Trainz Crash

[Jaunita Rousu]

Franksometimes loses his temper, which once caused him to crash into the back wall of the shed. Despite this, he is a hard worker and is sometimes called upon to rescue engines who have broken down. Frank means well and has a good heart, but can tend to be grumpy.

CMP is closely integrated to CCP.exe, another TRS2006 new asset management tool and can also used to open assets for editing and vetting them for proper data structures before submitting them for use in Trainz. Since TS2009, CCP's validation function has been built into the new CM releases, with ever more stringent format testing and faulty asset rejection.

Unfortunately CMP is well known for it's bugs and problems. Crashes, freezes, corruption of assets, malfunction, unpredictability and loss of data are not uncommon for many users. The reliability of CMP varies from user to user and is dependent on the setup of the system and the operating system.

After my first very hard 2-3 daze of trainz 2006, I have come to terms with CMP, in fact I'm in love, though it was a steep climb. Sure CMP hangs and breaks and sometimes "forgets to leave physical memory, when it crashes, so it must be evicted through the Applications (or Processes) tag within Windows Task Manager; but when it stumbles, it can be picked up from where it left.

When departure signal have been given: press 'Start'. A doorman's whistle is blown and CMP begins downloading. (With a FCT download usually maxes out the capacity of the connection, in my case up to 500KB/s.)

Another (undescribed) sound signals, when download helper has done as much as it could. The real fun (as defined by Rimmer of Red Dwarf) begins. Press the 'Missing dependencies' for an initial assessment of the "damage". Hopefully you have 'laptop' icons in the Status column all the way down to the floor.

Sometimes CMP cannot find assets, even though they are on DLS. The search them out in DLS and press download there to marshall the next download train. Some are not found on DLS, then you'll be back in this Forum looking for hints.

Some assets come down in tears. Either with 'Missing dependencies' or as faulty. doNT paNIC, most of the problems are rather simple to fix. Begin by opening the Right Mouse Click menu on the misfortunate asset.

Faulty assets can be edited in 3 or 4 ways, but I chose not to install .NET to save precious disk and bug space, so I have only used 'Edit in Explorer' as I'm an old hacker, so I prefer to keep an eye on things without to many buggy tools between me and the real problem.

So, now we're down to a faulty asset. If you cannot fix it, be sure to disable it in the asset RC popup menu. Starting Trainz with faulty assets is a rather bad idea, since the result is unpredictable with inconvenient application crashes as the likely outcome.

Dive into the faulty asset with 'Edit in Explorer' (in the sub-popup menu under Edit in the asset popup menu), this will move the asset files to an editing folder in the trainz root (folder). Then pick 'View errors' on the assets popup menu in CMP, so you know what to fix in the asset folder. Most of the errors are rather silly syntax mistakes in the config.txt file and the *.texture.txt files describing the visual assets components. If you stumble into something you cannot fix, maybe someone has or can, so you'll be back at The Trainz Forum sharing the community fruits or seeding new ones.

With config and texture problems - if you do not know how to fix the assets - it usually suffices to but the word rem on the beginning of the text line CMP complains about. Fx if CMP complains about the word 'surely' in config.txt and a line like: "surely cmp will sour over this line" appears in the file.

To validate you fixes and reinstate the asset: select 'Commit' on aforementioned submenu. If all's well the red exclaimation (!) in the asset's status field will fade and you can proceed to the next trouble item. Otherwise recheck the 'View errors' and repeat the editing part just described.

Now, what we really need is a way to bring the fixed assets back to the DLS without the somewhat disrespect and rather clumsy solution of cloning the fixed asset (with your user ID) and uploading it to DLS under a new KUID. It would be cleaner and more respectful of the producers efforts to put it back with a version increment, so the next one that downloads it (as a dependency) gets the fixed asset instead of being forced to repeat the exercise I have described here.

So much for Trainz'06 and CMP. Vista is another matter, which I would have advised strongly against, if BG&Co (Microsoft) had shown the courtesy of consulting me in advance;-). Unfortunately, the guys in SW (software) engineering still believe users and indeed other developers read manuals. This is at best naive, since it is pretty obvious, that quite few of them do so themselves, leading to various problems very similar in nature to those of the main topic in this reply.

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