rest of the Ulster railways.

 

[JCitron]

4 Gigs of RAM
Intel (R) Core (TM) 2 Duo CPU E8500 @3.16GHz 3.17GHz
The graphics card is Radeon HD4600 series

Trainz actually runs fine in general. The built-in routes are smooth and I have downloaded Along UTA lines and that runs okay as does my own tramway. Even with this problem a test train itself runs smoothly on the track in my NIR project it is the redrawing as it goes. Also the nightmare of fixing miles of scenery, hundreds of boards with again redrawing delays as well I can repaint only slowly and a very long and drawn out process trying to fix the scenery disasters and thus stopping me building the rest of the Ulster railways.

Have you tried running Trainz at a different video resolution?

Lower resolution like 1024 x 768 instead of 1600 x 1280

Have you unchecked texture compression?

These things can affect your machine's performance in general when doing intense graphics work.

Your CPU, memory, and motherboard should handle the task fine.

Are you using Windows 7 64-bit?

John

 

[leader2302]

It's the Undo button

Windows 7 64 bit will not corrupt your route.

Your route was corrupted when you used the "undo" button. On a route as large as yours any use of the undo button in surveyor will cause the damage and symptoms you describe. Once your route is corrupted, Trainz will not let you save it under the same name. Your difficulties have nothing to with your hardware or Windows 7.

My suspicion is that when you tried to fix the route you used the undo button again as you were working in surveyor, corrupting the route over and over each time you tried to fix it.

The only solution is to never use the undo button again. What I do when I make a mistake when I am building my route is to close the route and reload the route from the route menu and continue work. It only takes a second longer then using the undo button and you will get used to doing it after every mistake.

I also keep three different backups, one on a different hard drive and two additional backups on CD's. This saved six years of work on my route more than once!

Also, many serious route builders still create their routes in TRS2004 because it continues to be the most stable version of Trainz. It is a bit dated, but it does not crash like latter versions. Many route builders finish and test their routes in TRS2004 then convert them into TRS2009 and TRS2010 versions.

 

[pcas1986]

Seems to me that you have a couple of problems:

1. Your route has been corrupted at some point.
2. Repainting and repairing in Surveyor is slow. Perhaps due to the size of the route.

I've seen some bizarre behaviour in various programs using undo buttons so it wouldn't surprise me if usage in Surveyor is a problem. Don't think I've ever used it in Surveyor but it gets a lot of use in Blender!

Can I suggest you 'break' your NIR route into smaller chunks and repair those chunks individually. Then merge the repaired chunks back together. The smaller route chunks should repaint faster.

Obviously you need to plan the dismantling process carefully and back up before you start and during the process so you can recover if necessary.

Paul

 

[narrowgauge]

their routes in TRS2004 because it continues to be the most stable version of Trainz

It may have been the most stable when compared with anything up to and including TS2009, but TS2010 is now just as stable as TRS2004 with the advantage of an undo system that works every time. I base this on my experience with TS2010 since it was first released.

It also has CM3.3 that has none of the horrors of the earlier versions.

Peter