Black Country

[rufuskins]

. . . but of course upsetting driver aids is a side effect of installing MSBin I believe!!

Ruf

[NeutronIC]

If you want to put the route in to your main train sim folder then I expect all you need to do is install it somewhere else, then copy the route and trains folders over the top of your main train sim area - leave the rest as it is and you won't overwrite any views etc.

As John posted, this was the only way of producing a CD of a route that requires MSTSbin without potentially screwing up lots of peoples installations - IMHO it would be far worse to install an add-on only to find it's messed up your steam engines or electric engines because "that bin thing" got installed that you'd been avoiding up to now - OR it put a different version on, or if it didn't put that version on and then didn't work with the one you've got - how could anyone forsee that kind of mess?

We decided that the simplest and most straightforward way to make it click-and-play for everyone, and leave those that know what they're doing in Windows Explorer with the ability to do whatever they wished, was to produce it as an entirely stand-alone mini route. It was checked over many times with Route Riter and Conbuilder before leaving us so I don't expect you'll find any problems there anyway, it should just install and run beautifully without any risk to damage to your existing install.

This is a taster for what's to come with Mid East Plus, which will also have to be distributed this way for exactly the same reasons, so we're keenly watching to see how people get on.

Matt.

[Tonysmedley]

I have tried activating using the Mini Loader but always get an "error 78 Path not found". This applies whether I try to use the mini route in either drive . Opening the route in MSTS results in a random selection of one activity or no activity being activated.

[johnmnstl]

Any one that has got the London & Port Stanley route will already have experience of this method of route installation. Personally I never had any problem with L&PS and runs straight out of the box.

Havent ordered the dvd yet as I still got the Test versions on the pc running through trainstore but I do like the miniroute path that has been taken here. With the continual price drops in higher capacity HardDiscs the extra space needed for the duplication of MSTS itself and duplicate Trainsfolders isnt that important anymore.

Is the route to be uploaded to the site as well using the spanned zip method that has been successful in the past - i.e. one for the route and the other for the activities and stock

[dean1986]

Getting alot of crashing on the 1st activity chemical delivery. Happened around 8 times now in varies random places. MSTS closes and says Train.exe has encountered a problem :s

Dean

[dean1986]

Cant get past Langley green at all about 500 yards from the red signal it just crashes to desktop. Also whenever I quit the game instead of going to evaluation it just crashes to desktop.

Dean

[Lad491]

Dean - those errors all sound like insufficient system resources. Try turning your settings down some. The activities are incredibly intensive with loads of AI traffic.

[dean1986]

Cheers Lad, have lowered settings and it worked a treat. cheers

Dean

[Tonysmedley]

I also have Port Stanley which ran with no problems, as also the Bernina and Jagstahlbahn routes all free standing. But the start up for all these was completely simple.
It is frustrating because a lot of unpaid voluntary work has gone in to BC1 and can see from running the route in Explore mode (only if I create my own start point) that it is indeed first class. If only I could get the provided actvities to load!

[dean1986]

Hi tony I found it hard to get working but once i worked it out I found it quite easy. Find where you installed the route Mine is C/BC1_miniroute/trainsimulator/routes/BC1/activities. Then it should come up with the list of activities. Choose the desired one you want to run by clicking on it once, then go to activate selected activity click it and then go to run route.

Dean

[Tonysmedley]

Dean,
Well, your advice works, but at a price. I click on an activity in the BC1 Activity folder, open BC1 with the icon go through the routine of opening the route and get a message about missing paths, cancel that, select the activity and "activate selected route" then get another error message which I have to cancel to proceed further which closes BC1. When I go back to the activities the activity is now activated. But this is extremely time consuming and is obviously not the intended method.

[michaelhendle]

Hi,

I'm in my 60's and have been testing a addon that runs with a mini route set up similar to Black Country,and at first I was worried about loading it,luckily I have 2 disc drives,so I loaded msts onto the second drive (D) and then put this route onto that drive.

It took me a couple of goes to get it to work, (take the disc out of the drive oncce you have downloaded every thing).As mentioned forget about route not loaded message this only happens the first time,just click on route,that will bring up the Route,then click on the activity you want to run,then load activity wait for to go from off to act,then click load route,and when the main screen come click the activity then run and off it goes.

It's a lot quicker than going through the train store method.Also by putting on a seperate drive it doesn't muck up any settings you are using for msts.

Persevere with it and you will eventualy agree mini routes are the way to go in the future.

Michael

[Iluka]

Hi Tony

I haven't received the Black Country Mini Route DVD yet but I am actively involved with testing MEP and I have additionally many other Mini Routes installed consequently I am advising you in the "dark" but I think you will find that the following assists you.

I believe the problems you are having with the Mini_Loader is that you have installed Black Country to a different Drive other than than the default C - if so the following may be of assistance

1) Open up Mike Simpson's excellent Mini_Loader
2) In the LHS pane at the top you will see the Drive it is currently locating - change this to the drive where you have Black Country located
3) In the LHS pane below this you will see the path that the Mini_Loader is pointing to - change this path accordingly to where you have your Black Country ROUTES located ie in my installation for MEP I have the MEP Mini Route located in my E Drive and the path reads :-
E;\
Mini_Routes
Mideast_Plus
ROUTES
MidEastPlus


If you follow the above I am convinced that you will "fall in love" with Mini_Routes and Mike Simpson's excellent Mini_Loader

Regards

Mike

[tialho]

As someone who is pretty savvy with MSTS and runs 150+ routes with TrainStore/ConBuilder, I'm not sure that the mini-route approach works for me (whilst fully appreciating the reasons given for packaging BC1 in this format). Main concerns relate to creation/modification/sharing of activities:

1. Not straightforward to swap over stock within activities (for example would like to substitute commercial stock/
cabviews).
2. For practical purposes, creation of activities is limited to supplied stock, as otherwise multiple installation of items (main folder and mini-routes) is required. May not in itself be a bad thing - as everyone will have the same items installed, activities should work 'straight out of the box'.
3. What is impact of different installation locations on downloaded activities (i.e. functionallity of TSunpack)?

On the plus side, I appreciate that BD1 is a 'lean' installation - previous mini-routes I have installed have copied many unnecessary files (for example all files in main MSTS, global and common.cab/sound folders) whereas the BD1 installation only appears to have essential files.

For the moment, I have adopted a 'dual installation' approach - 'mini-route' and main MSTS installation (copied trains and routes folders from 'mini-route') - both working satisfactorily; long-term I will see how this discussion pans out! One suggestion I would make for future releases is that an option to install to the main MSTS installation is included (if practicable).

Tim

[gswindale]

Although not having BC itself, I have a number of other routes setup as mini routes - partially as a result of having been involved in something similar to Michael.

The only disadvantage that I can see relates mainly to disc space, but then given the price of hard discs these days is that such a major issue?

It makes things much easier from a development point of view (for me creating my own activies) as I can install the stock into the specific routes and not have to worry that I may accidentally use stock from another commercial route.
It does also allow me to have a GUI that reflects the route I'm using a bit better than the default.

The only issue I have with Mike Simpson's mini-loader (trainstore for mini-routes I believe) is that although you can see all the activities, you cannot read the briefings, so until you load up the route, you're not too sure which activity you'll be playing (as far as I can see).

Tim - I believe you will need to use Route Riter (or alternative) to adjust the registry path so that tsunpack relates to the mini route in question each time.