Kickstart

[777fred]

What route did you send it to?

[sniper297]

For the install, click options, then browse to wherever your rail simulator folder is, that's all you need to do. If it's not working after that, that's the bug we're trying to sort out now.



That's what it should look like, click the options button, browse in the window to select the rail simulator folder and click okay. You should get a KickStart.ini file in whatever folder you have RS_KickStart.exe in, the tempfiles folder will be generated the first time you start the program.

Almost forgot the original poster here, yeah, when we get it working it does change locos and/or cars, like replacing the player service in the Hagen "Into the Misty" with an SD40 instead of the German switcher, for example, and changing it to a rainy autumn day instead of winter. Or night time, basically it does the same things you can do in the scenario editor if you know how to use that, it's primarily designed for people who are scared stiff of the editors. As for your system, despite F-Secure screaming about it because of the BIN file extension, it can't do anything to your system since it's a stand alone utility that doesn't use install shield nonsense and it does NOT, like so many stupid programs today, grope around in your system registry and fondle the keys just for the hell of it.
:bad-words: Worst it can do is trash scenarios, and it does make automatic backups of those in case you haven't.

[Blackpatch]

D/L now - will report if all goes well. Can I ask can you detach from player selected loco in free roam then select another anywhere on map? If so then it truely makes RS as flexible has I'd hope it would become.

[nwallace]

The error Sniper posted a picture of occurs for me in RS_Tools TMB I guess it is probably the same issue.

[byker43]

I tried to set this program up, I set up a new folder and opened up the download, one thing I'm unclear about is where the folder should be placed, I followed the supplied instructions, back up the two folders as recomended and clicked on the Kickstart Icon, I was then faced the Kickstart screen, I clicked the button on the screen, this provided a route list, I then clicked on one of routes and clicked the senario button, nothing happened? No sign of this program in the game.

[andymar54]

The Kickstart folder can be put anywhere to run, mine is on the desktop within another folder.
You must set the path for railsim using the options tab in the upper left hand of the prog opening window, otherwise it cant find the activities.

[sniper297]

I set up a new folder on my desktop and ran it from there, then set up another new folder to point to the other railsim installation so I wouldn't have to keep redoing the path. Should work from anyplace, on my system it DOES work from anyplace provided I copy serz.exe to either Windows\System32 or the same folder that RS_KickStart.exe runs from. Possibly the difference is in the way serz.exe is installed, maybe the dev tools registers the serz.exe folder in the common program path and the package manager install don't or something. Still haven't heard back from Mike yet, meantime you could copy serz.exe to the same folder RS_KickStart.exe is in, that should work.

Further testing with the York Newcastle thing, deleted scenarios.bin and the scenarios folder and restored the original backup to it, apparently the Geordie frostbite is an addon and not an original. Unmodified York Newcastle still has the same symptoms, altho this time I noticed in the task manager that serz.exe appeared to be working hard at SOMETHING, so I looked in the tempfiles folder and discovered it was still decompressing to the scenario.xml file. After about five minutes it got up to a little over four megabytes, then I got a garbled error message. Sent Mike a zipfile with the tempfiles folder in it, possibly he got disgusted and went off to hunt crocagators with dynamite sticks taped to boomerangs for relaxation or something.

Again tho, bug reports, need info on Vista or XP, do you have serz.exe somewhere on your system, and which route which scenario were you trying to edit? Or does it do it on everything you try? What step were you at, what error message did you get? If possible try to make a copy after the error of the scenarios.bin and scenarios.bak files, plus the scenarios folder and the tempfiles folder before overwriting the corrupted ones, might come in handy for analysis.

Well, lessee, actually kinda off topic, "Can I ask can you detach from player selected loco in free roam then select another anywhere on map?" Yes and no, when you first start a free roam scenario you can go anywhere on the map and select any driveable engine. Once you select an engine you can hit the number 8 key to go back into free flying mode and select any other driveable engine within a two mile radius of the engine you just left. Limitation there is as soon as you select an engine you're tethered to it inside a circle, but you can, for example, hop from engine A to engine B one mile west, then move one mile further west to C, then one mile further west to D, therefore jumping to an engine outside the original circle. if there ain't no B and C then you'll just have to exit and restart the scenario going directly to D, or drive engine A to within two miles of D to jump to that one.

[mikesimpson]

As I said it is a work in progress, but I really must apologise to all that I missed a line out of the read-me file.

It should have said -

The file Serz.exe (which you will find in your RailSimulator folder if you have the DevTools version - Or which will be in your Packager folder if you have downloaded any of the extra locomotives from the Rail Simulator site) must be copied into your Windows\System32 folder for RS_Kickstart to work.

Users with Vista 64 bit versions may need to copy Serz.exe into their syswow64 folder.

Users with Scripting Errors may need to turn on MS Scripting on their PC. This can be done by going to the Desktop Start/Run box and entering:-

regsvr32.exe scrrun.dll

I will update the read-me asap

Meanwhile, sniper has sent me his files from the Coals to Newcastle problem and if I can replicate it here, I will see if I can fix that.

[777fred]

Thanks Mike, Works now .

[dlljones]

Looks like a really good utility but the route I'm building and using does not appear on the list of RS routes - only the default ones are there. I think it may have something to do with Vista Home Premium rather than the programme itself. Can anyone throw any light on this please? I'm able to access the route itself from RS without any problem.

Llew Bach

[sniper297]

Racking my brains here, can't come up with anything for this one. XML file is an ordinary ANSI text file, can be read and edited with notepad, so RS KickStart doesn't do anything to it, just reads it to get a list of what routes are installed. Exactly like the game does. You sure you don't have a backup of the original unmodified game somewhere and you accidentally pointed the RS KickStart path to that instead? What does your KickStart.ini file say, and how does that compare to the actual path?

[dlljones]

Thanks for your suggestion. I've checked the path and it's fine. I've done a bit more digging and for some reason my route does not appear on Routes.xml in the content file (even though the route itself is there and appears at the start up menu of RS). I can't see it in RS Tools either. I don't think the problem lies with these two programmes.

Llew Bach

[sniper297]

Well, that's a neat trick, since the game gets the info from the \Rail Simulator\Content\Routes.xml file to create the list of routes, if the route isn't in the routes.xml file then it won't be in the list. Any chance you could zip that routes.xml up and email it to me or Mike?

[johnan]

Still no joy here.
I am using Vista 64 and have copied the serz.exe as suggested to both places mentioned, and run the "scripting" thing but after I point Kickstart to the railsim directory and press start, I get the error message:"run-time error 75:path/file access error."
Could it be my railsim directory is in drive H:\ rather than the default?

[CaptScarlet]

Still no joy here.
I am using Vista 64 and have copied the serz.exe as suggested to both places mentioned, and run the "scripting" thing but after I point Kickstart to the railsim directory and press start, I get the error message:"run-time error 75:path/file access error."
Could it be my railsim directory is in drive H:\ rather than the default?

I have Vista 64bit and have Rail sim in a different folder than default as well as having serz.exe in both the /system32 and /syswow64 folders. The only problem I ran into was making sure that I had selected the railsim folder correctly. The first time I tried it I didn't double click on the rail sim folder so I had to go back and make sure the folder was selected properly. Then when I clicked on start it worked.

John