Atomic Systems

how about this as a crazy suggestion... It auto saves every 5 minutes??? Or it must know its going to crash so it quickly saves what you did upto the error? lol I get so emerged in what i do i forget to press F2 the amount of times I wish CTRL + S was save lol i do that quite often thinking its the save then nothing happens it kicks in! its F2 is should press

I guess what you need is SVN. It is a big thing for teams, but there will be a way to set it up on your local PC to just track your own changes, committing your modifications every 5 minutes to the local repository.

What this means in practice is that you have all the 5-minutes slices in there, with acceptable storage requirement because of the intelligence of the software. So if you find, that something went wrong in some place, be it because of SBHH or another bug or your own mistake, then you can go through the history to find the point where you can restore the most while loosing the least of other modifications.

Maybe someone can write a tutorial for simple, local, single-user usage for the purpose of RW. It would save a few people from getting lost in the big documentation of this powerful tool.

Lots of talk of autosave.. but personally speaking I don't like it, it's part of the fun route creating / scenario building, especially when you don't know if the program is going to crash on you or not!



Seriously, I don't want it... If for example you aren't working to a strict plan, and you hit upon an idea that results in you needing to go back around 30mins or so. With the current "save at your own risk" system I could simply revert back to a save near to the stage I was at 30 mins ago (had I saved back then), with autosave it'd result in a lot of messy deletion and possible reference to a(n) asset(s) left within my build, which might not ever appear in the route again. (see the threads about missing decals that RW_Tools sometimes throws up).

I guess what I'm saying is that "I" prefer to be in control of what is saved, and not being constantly 'nannied' by the software.

I still think you could have a autosave function where the user can decide how often the autosave - saves or turn the function off if the user did not want it. Best of both worlds. Imagine the relief after a hour and a half working and forgetting to save, the program crashes and finding you have only lost the last ten or fifteen minutes of work.
I think it has possibilities.

Re autosave, nice to have the facility there if you want it. Trainz Surveyor has an autosave which I choose not to use as the programme is fairly stable. However I would probably enable a similar facility in RW.

markwhale wrote:I still think you could have a autosave function where the user can decide how often the autosave - saves or turn the function off if the user did not want it. Best of both worlds. Imagine the relief after a hour and a half working and forgetting to save, the program crashes and finding you have only lost the last ten or fifteen minutes of work.
I think it has possibilities.

If it's configurable or has a multiple save system, i.e you could have it save every ten minutes and then have the choice of which save you wanted to reload, then autosave would be fine.

Something inexplicably bad has just happened. You mad, railsimmer?


...no? I'll get me coat.

Reminds me of a Wallace and Gromit CD ROM where, amongst other things, we had a number of alternative message beeps.

The standard Windows 98 error beep was replaced with 'That was a bit thick!'

And then we had dear old Wendolene going 'Goodbye...chock' when the computer shut down.

Oh and as for booting up, well, we were reminded that 'WINDOWS are our speciality!'

Just a thought, perhaps the thunk / beep sound of the error can at least be a barrel of laughs.

Kromaatikse wrote:Better yet, of course, would be error messages explaining what actually went wrong, and giving some idea of how to fix it.

We live in eternal hope...

Well to me the message means that RailWorks has crashed due to a bug in the RW core itself somewhere. It might not be easy to display anything more specific than that to the end user. I do notice that it creates memory dump files (.dmp), which I presume that one can upload to RW so that they can analyze them and hopefully correct the issue. In my day job, I use those things to help diagnose problems in our own software.

But at the moment, I am guessing that they are too busy with TS2012 to worry much about analyzing memory dump files...

I believe that the crash issue is a direct fault with running RW on Win 7. When I was running RW on XP 32bit system, I only ever has the SBHH issue once, and that was when I tried to reskin a station sign and made a pigs ear of it. Once corrected, I never had the dreaded message or crashes. Since running on Win 7 64bit, I crash often, at least once per session. Sometimes this could be several times in a working period.
I have read the remarks from the forum members with regards to running on win7 and they are mixed. Some say they have no problems at all, some, like myself, have crash issues often and some have said they cannot run Rw at all. Now, is this down to Windows 7 or something to do with 32bit and 64bit?. It is my hope that the forthcomming RW3 will resolve this issue as it has been developed to run on Win7 and not just being Win 7 compatiable.

It's only W7's fault if you're running it with a very low amount of RAM, 2GB is ideally the absolute minimum to run it with to give it the room to breathe. I was dual booting on the same system between Windows XP & Windows 7 and saw no difference in between stability on exactly the same hardware.

Whilst what you say about Railworks not being designed to be run on W7 is true, it was given compatibility with the "Vista" operating system. W7 is a 'tweaked' version of Vista (slight Kernel changes, WDDM driver changes, UI upgrades) but is to all intents an purposes the same as Vista, as XP was extremely similar to Windows 2000. I'd be more concerned about Windows 8 (scheduled for next year, developer pre BETA is available now), as that brings a radically different UI, integrated XBOX Live! features with the possibility of emulating XBOX software (unconfirmed) etc.

If you're running Windows7 on the same system you had before, I'd suggest running memory checks as I started to get loads of SBHH due to a memory module going bad. Windows7 can and will utilise memory far more efficiently than Windows XP and this can in itself show up memory modules previously thought to be working well, but in actual fact have a few bad registers, causing SBHH.

Make sure that your Railworks isn't corrupted (Verify Cache) & try to be as picky as you can when installing addons as it'll only take one with a badly formed blueprint to mess up an installation.

Thanks for that Andy. Maybe you could take a look at my spec and give me an idea as to what could be a problem:

Windows 7 64bit
Intel core i5-2300 @ 2.80 ghz
Nvidia geforce 405
6 GB ram.

Only had the system around 6 months, where I was using Win XP. Never did use Vista as the new computer came with Win 7. What's your thoughts?

The Geforce 405 looks a bit weak to me - it's the lowest of the low end from any recent generation, and only available to cost-conscious computer manufacturers.

It shouldn't cause crashing problems in itself though. Please do make sure your graphics drivers are up to date, as that does solve problems sometimes.

I already guessed that the graphic card was low end spec. Found that with other software. Want to upgrade but I am told I have to upgrade the power unit as well (300 watt at present) and the fact its still under warrenty, so may have to hold on that for now. I check the drivers regular and update as required so they should be the latest. I have download a fair bit of freeware but this is all from ukts and is going to be difficult too root out a problem downloads, if there is one.

The only problem I see with the specs of your system is the GPU (as Kromaatikse) pointed out, but more alarming is the 300watt PSU. Whilst it's technically fine for the system to be built and sold with the 300watt unit, as you put more load on your system by playing resource intensive games such as Railworks, the system will want to draw as much power as it can use from that PSU. Whilst the Intel CPUs are very low powered now, they'll still need a good constant voltage to be put out from the PSU and if you're nearing it's limits then the power will fluctuate even slightly and could lead to instability, in resource hungry games or the dreaded Blue Screen Of Death if it's really on the limit. If you're going to upgrade to a middle range / top end single graphic card solution then you're going to want 500W+ as a safe minimum. I've currently got a 650W psu which is feeding a middle of the range 250GTS, 8GB RAM, AMD PhenomII quad core 965 CPU & around 4 HDDs, and have a few watts to spare.