Trainz "Resetting" for No Apparent Reason

N

NJCurmudgeon

New member
Every so often, I go to start up Trainz or Content Manager and get treated like it's the very first time I ever started the applications - I have to re-enter my serial number and re-enter all my preference settings. That's annoying, but not nearly as annoying as finding all my modified content names reverted back to the original names! For example, I have a fictitious passenger railroad called TriMetro Transit. I cloned and reskinned some locomotives and passenger cars with a TriMetro livery and changed the names to include "TriMetro" so I could easily find them in Surveyor. After these "reset" hiccups, the assets are still there (fortunately!) but I have to search in CM on my name as author to locate them all so I can rename them again. I also lose all the bookmarked content in the search filter pallet in Surveyor.

There is nothing that happens during the previous time I work with the program to make me think there will be anything amiss when I open it again later - no crashes or errors messages or anything out of the ordinary. Since I don't always get a lot of time to play with Trainz, it is really very frustrating to have to waste much of that limited time on just getting things back to where it was! This has happened three times in the last couple months.

Does anyone recognize this problem or have a solution to suggest?

Thanks!
 
NJCurmudgeon said:
Every so often, I go to start up Trainz or Content Manager and get treated like it's the very first time I ever started the applications - I have to re-enter my serial number and re-enter all my preference settings. That's annoying, but not nearly as annoying as finding all my modified content names reverted back to the original names! For example, I have a fictitious passenger railroad called TriMetro Transit. I cloned and reskinned some locomotives and passenger cars with a TriMetro livery and changed the names to include "TriMetro" so I could easily find them in Surveyor. After these "reset" hiccups, the assets are still there (fortunately!) but I have to search in CM on my name as author to locate them all so I can rename them again. I also lose all the bookmarked content in the search filter pallet in Surveyor.

There is nothing that happens during the previous time I work with the program to make me think there will be anything amiss when I open it again later - no crashes or errors messages or anything out of the ordinary. Since I don't always get a lot of time to play with Trainz, it is really very frustrating to have to waste much of that limited time on just getting things back to where it was! This has happened three times in the last couple months.

Does anyone recognize this problem or have a solution to suggest?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I've had that happen too and the resets are usually caused by a database crash that was severe enough to glitch things. Have you waited long enough after closing Trainz before resetting or turning off your computer? We recommend at least 5 minutes to ensure full shutdown, although the process is a lot shorter than that. This can definitely cause the database issues you are having.

Regarding the names... You need to edit the content by editing in Explorer. You then change the username tag in the config.txt file.

John
 
Thanks for the reply, John. I don't recall the other two times, but this last one I can definitely say that I closed out of Trainz and left the computer on all night so it could complete a general system back-up. (And I have done that many times before without any problems with Trainz, so I don't believe the two are related.) Trainz seemed to close normally - no locking up or crashing. Had there been some problem like that, I wouldn't have been so surprised (and irritated) when I opened it again to find the reset problem.

I will try the name change in the config file. I had been changing it in the asset detail window in CM and it worked, but obviously not "really" since it reverts after these events. If changing it in the config file makes it more permanent, that would make the resets less problematic. Thanks for the suggestion!
 
Now I have a whole new problem. I am getting warnings on the two locomotives I reskinned (as well as on the originals) about texture and shadow files being "uniform color." What does that mean? How can I fix this?

I swear I spend more time troubleshooting Trainz than actually playing with it... :n:
 
As I'm sure James Moody (Bloodnok) at N3V would say, warnings can be ignored if you are not the asset creator - same with those warnings. I would advise you leave those warnings alone, as the fix may cause other problems in how the asset appears in-game. FYI uniform colour means just that - a texture with only one colour.

Shane
 
Unfortunately I can't just ignore them because now the assets in question are no longer placeable in Surveyor! And that includes payware.
 
Rebooted and still the assets in question, both the originals and the reskins, are pink and unplaceable. When playing with this software becomes more aggravation than fun, perhaps it's time to just ditch Trainz altogether and go to Train Simulator..........
 
Well, I tracked the problem with one locomotive down to two issues: the texture warning is for a bogey dependency but I also found a pantograph dependency is faulty. So possibly I can't place the asset because of the faulty panto instead of the texture?

Since that's a payware loco, I have sent an email to the creator to see if they can suggest a fix. I don't know about the other locomotives yet. When Trainz re-initialized, it updated the patches and from what I have seen on this forum, that has caused a lot of grief for a lot of people, so all this aggravation may very well be due to the patch ups.

Geeze...I bought Trainz because I wanted to play train engineer, not computer engineer!
 
Okay...for anyone who cares, here's a quick update. I managed to fix at least that one payware locomotive by some trial and error.

In Content Manager, the warning read: Warning: The texture 'shadow/shadow.tga' is a uniform color. I tracked this down to the specific Bogey dependency. As Shane suggested above, I was able to ignore it because the real culprit turned out to be a faulty pantograph dependency. The error message for that was: Error: The tag 'image' in '0' points to a nonexistent file: 'thumbnail.jpg'.

So, I took a chance and just deleted the reference to the thumbnail in the config file. Lo and behold, the loco was again visible and placeable in Surveyor and drivable in Driver!

I have some other payware locos to deal with yet when I get some time, but until then, I do have one more question - it is possible to "fix" an obsolete build number? A locomotive I had been using fine before the patch update is no longer working.

Thanks.
 
It is possible (by changing the trainz-build number) , but proceed with caution, as higher trainz-builds can introduce new errors and warnings. In addition to this, trainz-build 2.9 and above require mesh changes for some assets, as well as changes for auto-numbering if the asset uses this.

Shane
 
Okay, I changed the version from 2.7 to 2.9 but it comes up as faulty and I get the following message Error: Tag 'asset-filename' in the container 'traincar' is obsolete. Is there a way of "fixing" that?

Also, there is a bogie that seems to be causing problems - I don't know if it's what's causing the above error since it is a dependency. But the error I get reads: Error: Tag 'asset-filename' in the container 'bogey' is obsolete.

The asset-filename in the config reads asset-filename "AGV bogie beta"

I assume it has something to do with the syntax of the name?

Thanks
 
Last edited:
"change the offending tag to fonts-path in the config file."

LOL! In English please! :o

I only know enough to get myself into trouble here...what does "fonts-path" mean? Is that what I type in its place?

Thanks Shane!
 
Well, I tried it and this is what I got: Error: The Tag 'fonts-path' is not permitted within a container of type 'bogey'.


Any other suggestions? Thanks!!
 
Looks like one of the few tags it doesn't support. If there is already a username tag in the asset, take out the whole fonts-path tag including the part in the " marks.

If the username tag does not exist though, the fonts-path part can be changed to username.

Shane
 
Okay, I changed the username tag and it seems to have worked for the bogie. But I am still getting the following for the loco itself: Error: Tag 'asset-filename' in the container 'traincar' is obsolete.

I see "traincar" as kind and then further down a asset-filename. Since this is talking about something different, can I swap out for fonts-path? And if so, which one?

Many thanks Shane!
 
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