A new itch, but related to CM...

rivethed

New member
So on my return to TS a few weeks ago, I started collecting assets while I have an FCT.. User folder got huge real fast and I finally tired of waiting for TADD and friends to finish whatever they do for 20 minutes before I could enter cm or the sim proper. So I copied off my Userfolder, all 357 GB, to another drive. and installed ts clean, again. Is there a relatively easy (yes, I know this is trainz) way to surgically add assets i have already come to like and have corrected (in the case of faulty assets)? Or am I left picking through the wasteland that was my user folder?
 
If you reinstalled Trainz you have just the Built In assets and routes ... If you copy/paste the file you saved, and transplant it into your new Train installation, you will have all the old unwanted garbage back again.

Only the Trainz CM can read Trainz CM, there is really no other program, (asside from CDP Viewer, which does not have editing, or deletion capabilities.

If you downloaded the entire DLS ... You would have to wade chest deep in all the millions of assets in your CM. and delete them all 1 by 1.

The only other way is to choose all your favorite assets, and in CM make an archive, and choose "Add all Dependencies", and make it a "Save as CDP" file in your PC downloads.
 
Yea, exporting to CDP from the old copy and importing to the new one is the only way to do it surgically. But honestly, I have to ask what your computer stats are like and how many assets you have total on your old copy (On the search tab on the left go add "Installed - True" and let it run). I have over 100K assets and it doesn't take me 2 minutes to load CM or Trainz... Doubt it even takes 1....

Falcus
 
Cascade, would've been an option, if I had not already copied the folder to another drive, and started anew :S

Falcus.... after a clean install, with just ts12, murch and s&C, it had almost 30k. I will just have to "search" my copied folder for KUIDS that are missing. :(

Most of the previous bloat was due to missing KUID's. Soetime, in order to find one, you have to download a whole dependencies cdp from another site, and for 1 little KUID, you end up with 1000's.

Stats: i5 760 (Quad 2.8) on and Asus ROG mobo, 8GB Ripjaws with Heat Spreaders, striped Physical Primary platter pair @7200 as O/s and apps, solitary Physical platter @10,000 for storage and I run my Page File (12GB) of that disk (yes, it is faster), Both Logical drives are 1TB Each.GTX 760 (4GB) OC Running On a true 16x bus, and pushing out 1680*960 to my monitors natively. All powered by a certified 80+ Gold 850 W p/s. Windows (7pro 64) performance index (not that it matters) shows 7.3, 7.5, 7.9, 7.9, and 5.9 (the latter being my platter drive bottleneck). My "Valley" synthetic burn-in score was over 1200 (avg of 5 burn in runs) using fullscreen, native resolution, and 8x anti-aliasing (for a 2nd gen i5, it was good enough). System cache and temp folders are purged regularly, Minimal applications and services allowed to start without my interaction, Disks are fully defragged at least once every 2 weeks, with defragment only passes in between.

Let me grab the old user files stats as soon as It finishes pulling up the properties of that folder.
 
What assets are your favorites ?
Road Name ?
Era ?
Steam / diesel / electric ?

I tried to collect all the US and Canada assets, and my TRS2006 Local folder was well over 467 GB.

My Trainz program takes up 3/4 of my hard drive.
 
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My install is about 560GB and it doesn't take that long to load up in CM or in Trainz. Since these are platter drives, I recommend a good defrag of your drives. This can take some time if it hasn't been done in awhile but it does help with access time issues.

Also, we highly recommend turning off antivirus scanning and file indexing (system) from your Trainz install. This will definitely slow down things too as files are opened by the simulator and CM.

John
 
Cascade: Favorites: Hard to say just yet, Road Name: BNSF and all predecessors, UP and it's Predecessors, MEC pre Pan-Am, Era: 50's-present, Motive: Diesel and/or streamliners, .... Mostly Anything US as far as loc's and rolling stock.

Jcitron, in case you missed it:
System cache and temp folders are purged regularly, Minimal applications and services allowed to start without my interaction, Disks are fully defragged at least once every 2 weeks, with defragment only passes in between.
. And just so it is clear, windows Defrag is not a real tool, hehehhe. Defraggler is ok but I prefer using an app Written by J.K. Kessels, as it has some wonderful scripts to control the defrag.

I always disable file indexing on Windows machines.

Yes it baffles me a bit too, as I used to Triple Box (3 simultaneous Clients) Eve Online with supportive appd (Eve Rfinery, Evemon, TeamSpeak, Watch a movie, Surf the internet and run p2p 2 months ago (before I got back here on trainz) and never had any launch or running issues. And that was rocking my old gtx460 1GB OC :)


But back to the question, I guess I will just resort to searching through my copy for kuids to move back over as I find need to. Sadly, eventually my old user folder will need to be cleared off my HDD's sooner or later.
 
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Current User folder: 211268 files @ 37.4 GB
Old/Copied Folder: 1,882,810 Files @ 378 GB

:)

Thats how many Files. I mean how many assets. Theres only a rought total of ~350K assets in all of known trains. I've never encountered anyone thats known of more then ~365K (The DLS only has about 325K or so).
How to find out how many you have:
Open CM > Open Search Tab on left > Search for "Installed - True", and the read the little numbers in the lower right hand corner... This number makes a bigger difference then you'd imagine..... The way the DB conducts its internal structure means you can see variations in the total number of files all the time, where as knowing the # of assets seems to be a more stable indicator of likely DB Size and Resource usage.... Even for a million Files, I'll be surprised if you have more then 150K Assets, quite possibly less.

That said, I have an i5 3330 3.0GHZ, no Vid Card, and my install is on a 1TB Seagate External (Yea yea, I know, if it dies it dies), and as I said, it takes my computer less then a minute to load up.... I need a better idea of your install and what you're trying to do to even start to take an accurate guess as to why its so slow. But know that not Every little hiccup in the game is caused exclusively by DB Size....

Falcus
 
Cascade: Favorites: Hard to say just yet, Road Name: BNSF and all predecessors, UP and it's Predecessors, MEC pre Pan-Am, Era: 50's-present, Motive: Diesel and/or streamliners, .... Mostly Anything US as far as loc's and rolling stock.

Jcitron, in case you missed it: . And just so it is clear, windows Defrag is not a real tool, hehehhe. Defraggler is ok but I prefer using an app Written by J.K. Kessels, as it has some wonderful scripts to control the defrag.

I always disable file indexing on Windows machines.

Yes it baffles me a bit too, as I used to Triple Box (3 simultaneous Clients) Eve Online with supportive appd (Eve Rfinery, Evemon, TeamSpeak, Watch a movie, Surf the internet and run p2p 2 months ago (before I got back here on trainz) and never had any launch or running issues. And that was rocking my old gtx460 1GB OC :)


But back to the question, I guess I will just resort to searching through my copy for kuids to move back over as I find need to. Sadly, eventually my old user folder will need to be cleared off my HDD's sooner or later.

It sounds like you're doing the right thing since you work in the same industry I used to. :)

By defrag, I didn't necessarily mean the built-in "tool". I happen to use Diskeeper which does a really nice job. I just turn off the automatic defrag because it messes up the assets.tdx file for some reason. I discovered that the hard way... Defraggler I agree is okay, and I'll have to check out Kessels' tool and see how that works.

If you are having this kind of issue, there has to be something running in the background or accessing your disk at the same time.

Are any of these clients still running in the background or there are stubs running?
How full are your drives?

What are you using for an antivirus/malware program? Some are more aggressive than others and stomp on everything and cause awful performance issues for nothing?

John
 
Well ... US ... that limits us down to @ 786,645 assets.

Get on Free Skype, and we'll talk about how to acquire all your favorite assets, and how to whittle down your unwanted assets ... You can only drive just so many Trainz.

I once made a 56 mile long consist, with dozens of locos, it was spread out all up and down my route, up and over the Appalachian Front Range :cool: Mount Union to Johnstown
 
Jcitron, I am looking into the bottle neck at my drives. I might upgrade the Primary to Solid State, but ouch, that Price per GB is still way up. We have been using EVO 840 in lappy's at work for a year, and have performed well. On the other hand, the 'ol i5-760 is 4 years old now, so I am also contemplating a fresh build based on an i7-4770k. Want to wait until the new cores come out, to take advantage of the price drops, but may not have the patience to wait it out. funny enough, I came back to Trainz, to curb the cost of getting into woodworking, but with pending upgrades, I may exceed the woodwork budget limit I set aside.

Cascade, I am on m-f during the day while at work, if I do not respond, I am rebooting an SQL server cluster, installing a Wacom, or changing a light bulb. I do not log into Skype at home, unless I absolutely have to. :) We'll talk soon I am sure.

Now, off to pick through my backup for elusive KUID's I aknow I have already weeded out of the Net somewhere.
 
Jcitron, I am looking into the bottle neck at my drives. I might upgrade the Primary to Solid State, but ouch, that Price per GB is still way up. We have been using EVO 840 in lappy's at work for a year, and have performed well. On the other hand, the 'ol i5-760 is 4 years old now, so I am also contemplating a fresh build based on an i7-4770k. Want to wait until the new cores come out, to take advantage of the price drops, but may not have the patience to wait it out. funny enough, I came back to Trainz, to curb the cost of getting into woodworking, but with pending upgrades, I may exceed the woodwork budget limit I set aside.

Cascade, I am on m-f during the day while at work, if I do not respond, I am rebooting an SQL server cluster, installing a Wacom, or changing a light bulb. I do not log into Skype at home, unless I absolutely have to. :) We'll talk soon I am sure.

Now, off to pick through my backup for elusive KUID's I aknow I have already weeded out of the Net somewhere.

Interesting thoughts... My bro just upgraded from an ancient 1TB hd to the SSD. He only had less than 128GB of data anyway on his boot drive so for him it was a no brainer - he keeps his work on an old platter drive that he backs up quite often. He essentially replaced a 250GB boot drive with the same-sized SSD. I just went through a forced upgrade/update myself this weekend. I had video card troubles this past weekend and replaced my GTX680 with a GTX780Ti. Everything ran fine for about a day then I had some power supply issues - which I think may have been the issue all along, but it's one of those things that's difficult to tell because the symptoms were all video related... Anyway, after a nice fresh install, a new power supply and video card, I'm off and running for a few more years. I agree. This hobby can get quite expensive between the computer parts and the programs. It's not as bad as real modeling or woodworking, but it can be expensive...

I don't miss the technical support and am now out on permanent medical retirement. I did that for about 25 years, plus worked in MIS and as a hardware tech. At my last job, just before leaving, I supported nearly 700 people with everything from installing Telco-support software to mailbox issues. On any given day there were probably 5-10 malware infected machines and a host of other problems, not counting the 25-plus tickets per day I had to close. Geeze, I'm tired and stressed thinking about it.

John
 
yeah, it never ends 2000 users on 3 continents, more countries than I have phalanges, more o/s's and languages than one should ever have to support...
And on the Bright side, not more than few hours ago, I bit the bullet on a piecemeal system based on an i7 4970k (the 4Ghz badboy). Time for my Quadrennial upgrade anyhow. should be here in a couples days, assemble, install and then we'll see what kinda fuss CM throws at me. If it complains, lags, or otherwise makes me upset, I am sending it to the corner on a time out. bet your bottom quid, I will be chiming in with any TS related issues. But this particular threads origin, is moot and on the back burner for now.

Until next I itch again!
 
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yeah, it never ends 2000 users on 3 continents, more countries than I have phalanges, more o/s's and languages than one should ever have to support...
And on the Bright side, not more than few hours ago, I bit the bullet on a piecemeal system based on an i7 4970k (the 4Ghz badboy). Time for my Quadrennial upgrade anyhow. should be here in a couples days, assemble, install and then we'll see what kinda fuss CM throws at me. If it complains, lags, or otherwise makes me upset, I am sending it to the corner on a time out. bet your bottom quid, I will be chiming in with any TS related issues. But this particular threads origin, is moot and on the back burner for now.

Until next I itch again!

That's not bad, regarding user numbers. the nearly 700 was local and I still had field operations, remote sales, and other orgs I had to support. The total users was around the same if not more. In addition to support, I was also responsible for TELCO config, inventory and ordering, which was a whole ball of wax which I'll explain later. Due to QC issues, Lenovo lost nearly 400K from me on one order. I went with Dell instead. We had a choice of either Dell or Lenovo and we purchased direct. They installed a WIM and we loaded the files up ready for the user. This isn't bad in theory, however, if MyDesktop was down, we were hosed and that happened more than once and cost us time.

Good luck with your new machine. My slightly older, I7-3770 running with 32GB of RAM and my new 780Ti, runs pretty well. Even on my really busy route, I didn't get much jitter. CM runs fine with no issues. If you don't have one already, get a First Class Ticket. It really helps.

John
 
I do have a FCT, runs out late Oct. I think I am done gorging on assets though. Once I get re-setup and CM is relatively happy, I will probably spend another month trying to fix assets and errors. Organizational OCD, hehehe.
 
I do have a FCT, runs out late Oct. I think I am done gorging on assets though. Once I get re-setup and CM is relatively happy, I will probably spend another month trying to fix assets and errors. Organizational OCD, hehehe.

You should purchase a new one anyway. They don't expire until you activate them. You think you don't need one, but then you'll download a route from somewhere that still needs content from the DLS which you'll end up downloading at 3kbs per second. It's probably faster, but it seems that slow, and you'll easily reach the 100MB per day limit. Given that they cost about $22 it's a worthy investment. :)

Organizing content can be a whole job in its self. :) A buddy of mine has been doing this for about a year, maybe longer. Once you get it done though, which I did many years ago, it's easier to go with the flow. The error repairing isn't that difficult as you'll find out. A lot of the errors are easy things that need a tweak here and there. As time has gone on though, there are now fewer and fewer assets needing repair, that is, unless you download stuff that hasn't been repaired yet or downloaded from an external website.

John
 
I've been at this since '09. Never had an FCT. I have over 100K assets. The DLS usually hits about 10kbps for me on avg. I do hit my 100 MB limit a few times a week usually, but I also Download larger items via FTP on the Black Pages (This saves alot of CM Downloading).

One of the advantages to this method though is that I feel I have a better working knowledge of my asset library then most people because I take the time to sort through assets I want vs don't want. Because I take the time to let it download the "Slow way". But whatever. Most people want the instant gratification that comes with an FCT, but I like the way I do things.

Falcus
 
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