Atomic Systems

I've been building a route for many months and almost at an end in its construction. I have backed up my work constantly and tested the areas I worked in. I have hit on a nightmare situation though.

On my route there is a busy yard area with loco sheds and industrial areas etc which is complete and detailed and at the opposite end of the route I am finalising terrain and adding detail. The route has worked fine on all test runs in the areas I've worked on but when I came to create a scenario at the busy yard end of the route, an area I haven't worked on for months, it failed to open the route after selecting a scenario creation icon. If I go out of this area I can still create a scenario. If any scenario is saved in the busy yard area whilst driving, then the 'resume button' is unavailable upon re entry into the game menu.
I replaced the route with my backup, but to my dismay most of those contained the same corruption.

This is a fault which cannot be seen but only brought to ones attention when trying to create a scenario in the problem area. How can a route builder get around something like this? If the route were 200 miles in length then one would have to create scenarios in multiple areas all around the route after every building session just to test to see if the recent work has affected anything not remotely connected to the area you are working in.

I have isolated the problem to the Terrain folder. The only backup that works is an early one and I have spent uncountable hours since. To recover the route I would have to reverse engineer the terrain to meet the scenery, not realistically possible.

I guess I'm looking a the loss of an entire route which was destined for the workshop. I doubt there is a fix but thought it best to raise the issue for other route builders out there, if you get this problem, your backups won't save you!

Mark

You've done well to narrow it down to the Terrain folder. If you are using the Distant Terrain feature, you can further isolate the problem by removing the DistantPatches.bin and the related textures folder.

Assuming its in the terrain folder, then hopefully its just a single bad tile. Check your terrain tile file sizes - they should all be 65,689 bytes. If you are lucky you will see one thats different - its probably corrupted. Delete the file - find a backup for it or regenerate the tile's terrain by hand.

Thanks for the suggestions, all the .bin files are showing the same, 65kb in the folder, so same as you say in properties. I presume the DistantPatches.bin is located somewhere in the main route folder? I haven't used the feature to my knowledge. It is a freelance route with non DEM terrain.
Thanks
Mark