Railworks America

Either I have really bad luck, or I've done something to anger the Railworks gods...

I've been working on scenery on my route for a couple of months now and have several large areas complete. About two weeks ago I unpacked the Donner Pass assets ".ap" file to access some .geopcdx files to get some repaints to work. Nothing seemed amiss with the route for a few days after. (Many of the scenery assets and buildings on my route are from the Donner Pass route)

The other day I revisited an area I had thought complete, and noticed that a large warehouse and some surrounding terrain painting was missing. (see below)



I thought it odd, but I just replaced the building with the same and moved along.

Today I've gone back to a forested area which was 90% complete to find several empty asset blocks, areas reset to 'default' terrain textures, and missing pieces from a trestle. The strange part is that the trestle which is made up of 2 assets repeated (trestle legs, trestle deck) has sections of both pieces showing, but others missing with milk bottles in their place.

If I understand correctly, the milk bottles should show up if Railworks can't find the asset to be displayed. Since the program has obviously located both of these assets, why wouldn't the rest of them in the trestle show up? (see below)



I tried loading a few previous backups of the route, but the same issue persists. What should my next course of action be? Verify Files? If so, what should I back up other than the route folder? Any help would be appreciated.

Let's see if anyone can answer the man's question without any comments about how horrible TS is.

are the missing assets consistently missing, every time you startup?

I've had turntables especially sometimes disappear, and switch stands. Have no idea why. They reappear upon restarting the edit, the scenario, or whatever.

I have no idea what causes that.
I know a handful of milk bottles showed up in My Donner Pass Redo, but that was because early on I unloaded unneeded assets. Everything I did later was unaffected.

Now that being said, I have had areas that made me crazy. I was sure I'd leveled grass, planted floating trees and buildings back down on the ground etc, so I went over certain areas and marked them with one of those MoW crane trucks. Guess what? Some of those areas needed touch up work weeks later after I had left them alone... Track not snapped to terrain, scrub that I had used the gizmo to angle along rock walls etc was now standing straight out.
So you aren't crazy.

That being said, I haven't had these problems since I read a reply by Buzz about hitting the F-2 key and saving once in awhile. (knock on wood )
I also strongly suspect that using the world editor when finding defects, while driving along the route, is less safe than using the actual route editor as well.

P.S. Is that area in the screen shot near a tile boundary by chance? That also has me suspicious. IE I think some of these areas that get "undone" by repeatedly going into the editor may be near or on tile boundaries.
Tile boundaries can show up with nothing along them at times (while in the editor) but textures will reappear when you save.

I've done a ton of fixing as I was driving the route again using the F2 keeping before resuming and haven't noticed any "missing" changes or assets. I would run RWTools and see if it's having trouble finding the stuff you appear to be missing. Be aware if you are not already that many mistake the huge long list that comes up when you check a route to think all that stuff is missing according to RWTools. In fact the only things missing will show up in magenta.

Here's an area in the RW&A that occasionally does the weird missing asset thing. This is just west of the Waterton yard.
It always comes back when I restart it though.

gwgardner wrote:are the missing assets consistently missing, every time you startup?

Unfortunately so. I usually get to the world editor directly from the 'build' then 'edit route' buttons. I've tried playing a scenario, and going into the world editor from there but the problem persists.

Eric, it's good to hear I'm not crazy. There has been numerous times I've wondered if small things like snapping terrain to track have been 'undone' or whether I was mistaken that I had done them in the first place.

I'll try RW tools when I'm home tomorrow and see what it reveals.

Thanks for the suggestions!

I forgot to add.
Don't feed your Gremlins after midnight...