First crash to desktop. Unwanted milestone.

I've had my first crash to the desktop while working in surveyor. It happened so fast and without any warning that I was left stunned for a moment. Fortunately I had recently saved and I hadn't done much to the route I was building before the crash so it wasn't as bad as it could have been. This was a TS2019 milestone I most definitely did not want and now I find myself seriously wondering if I can trust TS2019 as a route building tool. Before anybody asks I'm running plain ordinary old build 105096.

With TS2019 having more versions than the bible and after seeing endless disaster posts on the forum about Trainz folk's experiences with the later versions I thought I might be safe enough with 105096, but now I'm starting to wonder about its reliability. Perhaps I stick with doing all my route building in older versions of Trainz from now on and give up on any hopes of using TS2019 to build anything and just use it for driving and operating which it seems to do reasonably well (touch wood).

Well if nothing else it was an interesting experiment despite the annoying pop up warning messages about splines, the missing 'undo' menu button and the difficult to read menus. I was actually starting to think TS2019 might be a good and useful route building tool, but it seems it isn't after all.

Excel crashed on me recently. Stuff like this happens. Remember that people post about problems on forums, while people without problems are busy using the product. TRS19 is more stable than any previous version of Trainz.

If you can reproduce the issue, then great, just report the steps required and we will fix it. If you can't then great, it was a one off.

One thing that I found that made a huge difference to the stability of TRS19 (and TANE in hindsight) was correctly setting my virus checker. It was a post in these forums that put me on the track, so to speak.

Basically everytime TRS19 and TANE accessed the asset database the virus checker also started scanning it. This sometimes lead to corruption of the database and sometimes to conflicts between TRS19 and the AV, and subsequent CTDs.

My solution was to exclude TRS19.exe (and TANE.exe) from real time scanning by the AV. I have not had a problem since.

A suggestion only.

ever just kick the power button on your PC after three hours of unsaved work? (you may laugh as i still do lol)

Tony_Hilliam said:

Excel crashed on me recently. Stuff like this happens. Remember that people post about problems on forums, while people without problems are busy using the product. TRS19 is more stable than any previous version of Trainz.

If you can reproduce the issue, then great, just report the steps required and we will fix it. If you can't then great, it was a one off.

Click to expand...

Well suddenly I was back to the desktop without warning, I stared in disbelief for about 3.20987 seconds and then I said, 'Oh ---------'.
So not really a reproducible case Tony.
I had just laid down some trackmarks and after that I made a small adjustment to the environment settings. I was moving back along the line with sparrowcam and then suddenly hello desktop.

I'll go back and have another go and see how it works out, but I will be a bit more paranoid about regular saving from now on.

In TS2012 which has been my surveyor route building go-to for a good while now I can work for hours at a time and it's never crashed yet (touch wood) so you can understand why this all came as a bit of a shock.

Pware, my antivirus is set up to exclude Trainz so that wasn't an issue. I've been doing that ever since I first started out with Trainz.

kcwright, yes, been there done that. My present computer is a tower case though and I'd have to deliberately reach up to the off button to repeat that mistake. I also have a UPS for maximum paranoid gratification.

Annie,

I've had content do that. A bad tree, or something else that's difficult to find is the most to troubleshoot. I've said this before regarding a Speed Tree by McGuirel. I had a forest with lots of various trees on a particular route. I couldn't look in a particular direction otherwise the program would CTD on me while driving. This was in TS12 too and not T:ANE or TRS2019. I noticed if I looked the other way while driving, I could get passed that spot, but dealt with dreadful, less than a slideshow speed, but once passed that place everything was fine.

I knew there was something in that area that was causing the problem, but couldn't find it so I left it, and was ready to give up. I ended up finding the culprit maple tree when I changed out the Speed Trees for something else so I could move the route into T:ANE. After the trees were replaced, the route worked fine in TS12 too.

The thing is it's not always the last thing that causes the failure either. It could be an asset placed long before that somehow will corrupt something in memory. The corrupted memory location is now sitting there awaiting some other function. The function could be calling some data value for something else, but because it's corrupted the program crashes instead of performing the action.

For me the culprits have been bad textures, old scripted assets, bad assets usually with a corrupted mesh, Speed Trees, and even the route its self.

Good luck solving this. You might be lucky and carry on with no other failures.

Thanks for your input John. The strange thing is I've been doing things with this particular route from TS2009 to TS2012 to TANE and finally now TS2019 and it's never given any problems before. As you say it might be a script or an asset that's suddenly put a knot in itself and gone bad. I'll keep on with the work I'm doing and see how it goes, - hopefully it was just a random event which caused the event, but I'll certainly be a bit more vigilant from now on.

Probably something random. I leave surveyor open sometimes 14 hours a day and have had about 3 CTD's, all asset related. I do save regularly and I have to say I have far less trouble with TRS19 than I ever did with TS12 or T:ANE
cheers
Graeme

Consider it an initiation.

This reply was made by the Daily CTD gang.

Matt

Hi,
Just a couple of random thoughts!

1) try installing one of the computer monitoring apps ( voltage, temperature, can speeds). I've had random CTC with a power supply on the edge of failing. Trainz requires the GPU and CPU to be near 100% useable, this can stress the PSU. In my case, it was the 5v supply line, going from 5v to 2v as a random cycle.

2) you have cleared all the blurb from the cooling fans & filters (?).

3) TS 2012 uses the CPU much harder than TANE or TS19 - do check the CPU temperatures/cooling. The stock cooler is not designed to cope with 100% use for a long time. I burnt out one CPU that way ( cost a new motherboard as well with the burnout and old CPU socket!)

Cheers
Colin

Colin brings up a good point. I never had the burn out like that, but I did discover a faulty power supply way back in TRS2006 days.

My large personal route, which is still extant today, was giving me problems in one particular part as I drove and only when I drove. I could be in Surveyor all night, but as soon as I got about 30 minutes into the drive, I'd end up staring at the desktop! I spent days, weeks even, hunting down bad content, checking assets, rebooting, but all to no avail.

Then one day I had another issue come up that clued me in the problem wasn't with TRS2006, but instead was at the system level. Whenever I exited Word or Firefox, I would get a memory error. Ah, I said and ran memtest86. Nope. That wasn't it. Memory test passed with flying colors.

The same problem existed with apps crashing on exit and TRS2006 crashing while driving and I checked my hard drives for errors. There was some lost clusters, but nothing faulty. That didn't fix anything either. Then one day I did have some real corruption when I saved some documents for an online class I was taking at the time. After I handed in the documents, I got an email from my online professor telling me that she couldn't read the papers! What?

I ran some disk tests, more thorough ones this time around, and the tests showed some failures on my data drive. I replaced the drive after backing up stuff and still that didn't fix the problems. Same issue, new corrupted documents and Trainz crashed anyway.

I then ran a system monitor and watched the voltage and this is where it got interesting. I checked while driving in TRS2006 and crashed after 30 minutes right on the button. The voltage dropped as the content became more complex. When TRS2006 crashed, the voltage went back up to the +/- 5% tolerance it's supposed to be in, but under load, the voltage dropped substantially more. I then saved a large document and the voltage dropped substantially on the +12V line when the data was written to disc. My conclusion was that my power supply was flaky. After spending only $50 back then, the problem went away with no other problems like that again.

Slight digress here...

19 doesn't have an undo button?

HotshotJimmy said:

Slight digress here...

19 doesn't have an undo button?

Click to expand...

Ctrl-Z
Ctrl-Y to redo

FootplatePhil said:

Ctrl-Z
Ctrl-Y to redo

Click to expand...

Oh that's fine then.

HotshotJimmy said:

Slight digress here...

19 doesn't have an undo button?

Click to expand...

It does it's moved to the menu second icon from the left, I've always used Ctrl z and ctrl y though as it's used in 99.9% of programs so not bothered where they have hidden it.

ColPrice2002 said:

Hi,
Just a couple of random thoughts!

1) try installing one of the computer monitoring apps ( voltage, temperature, can speeds). I've had random CTC with a power supply on the edge of failing. Trainz requires the GPU and CPU to be near 100% useable, this can stress the PSU. In my case, it was the 5v supply line, going from 5v to 2v as a random cycle.

2) you have cleared all the blurb from the cooling fans & filters (?).

3) TS 2012 uses the CPU much harder than TANE or TS19 - do check the CPU temperatures/cooling. The stock cooler is not designed to cope with 100% use for a long time. I burnt out one CPU that way ( cost a new motherboard as well with the burnout and old CPU socket!)

Cheers
Colin

Click to expand...

All very good points Colin. I give my computer's insides a good sweep out from time to time and I do use monitoring apps. CPU temperatures stay in the safe zone even when running large routes in TS2012. It must be a sign of the times but when I googled 'computer monitoring apps' I got endless websites for monitoring a business's employees and it took a change of keywords to end up with system monitoring apps.

My power supply looks to be good John and I'm not overloading it. I buy ex-lease enterprise grade computers from a properly certified refinisher/recycling company and what they sell is reliable and has a warranty.

I have been continuing to work on my route in TS2019 and so far (touch wood) all has been fine without any problems with surveyor doing what it's supposed to. As much as I like TS2012 I can see the writing on the wall and that I need to stop being a suspicious little luddite and move over to TS2019 if I want to keep on enjoying playing with digital trainsets.

I'm continuing on with building my route which is rebuild of a TS2004 route. As is usual with me most of the route is the open empty rural countryside of the last quarter of the 19th century so it's scarcely a resource hog. My computer's spec is not going to set the world on fire being an i5 with 16Gb RAM and a GTX660 all connected into a Gigabyte Ultra Durable motherboard in a Cooler Master tower case, but for what I'm doing it's fine. Since I'm not using any of the new magic stuff in TS2019 or trying for 10 mile viewing distances I don't really need a high spec machine.
I downloaded NZXT system monitoring software and it's been showing me that I'm certainly not pushing my computer to the max with TS2019. The only time resources do get a bit pushed is when I commit any edited assets with large texture files. So far all has been fine with no problems and I'm starting to enjoy working with the surveyor tools in TS2019 again. Whatever it was that caused the CTD I haven't a clue so I'm putting in in the, 'must be just one of those things' box.

I get the CTC now and again on the route I am working on. It happens often on start up after a DBR. It starts to load the route and session and then it will crash. Re open the route and it loads fine every time until a DBR. Also found that sometimes after a change of textures and a save it will freeze while saving. Had to use task manager to exit. Went to CM and the route was open for edit so submitted it and launched the route and it was fine and with the changes in place.

thats another reason im not getting 19, they moved everything around and i have all the keys from TANE and below locked into my muscle memory

kcwright_rm said:

thats another reason im not getting 19, they moved everything around and i have all the keys from TANE and below locked into my muscle memory

Click to expand...

It's been a bit of a learning curve for me kc since I've been using TS2012 for ages, but I've got used to the changes and I'm liking working in TS2019 surveyor. At the essential heart of it all it's still the same old surveyor it's always been so now I'm used to the menus it's game on just the same as usual.

I get the CTC now and again on the route I am working on. It happens often on start up after a DBR. It starts to load the route and session and then it will crash. Re open the route and it loads fine every time until a DBR. Also found that sometimes after a change of textures and a save it will freeze while saving. Had to use task manager to exit. Went to CM and the route was open for edit so submitted it and launched the route and it was fine and with the changes in place.

Click to expand...

I guess too we have have to remember that Trainz is running in Microsoft Windows and that in itself can be a risk.