Railworks America

I'd like all with the scenario crash issue to email support with System Specs, and Game version which can be found by right clicking it on Steam and going to properties! Note, I am not a direct rep for RSC, but I do know that having detailed reports sent to Support will help them determine potential causes MUCH easier than coming onto a forum and joining an angry mob.
Thanks All!

I will reply tonight with my specs.
I have been getting the issue while modifying cloned scenarios for the Colton Northern route.
Here is what I did:
- in RW Tools, I cloned each default C N scenario, swapping rolling stock.
- in RW scenario editor, opened each cloned scenario, making a few changes in the timetable view, saved, closed timetable view, clicked on the "play" icon, exited, repeated.

This went well for the first 6 scenarios, then at the 7th it took 2 minutes to save the scenario. At the 8th it took 5 minutes. At the 9th I lost patience and killed the process,
Then when I tried to play the scenario I had the "malformed xml" error. I deleted the 9th scenario and had the same error. I deleted all my cloned scenarios and still had the error. I looked at a few cloned scenarios and they had only 3 or 4 empty provider nodes.

So this behavior is pretty much what everyone described in forums already, except that it seemed to start after some time and get worse and worse, leading me to suspect a kind of memory leak. Also, it is consistent with what Mike Simpson posted on trainsim.com: he suspects the problem is caused by the rw scenario editor, but compounded by serz.exe, which gets confused by the xml error and starts looping.

For some reason the xmls, normally small in size, have been bloating to MEGABYTES in size, causing Railworks to load for ages. I have no clue what caused it, but Im sure Dev will hop right on it.

BNSFdude wrote:For some reason the xmls, normally small in size, have been bloating to MEGABYTES in size, causing Railworks to load for ages. I have no clue what caused it, but Im sure Dev will hop right on it.

Have you looked to see what's in there?

I'm not having these issues, I'm just going by what I've been told.

That's precisely what Mike Simpson reported: serz.exe panics and starts looping, adding megabytes of empty provider nodes in the xml.
EDIT: Nevermind, seems RSC pushed an update supposed to fix this problem.

If this doesn't fix your already corrupted scenario files, you can fix them with RW Tools.
Otto posted about this on trainsim.com. From memory, you check a route, exit, choose to check the shapefiles, then click on a button for listing providers, then you can delete empty lines in the list.

According to the discussion of this issue on Steam's RailWorks forum, it has been fixed ... probably. I tried some editing last night and then used RW_Tools (the Australian answer to all RSC glitches) to check the results: no rogue scenarios.

(Where's the smiley for "Whew!" ?)

As for my already corrupted scenarios, it was quicker to just redo them than to try to fix them.