Atomic Systems

So I decided to take advantage of the sale, pick up some German stuff - namely the vR BR101, and the Berlin Leipzig and Seddin routes - and teach myself PZB. I'm having an issue with the Berlin-Leipzig route, which I can't find even mentioned searching here, the Steam forums or Google, suggesting there is something about my particular set-up that is the problem. Basically, if I attempt to play any of the scenarios included with the route, it crashes before I can even reach the first station and throws up a message along the lines of "ERROR: failed to create index buffer FILE: DxCommon\cHcVertexManagerDx.cpp LINE: some number".

I've tried a variety of resolutions (I normally play TS very happily in 4K, but also did a test on my old 1360x768 monitor) and graphics settings, including dropping scenery quality right down and the result is always the same. I don't have this issue with any other routes - TS will dump occasionally if I'm being over-ambitious with AI, but on the whole it's very stable - I encountered no issues running one of the included scenarios with the vR 101, or for that matter on Medway Valley, which I also bought(steady 35 or so fps with all settings maxed). It's really frustrating as the route sounds great, but it's unplayable for me at the moment. As mentioned, I'm assuming the problem is at my end as I can't see any mention on forums of anything similar - any assistance in getting to the bottom of this would be most appreciated.

There's nothing special as far as I know about my system - Win 10 64-bit, Core I7 2600K processor, 8GB RAM and a factory-overclocked GTX970 (MSI Twin Frozr if that helps). Windows and NVIDIA drivers are fully up-to-date. Windows installation is on a 64GB SSD with around 7GB free space - I know I could do with this drive being larger, though other, relatively demanding games (I have Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 on the go at the moment) seem to be doing fine. Hope someone can assist!

Although more knowledgeable folk will be along at some point, It seems to be the consensus on the forum NOT to have TS on the same drive/partition as Windows.
Can you partition your SSD into 2 drives and put TS on the new partition? That MIGHT help.

Could you try to free up some space on the windows drive/partition and see if it helps?

I would assume that 7gb of space may not cover the page file? But that may depend on what it is set at? As Dave said I'm sure one of our respected tech wizards will sort you out.

I have this route and it has never caused a crash like you are experiencing, but then again I have enough space on my windows drive plus 16Gb of ram and 6Gb of Vram.

Windows is on the SSD (yes, it's too small--the reported free space is after the swap/page file is taken into account but it still isn't really enough for Windows' background routines) but where is Steam installed?

Thanks all - my SSD contains only windows and a couple of apps that insist on on installing to the system drive like Avast and Dropbox. All of my games live on HDDs - I have one 1Tb and one 2 Tb drive as main storage, plus a 1 Tb USB drive for photos, odds and ends.

As mentioned I generally experience few problems with my system, with TS running well except for this route, and more demanding games also fine - a few nights ago I played a heavily modded Fallout 4 for about 4 hours solid without issues. TSW also behaves itself very nicely.

ETA my Steam and TS installations are on the same partition.

I seem to have found an effective workaround. There are spots near Berlin Hbf and Leipzig in the tunnels approaching the station where the crashes occur consistently. If I save just before these spots and then resume the scenario I can finish it without further problems. I'm happy that I can play the route, not least because it's really good, but if anyone can shed any light on what the root cause might be I would love to know.

I've experimented with in-game settings, NVIDIA driver settings, run the game on my old 1360x768 monitor to try a low resolution, tried windowed and fullscreen mode, done some housekeeping to free up 3 gigs or so on my SSD and none of these things make any difference. I used MSI afterburner to monitor graphics card performance (I have a 4gb MSI GTX970 with factory overclock) and at no time did VRAM usage go over 2.5Gb. RAM usage was around 2.7-3Gb. I've tried moving reskins out of the Kuju folder, and using other rolling stock (swapping into supplied scenarios and creating a test scenario of my own) - the problem still occurred in the same manner.

As mentioned I have no similar issues with other games, and I'm not experiencing this problem with other routes (I also did the full length of Konstanz-Villingen this afternoon without a hitch). My computer is running, as far as I can tell, just as it always has.

Yeah, but, don't forget this isn't a 64-bit game, I have the odd jitter on this route at Berlin and Leipzig, on occasions as well, I assume as both these areas have thousands of assets on their tiles it does create a bit of a bottleneck with the amount of catenary, gantries, trackwork, etc, which you just have to live with. Your PC system specs are great, top of the range some would say, which is why you shouldn't have any problems playing other computer games, including TSW, neither do I, it's only Railworks that I have any problem with, sadly, that's life.

Cheerz. Steve.