Conbuilder 2.05

[jbilton]

Hi
Just downloaded and upgraded...but getting a problem with the picture taking side.....basically taking the picture of the wrong engine...but naming it correctly...and putting it into the correct folder...but strangely with the wrong file date....all mine coming out as 06/08/2004.
Any one else found this....or is it just my installation?
Jon

[kevarc]

Marc gave the CB folks their own fourm over at http://www.3dtrains.com/forums . A good place to get a fast answer.

[rachaelwinn]

Has anyone noticed that the latest version does not appear to be checking in the main Sounds folder for .wav files.

I suddenly found I had hundreds of missing sound file errors when running the engine check that were not there on version 2.0.1.

They all relate to files found in the main Sound folder rather than in the specific stock items sound folder.

Not sure if this is deliberate or not. Have dropped the authors a line to ask.

[jbilton]

Has anyone noticed that the latest version does not appear to be checking in the main Sounds folder for .wav files.

I suddenly found I had hundreds of missing sound file errors when running the engine check that were not there on version 2.0.1.

They all relate to files found in the main Sound folder rather than in the specific stock items sound folder.

Not sure if this is deliberate or not. Have dropped the authors a line to ask.

Hi
Yes I'd noticed...but I found 2.0.1 doing it as well.There were some postings about aliases last week by the author(I think)....which could explain this...unfortunately I felt he had drawn some wrong conclusions...and the proof is when the loco plays the sounds correctly in the game....reguardless of whether the alias is done to the correct format or not.(If it aint broke dont fix it )

[rachaelwinn]

Thats strange I've just stored everthing in Train Store except Mid East and run a test.

Version 2.0.1 0 errors. Version 2.0.5 985 errors! All missing wav files involving coupling sounds that exist so far as I can tell in the main Sound folder.

I agree if its not broke don't fix it so I don't intend to change anything yet but thousands of errors will really get on my nerves and of course other errors that do need attention may be lurking about undetected.

If the general view is that MSTS will run better if these files are actually in the Stock/common.sound folder I may decide to copy them in. It probably won't be as bad a job as it sounds as a relatively few "missing" files can generate thousands of errors.

Regards


Rachael

[sg100]

985 errors!

You think that's bad, I'm at 6,521 errors! Although that is out of 239,951 files.

[rachaelwinn]

Oh dear. You'll be burning the midnight oil!

My 985 are in stock used by Mid East only. I dare not try it with all stock unstored. I would probably blow my machine up.

Believe it or not I'm 99% sure there were absolutely none under earlier Conbuilder versions. I had been sorting them one by one over the last 6 months and to keep things correct in future nothing is used until Conbuilder comes up clean.

Thats why I raised the question of whether version 2.0.5 is supposed to ignore wav files in the main Sound folder.

Happy fixing

Rachael

[latimers]

From my testing, I don't think it ignores them.

When I ran the latest version, I got lots of errors on stock that the older versions had declared "clean". The errors were all to do with sound files in the main Sound folder that had some incorrect aliasing applied to them. For example, in my setup I had, in .sms files, somthing like ../../CommonSounds/GP38/couple.wav. My understanding is that MSTS would look in the ../../CommonSounds/GP38/ folder, not find the file and then look in the main Sound folder and find it.

What I did was to remove the ../../CommonSounds/GP38/ and ConBuilder then thought it was okay.

I'm not sure whether that actually accomplished anything (other than getting a clean report from CB). My understanding is that now MSTS looks for the loco's Sounds folder (which doesn't exist) and then looks in the main Sound folder and finds it. No saving in the number of steps necessary.

[rachaelwinn]

Thanks Latimers I think you are probably correct.

Its late now so I'll check a few tomorrow as you suggest and see what happens.

Unfortunately this would means each error would need individual attention to "correct". Admittedly a simple correction but to do that would be very time consuming and very boring. Especially if everything still works fine anyway.

For me a quicker way to remove the errors may be to simply copy the "missing" files to the appropriate folder. Most of the errors listed relate to aliases of Kiha 31, Dash 9 & GP38 so a bit of copy and pasting may remove hundreds of the listed entries at a stroke.

Thanks again

Rachael

[ianmacmillan]

I keep a spare Cabview or Sound folder in my aliased folders.

If I find a problem its usually a mistake in the loco's aliasing file so I just delete it and copy the good one over.

MSTS is happy if it finds a correctly named .cvf or .sms. If the actual .wav file or ace is missing it simply does not play or show it.

Conbuilder is only doing its job when it finds errors. You only need to fix the critical ones.

[latimers]

Rachael,

That was my experience too - aliasing to the the Kiha31, Dash9 and GP38 were the main culprits. There were also issues with aliasing to the UK_Shared folder - tender01.sms etc.

I would hesitate to start copying files around. It will just make your MSTS installation bigger. Using a good text editor on your whole Trainset folder and replacing (in files) things like "../../CommonSounds/GP38/couple.wav" with simply "couple.wav" should get rid of most of the errors in CB.

Ian,

How do you know what's "critical" without a lot of testing? And how do you spot the critical errors in a large pile of non-critical ones? I assume CB flags the errors because the authors think the errors do make a difference to MSTS.

I'm afraid I might fall under the definition of a "perfectionist" - someone who takes great pains...... and gives them to others.

Regards,

Bob.

[asalmon]

Although I am not a conbuilder beta-tester, I have been on correspondance with one of the testers, Tony F. The below is mostly his work, which I have confirmed similar results on my PC. (As we had different windows versions it was good to compare results)

When a sound is referenced in an SMS file, MSTS first looks in the current directory for it, then looks in the main sound directory.

If a sound is referenced as follows

../../gp38/sound/x_gp_horn.wav

then when it looks in the current folder it goes up two levels, down through gp38 to sound and finds it.

If it doesn't find it, it looks in your msts folder. HOWEVER it looks for

{insert path here}/train simulator/sound/../../gp38/sound - which is looking for a gp38 folder at the same level as train simulator - which most likely doen't exist!

So, for all those sounds meant to be in main sound folder, if you try to alias them they don't work.

Try it - have a consist of two of your engines where "x_couple" has been incorrectly aliased. Explore a route - uncouple and recouple - what do you hear?

Now fix the sms removing the "aliasing" of the coupling sound. Repeat. How is it now?

Another bit of proof - run msts with the soundtest interface - train.exe -vm:w -soundtest - when you do anything with your incorectly aliased enging, you get "SMS error - failed to load WAV" - try it.

Therefore - all these errors do need fixing.

[rachaelwinn]

Thanks guys I guess we have a bit of work ahead of us tonight

I know how to use Find and Replace in Wordpad but I don't think this can work on more than one file at a time. Can anyone recommend a text editor that would search the whole Trainset folder and subfolders for the errant text?

Rachael

[latimers]

Thanks Alan for the clarification. I'd never actually tried it to see if the aliasing actually worked.

Rachael, I use UltraEdit (which was recommended to me by Mike Simpson) and it works really well. You can point it at a folder and have it find and replace any character string in any file in that folder and all subfolders. Very useful for this type of problem. It's Shareware but well worth the money.

Alternatively, check out http://www.railpage.org.au/steam4me/trainsim/. There's a freeware editor mentioned on there, along with a tutorial on how to use it for MSTS.

[rachaelwinn]

Thanks Latimers.

I have played around with EditPadLite in the past but not upgraded to the full version which I think is needed for this problem.

I don't mind paying but I want to be sure it will do the job first.

I'll try the steam4me link as this sounds ideal.


Regards

Rachael