Route editing with latest update - Warning

[Easilyconfused]

As daft as it sounds if RSC can make such a big mistake then they should stay in the office till its fixed,simple as!

Like most things in life it is not "simple as".

In my job the SLA (service level agreement) says a Sev 1 incident i.e. system down or major functional area (payroll) offline then you stay until it is fixed. Lower severities wait until the next working day. That SLA is much more rigid than the EULA for consumer entertainment software.

Read your EULA you agreed to when you installed the software. Does it anywhere say that they will work silly hours to rectify any errors that they introduce ? Thought not. In fact the EULA for most software specifically states that if is not guaranteed to be error free.

Do I personally agree with this - not really but then again I also want the software so I have to agree to install it.

To stop companies doing this would require a change in the law and that can only be enacted by lobbying members of parliament and hoping the big software houses don't have enough of those on their side to block any change that software should do what it says on the tin. Until then you are going to get "best efforts". There would be a knock-on effect in that games / simulations would cost probably 10* more than they do at the moment. Also, if the developers have been asked to stay late but are also aware of rantings on various forums about them and how bad they are then human nature indicates they won't be best disposed to staying late and fixing the problem.

I'm not taking any particular "side" here - just giving my own personal views as a software developer and system admin. As such my normal signature is not on this post - it is not a moderator post but personal opinion. It should not be taken as official UKTS line either. The other moderators may well not share my views.

Kindest regards

John

[RSderek]

Hi,

Currently we have found a problem with Delivery day (currently under investigation), also an issue in return ticket due to a rouge AWS ramp.
These will be fixed in the next update.

If you do have a problem email support@railsimulator.com and attach the dmp file.
As of this time we have had 2 people email support with a crash error that may or may not be because of the updated code yesterday.

regards

Derek

[PaulH2]

I feel it would also make sense to release any updates at the beginning of the working week not at the end.

Now that makes loads of sense, if there are any problems after any updates, then RSC, have a few clear days to attempt to fix them, rather than possibly leaving users in the dead zone over the weekend.

That does make a lot of sense, although using the Steam mechanism I don't know how much control RS.com have over when the updates go live. I suspect they send the updates to Steam and after that it is probably pretty much out of RS.com's control, the update probably just gets put in a queue and pops out when it gets to the end, but I don't know for certain.

[almark]

As daft as it sounds if RSC can make such a big mistake then they should stay in the office till its fixed,simple as!

Like most things in life it is not "simple as".

In my job the SLA (service level agreement) says a Sev 1 incident i.e. system down or major functional area (payroll) offline then you stay until it is fixed. Lower severities wait until the next working day. That SLA is much more rigid than the EULA for consumer entertainment software.

Read your EULA you agreed to when you installed the software. Does it anywhere say that they will work silly hours to rectify any errors that they introduce ? Thought not. In fact the EULA for most software specifically states that if is not guaranteed to be error free.

Do I personally agree with this - not really but then again I also want the software so I have to agree to install it.

To stop companies doing this would require a change in the law and that can only be enacted by lobbying members of parliament and hoping the big software houses don't have enough of those on their side to block any change that software should do what it says on the tin. Until then you are going to get "best efforts". There would be a knock-on effect in that games / simulations would cost probably 10* more than they do at the moment. Also, if the developers have been asked to stay late but are also aware of rantings on various forums about them and how bad they are then human nature indicates they won't be best disposed to staying late and fixing the problem.

I'm not taking any particular "side" here - just giving my own personal views as a software developer and system admin. As such my normal signature is not on this post - it is not a moderator post but personal opinion. It should not be taken as official UKTS line either. The other moderators may well not share my views.

Kindest regards

John

I was joking,obviously i wouldn't expect them to,although i just wish they didn't have these problems that RSC keep throwing at us with updates.

Cheers,
Mark

[Basherz]

As daft as it sounds if RSC can make such a big mistake then they should stay in the office till its fixed,simple as!

Like most things in life it is not "simple as".

In my job the SLA (service level agreement) says a Sev 1 incident i.e. system down or major functional area (payroll) offline then you stay until it is fixed. Lower severities wait until the next working day. That SLA is much more rigid than the EULA for consumer entertainment software.

Read your EULA you agreed to when you installed the software. Does it anywhere say that they will work silly hours to rectify any errors that they introduce ? Thought not. In fact the EULA for most software specifically states that if is not guaranteed to be error free.

Do I personally agree with this - not really but then again I also want the software so I have to agree to install it.

To stop companies doing this would require a change in the law and that can only be enacted by lobbying members of parliament and hoping the big software houses don't have enough of those on their side to block any change that software should do what it says on the tin. Until then you are going to get "best efforts". There would be a knock-on effect in that games / simulations would cost probably 10* more than they do at the moment. Also, if the developers have been asked to stay late but are also aware of rantings on various forums about them and how bad they are then human nature indicates they won't be best disposed to staying late and fixing the problem.

I'm not taking any particular "side" here - just giving my own personal views as a software developer and system admin. As such my normal signature is not on this post - it is not a moderator post but personal opinion. It should not be taken as official UKTS line either. The other moderators may well not share my views.

Kindest regards

John

I was joking,obviously i wouldn't expect them to,although i just wish they didn't have these problems that RSC keep throwing at us with updates.

Cheers,
Mark

No, but this is why a Monday or Tuesday release could be a good thing. a). it gives them time to play over the weekend, on a work or destroy mission, and b). the working days after release are maximised.

[AndiS]

While I think that the idea with updates at the beginning of the week is a very good one, I suppose otherwise we just need to backup.

The coder working on the game core proper seems to have returned from holidays or from fixing the most frequent dozen of "ProcError" flavours, and things are getting interesting now. I must say that I feel a bit sorry for RSC at this time. Their recent update sounded like a refreshing change from the previous ones, but it brought in the "ship-train bug". Now they created a quick fix, but it eats some files under some circumstances.

Obviously, this does not concern everyone, so it is a bit difficult to ensure that it does not happen.

Those who run to be beta-testers, great, but are you really promising to play the 50 default scenarios (plus some 20 that come with various stock or as freeware)? How long will it take you? Don't you fear to get bored if you do it twice a month? Or are you saying you want to be the first to play around a bit with new stuff for free before all the others get to see it?

No offence to no one, but I think that many people underestimate the challenge in testing a complex system. While I do encourage RSC (ad nauseam) to further improve their procedures in this regard, I must say that reliable, disciplined, clever testers who really help you fix errors by giving concise descriptions of all they observed with all the relevant circumstances included are pretty thin on the ground.

The only thing that certainly would work would be to send the release candidate to Jim and ask him to beat the software for 24 hours and report on the squeals. That will drag up some surprises under any and all circumstances, with indications of how to fix it, if you are lucky.

[growler37]

While I think that the idea with updates at the beginning of the week is a very good one, I suppose otherwise we just need to backup.

The coder working on the game core proper seems to have returned from holidays or from fixing the most frequent dozen of "ProcError" flavours, and things are getting interesting now. I must say that I feel a bit sorry for RSC at this time. Their recent update sounded like a refreshing change from the previous ones, but it brought in the "ship-train bug". Now they created a quick fix, but it eats some files under some circumstances.

Obviously, this does not concern everyone, so it is a bit difficult to ensure that it does not happen.

Those who run to be beta-testers, great, but are you really promising to play the 50 default scenarios (plus some 20 that come with various stock or as freeware)? How long will it take you? Don't you fear to get bored if you do it twice a month? Or are you saying you want to be the first to play around a bit with new stuff for free before all the others get to see it?

No offence to no one, but I think that many people underestimate the challenge in testing a complex system. While I do encourage RSC (ad nauseam) to further improve their procedures in this regard, I must say that reliable, disciplined, clever testers who really help you fix errors by giving concise descriptions of all they observed with all the relevant circumstances included are pretty thin on the ground.

The only thing that certainly would work would be to send the release candidate to Jim and ask him to beat the software for 24 hours and report on the squeals. That will drag up some surprises under any and all circumstances, with indications of how to fix it, if you are lucky.

Hi
AndiS is correct software testing is tough,and time consuming,and usually working to a limited timescale,the product creators criteria for testing, different aspects of the product changes almost by the hour!
some time ago i was involved with a certain trainsim company testing a certain product,i was gobsmacked at the work involved,i must admit my first reaction when asked was, "goody" free software,but when the testing period was over,i was sent the finished product by the manufacturers as a gift, i was so fed up looking at it when testing,that i have never installed it to this day, and probably never will.
Regards
Kevin

[Ghosttrain666]

Hi to All

I have been sitting for 5 hours today building on the next edition of Denmark 2000. I can tell that I have had NO problems with saving, and I have just tested if there should be any problems after restarting my PC, RW and so on, There was NONE. If anyone can use this for anything my computer Specs are:

Mainbord: ASUS Rampage II Extreme
CPU : Core I7 940
Graphics: ASUS ENGTX 285
RAM : 12 GB
OS: : Win 7 PRO 64 bit Enterprise DK

I can tell that I have lots and lots of 3. parts Assets in my RW.

[javierfl]

After latest update, on my new route, I only add a former Kuju manual crane object, save the rute and the "exception..." message appeared. It was impossible to open my route anymore!.

Javier.-

[CaptScarlet]

After latest update, on my new route, I only add a former Kuju manual crane object, save the rute and the "exception..." message appeared. It was impossible to open my route anymore!.

Javier.-

Send the info and any railsim.dmp files to RSC support, they need as many instances of this happening as they can get so as to fix it.

John

[mikesimpson]

Hi
This begs the question,"who tests these updates"
Its a shame RS.COM are so insular,if they engaged the community to help with updates /testing, Etc these errors would not happen,or be less frequent at least.
Almost every product they release has errors,that should never have got past the testing stage.
Thanks for the warning,although there should have been an official RS statement by now.
Regards
Kevin

Hi Kevin,

It is a lot more complicated than that, no matter how many beta testers you have, errors will still get through when the product is released. You can get errors like when you place object A next to object B in a scene when it is raining then the program crashes. How often would this happen though? You can test a program for years and not find every possible problem.

Programs like MS Office 2007 still throws up bugs from time to time, yet it has literally millions of users who use it every day.

Mike

[javierfl]

After latest update, on my new route, I only add a former Kuju manual crane object, save the rute and the "exception..." message appeared. It was impossible to open my route anymore!.

Javier.-

Send the info and any railsim.dmp files to RSC support, they need as many instances of this happening as they can get so as to fix it.

John

When crash I did it!

Javier.-

[SuperTux]

Mentioning beta testing, would it be possible to have community beta testers? I know, as Mike says, no amount of beta testing will catch all the bugs, but at least it will reduce the likelihood of some howlers slipping past as seems to have happened.

What I mean by beta testers is closed beta testing, sign up via an application, but the upside you get to see any new stuff before anyone else. Not sure how public beta testing would work with the Steam delivery system.

I know plenty of other games and software which publish betas beforehand.

Matt

[javierfl]

Sniper has found a workaround to save the route in-case you don't have a backup.

If you don't have a recent backup, first thing to do is scan thru the files and see if you find one that's zero bytes. I trashed my route before seeing John's warning and got the same thing, but rather than restoring yesterday's backup I started deleting folders and attempting to reload - it loaded with everything but the scenery folder, so I restored that and searched, found one 0 byte bin file and deleted that, everything else was okay and it loaded. Left a gap in the scenery so I copied just that one file from the backup, too lazy to re-scenic that tile.

John

Yes. It seems that RW create a bin file with zero bytes. It is in C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\railworks\Content\Routes\....\Scenery folder. I deleted that and route loaded, but it is impossible any change in the route after, because it crashed again. You must deleted again the "new" bin zero bytes, etc.

[AndiS]

a) Have you already sent a report to RSC?

b) If you don't have a backup, copy a tile file that is small, rename it like the zero-sized tile that you delete before. Restart.
I guess, it would work. If so, delete whatever is on the tile and place items that were there before, carefully. But better wait for the next update before you do, because something that was on the tile was hard to digest for RW on your machine, whatever that means.
Just my idea on a little self-help.