Can anyone out there load, run, or edit third party routes?

[buzz456]

It's a good thing?????????

[PapaXpress]

Yes. Garbage in is Garbage out. Having properly made assets will help with all the errors and countless sleepless nights you will spend trying to fix a problem someone else made.

In short. Standards.

[buzz456]

That is BS Sir. These routes have run fine and now you are saying they are garbage, If this game has moved on so all of the hard work of this community is lost well then I'm out.

[PapaXpress]

You can think what you wish. When you walk 15 years in my shoes then you start wonder why developers don't conform to standards. Then things break. Then you politely suggest that they do it this other way, and all of a sudden the machine starts to work again.

What is broken can be fixed. In many cases it appears the track rules was hacked improperly when they were cloned from their originals. In my case I had a bad path in my blueprint which was completely my fault. RSC is not sabotaging anyone, they are just raising the bar. Again. Its all fixable.

[g_nash]

----
then you start wonder why developers don't conform to standards
----

Show me the documentation for those Standards Papa.

It's not like I don't agree with the need for same, It's not that I don't agree that hacking Track Rules or anything else is a not good idea and should never be done, It's not that I don't think that raising the bar is not a good idea .. But show me where the bar is now ?

In short, show me the documentation for those Standards of which you speak, I've looked for them, they do not exist.

It shouldn't be that hard Papa.

[PapaXpress]

When you walk 15 years in my shoes then you start wonder why developers don't conform to standards.

If you quote me please use the complete sentence. I was speaking from my own experiance.

Now. I completely agree that there is a lack of documentation but in my case I had a bad provider in the blueprint. Why it loaded pre TS2014 I have no idea, but it was caught now. Pretty simple huh? All I needed to do is put in the correct provider. Which by the way was: RCAP. If RCAP v2 released before TS2014 and people used that assets then all of those routes would fail to load. You can bet I am looking over the rest of my RCAP assets with log mate turned on now. Perhaps other authors should as well. To quote my C++ instructor in college a long way back "There is no excuse for having warnings in your code. It just shows you are sloppy, and its an error waiting to happen" and to this day its holds true.

[buzz456]

More geek bullshit. The rest of us are a victim of stuff that we have no idea of what we are dealing with, nor deserve to deal with. We love the sim, D/L a bunch of stuff and have every reason to expect it to work. Anything less from the provider is not what we bought into and should not be tolerated. I expect the stuff I have built up to be supported and when I can't even get routes provided from them to be supported while then maybe I need a new hobby.

[PapaXpress]

Oh Buzz... admit it. You like us geeks.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I will be looking at my own creations more closely. I can only hope other content creators will too. Also given time I will help others out as much as I can. I have not forgotten the multi track rule problem Ann Arbor has, and I plan to work on it soon.

[dgallina]

IMO Papa has a good point. What RSC did wrong was not to document the changes. Better error checking is a good thing if it causes fewer random something bad has happened crashes. Going forward.

Diego

[Chacal]

Now. I completely agree that there is a lack of documentation but in my case I had a bad provider in the blueprint. Why it loaded pre TS2014 I have no idea, but it was caught now. Pretty simple huh? All I needed to do is put in the correct provider. Which by the way was: RCAP. If RCAP v2 released before TS2014 and people used that assets then all of those routes would fail to load. You can bet I am looking over the rest of my RCAP assets with log mate turned on now. Perhaps other authors should as well. To quote my C++ instructor in college a long way back "There is no excuse for having warnings in your code. It just shows you are sloppy, and its an error waiting to happen" and to this day its holds true.

I agree 100% with all you just said.
But I suspect a lot of asset and route creators just don't know about debugging tools like LogMate.

This just happened to me at work: my cutomer had been experiencing mysterious bugs in a business rules engine for years, resulting in corrupted data several times a year, with days wasted on manual fixes. Then I came in and asked "Have you turned on verbose logging? That will tell you precisely where the problem is". This was met with a blank stare: they had never heard about the logging option on that system. It did point out the problem, which was permanently corrected in 2 minutes flat.

I'd like to create a tutorial on how to fix problems using LogMate. Can you share a few tricks?

[donoldskay]

To Chacal:

Yes, it is installed on my C: drive.

Don

[Bananarama]

That is BS Sir. These routes have run fine and now you are saying they are garbage, If this game has moved on so all of the hard work of this community is lost well then I'm out.

Better to fix now and change bad habits into good before we get so far down the road we won't know which way is up.

[OlPaint]

I have seen several references to "LogMate". I assume it is a Debug Utility that records activities for later study. What is it and where do I get a copy?

OlPaint

[_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha]

It is your railworks folder.
Fire it up before starting Railworks. While still not 100% clearly understandable in its reports, it is better than a SBHH or freeze.
It reports on blueprint parsing, errors in xml and GeoPcDx files etc.
Debugging using LogMate is worth a thread on its own. Also read in on UKTS on the subject.

[mrennie]

I have seen several references to "LogMate". I assume it is a Debug Utility that records activities for later study. What is it and where do I get a copy?

OlPaint

Logmate.exe is in the RailWorks root folder. To use it, you have to set the following launch option (right click on Train Simulator 2014 in the Steam library and choose "Properties", then "SET LAUNCH OPTIONS" in the "GENERAL" tab):

-LogMate -SetLogFilters="All" -lua-debug-messages

Before starting RW, execute Logmate.exe. That's so that RW can connect to it when it starts.