Railworks America

I can not believe no one has posted about this yet, but Mike has a new utility that is like trainstore for MSTS. Go to his site and check it out. It requires RW Tools to run. It is also in testing.

For those of us who have never done anything with MSTS could you tell us a little about it?

StoreThem is a utility, similar to ‘Train-Store’ for the Microsoft Train Simulator.

The intention of this utility is to only include those Assets and Route files in TS-2014 which the current
Route actually requires, thus vastly reducing the amount of work TS-2014 has to do when it first runs. If
you have downloaded a lot of 3rd party content and payware routes, there may total around half a million files
in your Assets folder alone !! TS-2014 looks at virtually all of them when it starts, whether they are needed
for the route you wish to use or not. Thus taking a lot of time and delaying start up.

StoreThem works by simply re-naming files and folders, So no file or folder copying is done and in theory
nothing can be lost. However, users should always have back-ups of their Asset and Content folders and no
responsibility is taken for any problems caused to your TS-2014 setup by use of this program. If you do not
agree with this, then please do not even consider downloading it.

This is an early version of the program and although I have tested it thoroughly, there may still be bugs
which a wider audience will find, I will post updates on my site as and when they become necessary.
This program may be placed anywhere on your computer, e.g. E:\Rail Utilities\StoreThem

Please note that it will only work if you have already installed my RW_Tools program on your PC as it uses files in the RW_Tools distribution.

It's a mod manager.
It speeds up TS 2014, and probably prevents a lot of crashes, by making visible to the game only the required assets for the route(s) you want to play.
That way, TS doesn't have to scan all your routes and assets, and won't try to load unrequired assets, which is often the cause of crashes when there are too many of them, or when some assets are broken.

It is easy to use:
1- First you "Store" all routes and assets. Now if you start TS2014 you have no route at all.
2- When you want to play a route (or some routes), you fire up StoreThem, select the route(s) and "restore" them. The program will restore the route(s) and all required assets.
3- Fire up TS2014 and you will see only the "restored" routes. Loading will be much quicker.

The program is safe and performs quickly because it doesn't copy or move files around, it just renames them, which is very efficient.

This is much better than managing multiple instances of TS2014, because the program will automatically bring into the game all needed assets (as determined by reading the route and scenarios blueprints).

EDIT: oops, looks like Bob and I were busy at the same time

What about if you have scenarios that require assets from multiple routes?

That's precisely why the program is a good idea.
It reads the route and scenario blueprints and finds the provider/assets entries.

I've just downloaded and installed Store Them and am currently making back-up copies of my Assets and Content folders. In the mean time, here's a question: suppose that, for the purpose of writing a scenario, I add one or more assets to a route at the scenario level. Am I correct in thinking that I would then have to shut down TS, shut down Store Them, and then restart both programs before continuing to work on the scenario?

Chacal wrote:That's precisely why the program is a good idea.
It reads the route and scenario blueprints and finds the provider/assets entries.

OK because nothing ever mentioned the scenarios for it whether writing (As OldProf writes) or playing them.

OldProf wrote:I've just downloaded and installed Store Them and am currently making back-up copies of my Assets and Content folders. In the mean time, here's a question: suppose that, for the purpose of writing a scenario, I add one or more assets to a route at the scenario level. Am I correct in thinking that I would then have to shut down TS, shut down Store Them, and then restart both programs before continuing to work on the scenario?

First of all you don't need StoreThem running when you are using TS. You only run it when you want to store or restore routes and assets.

For adding assets to a scenario, I haven't tried yet, but if I understand TS correctly you would have to exit from TS, start StoreThem, restore the needed assets, then start TS again. It seems logical that if the assets are stored, the scenario editor won't see them so you won't be able to add them to the scenario.

On the other hand, I haven't tested how long it takes to "restore all", maybe it is simpler to do just that before creating scenarios.

This program does no magic, "storing" files means just moving them to different folders inside the railworks folder (The Assets are stored in Railworks\StoreA and the Routes in Railworks\StoreC), which is the same as renaming them, an operation WIndows does very quickly.
Once you know that, you can predict the answer to all these questions.

There is a part you guys are missing eh? Like extracting all the maincontent.ap files to get the route properties.xmls and extracting all the scenarios from their .AP files. Make sure you read all of the instructions if you have not or are not doing this. I still have not tried it, but I have read the docs twice.

Wow very cool and so simple to use. will test this tonight at home and see how long it takes to load up seattle route on the first pass now. Way to go Mike!

I know that StoreThem is currently a WIP. But how should we report issues with the utility that we discover to Mike? I was going to PM him so not clutter up this forum.

OlPaint

Hmmm....so you're saying for it to work well, we have to unpack all the .ap files in our installation first, right?

I usually don't know what route I want to run when I start TS. But, say I did, I still don't know what scenario I want to run. When I "restore" a route, do all the scenarios and all the assets used in those scenarios get "restored"? So I can just say, hey, I think I'll run the RWA, restore it, and all the scenarios and assets necessary to run them will be available? If so, this is great. I absolutely HATE how long it takes TS to start and do anything. I often eat a meal or catch a nap in between starting and being able to run a train.

Okay, so I went to Mike's site to look, and this appears to be exactly what happens. I've downloaded, will read the instructions about the .ap files, back up my HUGE assets and contents folder (haven't done that in a while anyway), and then give it a try.

You are not extracting the entire ap file only pulliing out routeproperties.xml for each route and you are pulling out the scenarios for each route. The program does this all for you, but you have to select the routes and AP files. Read the instructions good as they do not follow the pictures quite right. It is talking about 1 thing but showing you another.

Okay, so I extracted the RouteProperties from the MainContent files, and the scenarios from the Scenario.ap files. Stored all routes and assets, and then restored the RWA. Seemed to work great. Startup was SOOOO much faster. Now I'll try some of the more complicated third party routes.

What a great utility. Looks like Mike is going to get some more of my money.

This seems like a great tool not only for storing all routes but the one you want to run currently, but also for paring your install down to a few select favorites, which you can easily exchange for another select group any time you want.

Thanks for the heads-up!