Railworks America

Scenario Editor had corrupted my (almost) finished scenario (at the time 16 hours working on it) after I changed the lenght of two destination markers! Great! Scenario was still playable till its end, but when exiting the game was always freezing with the SBHH.
I sent the dmp file to RSC support and in the day after (BOOOOOOOOOM) they replied with: Unfortunately that is not something that we provide support for, however we wish you the best of luck with it. Great, again!
They have a less then mediocre editor crashing/messing constinuously the scenarios, I sent the diagnostic file expecting they would at least look into the dmp to say what the problem was, but nothing... like if the editor, and dignostic file, weren't from RSC...
This is RSC support! they say to email to support when we have a problem, for what?! Let it be...



Anyway... Anyone knows how to read the dmp file?

Maybe next time I could find the problem by my own, instead rebuild the whole scenario which took me more 5 hours long. Oh, yeah, lesson learned, since yesterday I'm saving the scenario in rwp format each half an hour or so...

Cheers,
Doc.

Machinist wrote:"Unfortunately that is not something that we provide support for, however we wish you the best of luck with it."

At least they didn't include 'By the way, be sure to check out our latest DLC, available this Thursday"

Samwolf wrote:At least they didn't include 'By the way, be sure to check out our latest DLC, available this Thursday"

We can all laugh about it, but this is a serious issue: lack of comprehensible error messages and how to deal with them.

Image you are a professional modeller or designer that would want to produce good quality assets, routes etc for a living?

There is lack of current up-to-date documentation, there is complete lack of support. The number and frequency of errors one encounters with TS2012 is very high.
How would you suppose to make any money?

It is as if RSC wants to keep it all to themselves and a few anointed UK partners. Pumping out DLC without adequate quality control (Donner Pass!) and hardly giving us paying customer any support, only promises.

I do enjoy TS2012 and shall support its suppliers, but sometimes I wish we should take the initiative in our own hands and try to develop an Open Railworks.

_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha wrote:We can all laugh about it, but this is a serious issue: lack of comprehensible error messages and how to deal with them.

Image you are a professional modeller or designer that would want to produce good quality assets, routes etc for a living?

There is lack of current up-to-date documentation, there is complete lack of support. The number and frequency of errors one encounters with TS2012 is very high.
How would you suppose to make any money?

It is as if RSC wants to keep it all to themselves and a few anointed UK partners. Pumping out DLC without adequate quality control (Donner Pass!) and hardly giving us paying customer any support, only promises.

I do enjoy TS2012 and shall support its suppliers, but sometimes I wish we should take the initiative in our own hands and try to develop an Open Railworks.

I agree, it gets very frustrating not knowing what is causing an error. However if I didn't laugh, I'd cry.

Speaking of Donner Pass, where is the promised update of track transitions?

_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha wrote:I do enjoy TS2012 and shall support its suppliers, but sometimes I wish we should take the initiative in our own hands and try to develop an Open Railworks.

Yep! this is an excelent idea, I'd appreciate... but it's up to experienced (and brave) volunteer programming developers.
In Trainz I was part of a missions' creators group using a sort of tool developed by one of them in which he digged many basic controls from source library and let them available to be used by us, ordinary mortals. The problem was that the guy has left the game (due to professional commitments) and left us for a long time (over then 6 months at the time) with no new feature, nor support.

The current Scenario Editor is a shame (to say the less) just better then nothing, nothing more than this! I usually waste 50% (if not much more) of my time unmessing (when I get a fix, not always) the SE's messes.

I look at OpenRails physics code and drool a little... unfortunately I look at it's graphics & wince. If only it would collide with RW.

_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha wrote:Image you are a professional modeller or designer that would want to produce good quality assets, routes etc for a living?

Professional modeller? For a living? Are we talking about the same hobby here?

I assume IHH, JT and the others are self employed professional designers working out of their homes. They probably work for other sims as well, besides doing contract work in CAD I suppose.

All this crap over system instabiblity, poor hardware utilisation and the myriad of problems we encounter almost daily surely deters prospecting individuals and small companies that presently cater to MSTS and Trainz exclusively to commit themselves to TS12. Would love to see and buy 3DTrains' WP Feather River Route, yet we have only the ATSF F7 that RSC doesn't support. There is so much good US content out there that perhaps will never get converted thanks to the Donner Pass debacle and the way RSC handles it.

Having comprehensibe and helpful error message plus a manual on how to deal with them would help all us so much enjoying the sim and make content creation more lucrative, even for shareware/donationware from relative amateurs.

Why don't we hire those same Indian boys that bring out Indian Railways rolling stock daily over at trainsim.com? I am sure these Indians are better than RSC's Indians

Doc
They may be able to be read using windbg http://windows7themes.net/how-to-open-d ... ows-7.html. and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315263. and http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows ... 63009.aspx
This looks interesting, whilst used for interpreting BSODs it looks like it can read dmp files: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html
They look like just memory dump files similar to Windows variants you can "open" them in note pad but then all you get is a lot of hex gobbledygook.
Go Lisboa
Peter

_o_OOOO_oo-Kanawha wrote:Why don't we hire those same Indian boys that bring out Indian Railways rolling stock daily over at trainsim.com? I am sure these Indians are better than RSC's Indians

Another case of too many chiefs, not enough Indians?

Anyway I suppose developers will now be able to put those kind of problems through the new guy in charge of 3rd-party relations, who begins in April.

I don't think so. Third party relations is for companies that work directly with RSC on content. Not simple end users like us.

Well, perhaps with this 3-rd party liason officer, some contacts with state-of-the-art US developers/creators can be made. Contacts that lead to Contracts that lead to Content and new Customers. RSC being an UK outfit and still mostly UK centered needs to espand its horizons. We have German, French, Russian, Swiss, Spanish and Portugese routes and trains in development, all of which look very promising and commercially viable. Many of these will be free, which is good of course, both to us and to the author as a testimony of their quality. Doing a job well can lead to contracts to expand upon the proven base with the help of this 3-rd party liason.

I suppose the UK market is almost saturated with rolling stock. Apart from Turbomotive and the Duke of Gloucester and perhaps an original Merchant Navy class I really don't know what to desire in UK steam engines. As a fan of US railroading I am not too fond of all these 1st generation British Rail Diesels, most of which are duplicated and even triplicated by the other houses! Routes one can never have enough, quality routes that is!

Hopefully the success of Horseshoe Curve and the K4 will lead to more PRR content. Once the US market is opened, I think there will be MSTS conversions for TS12 is a commercial opportunity too good to be missed.

Error reporting and error handling is essential to the development of any asset/piece of rolling stock or route and will benefit us all in the end.

Which brings me back on topic: Is logmate any help? What does it do? How do you use it?