Is there a limit to how many boards you can have in a route?

I was wondering if there were any limits as to how many boards per route this game or T:ANE could handle. I've been working on a fictional route where a bullet train route was built that links the East Coast of the United States with large cities like Washington, D.C., etc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIt56JFknjA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSC9m52Oj5Y) Now at first, the route was working perfectly when I built a station for Cape Henry in Virginia, but as soon as I tried to extend the route south to Corolla, North Carolina, the game started crashing without any warning or reason. I tested the route in T:ANE and TRS2019 and get the same error and at the same location. Somewhere near the Virginia / North Carolina border. The route is currently 744 boards large and spans from Cape Henry, VA to Corolla, NC. The route is 36.4 MB and the session is 277.8 KB. This is actually my second attempt at doing something like this and the first yielded similar results.

There is a limit, but it's based on how much your computer can handle. At 36MB, that route is pretty small by today's standards. The crashing you are getting could very well be one or two of the assets you have installed on the route. The asset could have a bad script or a faulty texture, or even a corrupted mesh. The only way to determine this is to list the dependencies and disable them, test, and then renable them.

Having gone through this process before, I highly recommend doing any disabling in groups, such as by type, for example, skipping built-in and DLC content if any is in the route.

Sometimes this doesn't find anything, and merging the route into a blank baseboard, not the other way around, fixes the route crashing problem because the problem maybe the route its self which is bad.

This question has been raised a number of times since Trainz appeared. 36.4 MB is not a large route by modern standards - but how are you measuring its size? By the size of its .cdp file? The CDP format, like ZIP, is actually a highly compressed data format so your route may be significantly bigger than that. My current TRS19 route has a .cdp file size of nearly 50 MB. I believe that the maximum .cdp file size that TANE (??) can handle is about 500 MB (others will no doubt correct me on that point).

I would suspect that your problems are more likely to be caused by a faulty asset or another issue unrelated to the number of baseboards or the route size.

I think 500Mb might be the maximum size for DLS upload. I'm fairly certain though I've worked on routes where the uncompressed .gnd file is larger. However that does bring performance and saving issues with the risk of route corruption, if you don't have enough RAM or VM to buffer all the info the route editing process is generating.

So far, merging the route with a blank one seems to be working. I haven't had the problem since trying it.

janathan said:

So far, merging the route with a blank one seems to be working. I haven't had the problem since trying it.

Click to expand...

That's good to hear. I discovered that "trick" way back in the TS2009/TS2010 days and it still works today.

Don't forget that you also have a perfectly good 'Compact Route' command in your main menu as well.
(Full COPY backup safely stored elsewhere before you invoke this!)
It works, and will often clean up any glaring glitches with the route along the way.
Warning! You'll need to re-create any dependent sessions for your newly compacted route.