Railworks America

Everything in TS2014 was working great, all routes, when I left for travel 2 weeks ago. I see that there has been a patch, the .ap problem, etc., so life has been apparently interesting. Today I fired up TS2014 and went to my own (2 years in the making) route and the sim crashed a few seconds after I selected the route and free roam scenario I wanted. I did 2 file verifications, the last that said there were no more problems. I checked for .ap file issues and unloaded all RSC, RSDL, and Kuju .ap's and extracted them to the existing and newly empty file folders. I removed the infamous PON track rules (all of them). I then restarted TS2014, sselected my route again, and once again it failed seconds after hitting go. The crash closes the sim entirely. I then restarted and checked the RSC DLC routes, and all the native ones worked fine. Any 3rd party DLC (Allaboard, G-Trax, etc.) failed just like my route did. I did another verify, and checked all the fixes to make sure they were still there, but nothing changed, the sim crashed the same way. I used RW_Tools to look for missing items in my route and all was OK. Another fire-up of the sim and no changes, still failing after hitting go for the route(s).

Sooo, I think I have done all that the various forum posts have recommended, unless I overlooked something along the way. Any suggestions would be interesting, as I find this extremely upsetting, and its wasting time that I need for route development and for testing newly created assets.

Thanks,
Doug

Run the sime with Logmate enabled.
You'll get some hints as to the cause of the crash.

Thnks for the input. Here are the relevant items from the log when starting my route:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Trace cBlueprintLibrary.cpp : 392 = Blueprint set not found : Kuju, RailSimulatorCore
Trace cBlueprintLibrary.cpp : 423 = Blueprint set not found for: Cameras\EditCamera001.xml

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
cScenarioDatabase.cpp : 1221
cBlueprintSet::loadFile Failed to load blueprint: RailNetwork\TrackRules\PONtrack.bin

cBlueprintSet::loadFile()

cBlueprintSet.cpp : 369
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, it looks like there are a couple of blueprints that it can't find. Not sure where to look for these. The last entry before failing appears to be the PONtrack.bin not being available. I don't remember using this blueprint anywhere in this route, so that is strange. I have only used the Scalerail track rules to the best of my knowledge. I did temporarily rename all the PONtrack rule versions (Sniper's and Otto's) in the PON Route, so there should be none available. Now that I see this, I will have to look closer in my own route to see what is up. Not sure what happened in the last 2 weeks that would make this kind of thing a problem, but it certainly is a nasty turn of fate.

Doug

Welcome to the PONtrack bug !!!
I just had the same problem tonight.
Here's how to solve it:

In Windows explorer, go to your Railworks folder.
Right-click on the folder and select "Open a command window here"
In the command window, type this:
del /S PONtrack.bin

It will find and delete all occurences of this file and you should be all set.
Note: that's a capital "O", not a zero.

Also you may want to clear the cache from with in railworks settings/tools. This will also clear the scenario database and it will be rebuilt at startup. Using the delete pak command line will not clear the database and may cause some issues.

The PONtrack.bin bug was my target, but apparently I missed one of them that for some reason was in the Kuju developer folder. I was focusing on the PON Route Asset folder. After deleting that errant copy all is working properly again.

Just curious, has anyone dissected the reason why this one track rule was causing virtually all 3rd party routes to fail, not just PON? It is not a universally used asset. One would assume that it wouldn't bother any route except the one where it resided. I am not aware that Sniper did anything to that track rule other than adjust radii of track and selection of relatively minor mods to textures. I am certain that he used the default track rules as the starting point. One thing does come to mind, since I found this track rule over in the Kuju files that were just modified in the update, and that is that somehow it just didn't work with whatever changes they made other than simply creating an .ap out of the assets. I had already expanded and extracted the Kuju assets before firing up the sim, so it has to be something a little deeper that was changed. I have no idea which route would have used Kuju as the developer, and this track rule for that route. Back in the early days of RS/RW many new route builders were erroneously using the Kuju developer folder for all their creations, so its anybodies guess.

Thanks loads to you folks for your advice and counsel. It is always appreciated.

Doug

Doug
The only practical way to find out why PONT etc is causing the crash would be to put it back, run Process Monitor in the background with logging on, and then when the sim crashes - have a look at the procmon log file and that should indicate what caused the issue.
If you look at your event viewer log at the time of the last crash that you saw - if there is an error it will show what might have caused the issue and I would suspect a cX000005 error ie memory mismatch which may be too general to give us an idea of what was happening.
Glad you got it sorted.
pH

Chacal wrote: In Windows explorer, go to your Railworks folder.
Right-click on the folder and select "Open a command window here"
In the command window, type this:
del /S PONtrack.bin

Chacal, what version of windows are you using? I'm currently running Windows 7 Home Premium, and not having any luck getting windows explorer to do your trick. I am still experiencing inability to run almost any if not all of my 3rd Party routes.

In Windows 7 or 8 you have to go to the Start Menu and at the bottom, type in command or command prompt. You will get a list of possibilities, but just choose "command prompt" and you will get the good old windows dialogue. Unfortunately, you may have problems getting it changed over to a specific folder, so just go to the drive you have Steam on (type C:, carriage return, or whatever drive you use). Do what chacal recommended, and all cases of the PONtrack.bin will.be removed.

Good Luck

Doug

Try holding the shift key down while right clicking on the folder.

Hey, that is a neat piece of info. Don't know how I missed that one. Thanks

Doug

I missed all the initial issues because I was away and late to update to 2014, however, now I have done it, I am not too impressed. I only play 3 routes - Tori's wonderful COA, B-24's impressive Bumbleberry Creek (basically a hyper scenic-ed Bauer Logging of the COA) and the New Haven V RR, and I couldn't get any of them to run. Ran them through RW Tools and there were so many missing files, all pointing to old files located in the new ap'd folders. Unpacked those, but made little difference. I ended up renaming the newly ap'd kuju folder, and restoring from my back up all of the original folder contents. Pretty sure I am going to have an issue at the next verification though.

Can at least open and edit now, but none of the included scenerios open (well, they open but are just blank) yet ones i have created with other 3rd party content (Dicks' USRA steam fleet etc) seem to work fine.

Who has the hours needed to unravel all of this just to get it to work!! If this is a designed strategy from RSC to lock the program down to only DLC purchased through them, then they will be playing the game without me, but to be honest I wouldnt be surprised, so they can push activity through the new Marketplace tool and to lock it up so they can try and implement multiplayer that we "just have to have"

My

I made a comment on the Alabama Route thread that I had pretty much lost interest in Railworks because of the havoc created for 3rd party routes by TS 2014. Was asked if I had been able to run any of the third party routes. Said I would answer over here. Up to that time, I had only been able to get one of them to run. That was the GN Butte-Great Falls route. We had been away for three weeks and I had not used RW since our return when I wrote that post. Decided to try to run it before writing this. When it came up I tried drive, standard. No routes or scenarios showed up. Only a blank. Tried editor. Same result. Here we go again. Must verify files. Did so. Result: 474 files missing. After going through this operation, tried running it again. Worked OK. Started trying out 3rd party routes. The routes all loaded OK including the P&LE which I had not been able to run since the 2013 upgrade.

Everything's perfect? Not quite.

1. Bay of Quinte. Loaded perfectly except there was no track. Developer used an early third party track, Mainline which had been installed in the Kuju\US folder. RSC removed it at some point. Had a backup, put it back in the Kuju\US folder. Track now shows in Bay of Quinte Route (at least until the next RSC improvement.

2. Many scenarios show missing rolling stock. So far all of the missing rolling stock is from the Kuju\US folder or the RSDL folder. I used scenarios that I had successfully run before, so the rolling stock had been in the folder at one time. Many of the early repainters put their models in the RSDL or Kuju folders as it was easier if you had to copy the GEOPCDX file into the repaint. Unfortunately, they did not anticipate that RSC would pull these 3rd party files. Not sure why RSC feels it is necessary to do this.

Looking forward to the next upgrade, so we can go through this again.

Don

Just found this thread and DELETING THE /S PONtrack.bin files actually works! AT least for me. None of my 3rd party worked. And it was all of a sudden. Everything worked fine for literally years and then yesterday morning, they would not work. I tried everything that was suggested by Steam and all posts I could find . Then I ran across this. I have no idea what I was doing, but I just followed the directions, and everything seems to be working.
I think the problem started when STEAM updated a couple of days ago.

What in the world is the PONtrack .bin anyway? And what corrupted it? Does STEAM or RSC need to know about this?

What in the world is the PONtrack .bin anyway?

I think it has to do with Jim Ward's Port Ogden To Chicago route over at Train Sim.com. It is a fantastic route and that is the tracks bin it uses.