The next Public release of Open Rails will take place on May 27th

[OTTODAD]

Yes. We settled on a version that was fairly stable for public release. Work still carries on in the background.

Thanks, Chris !

The team has done a great job so far and there is no point mentioning anything which is not yet working as it should, the team is no doubt aware of.

It will take a long time to make all this work as is should and hope that at the age of 81 I am young enough to see the finished version !

Good luck and keep up the good work !

Take care, O t t o.

[tcain1]

Thanks, Chris !

The team has done a great job so far and there is no point mentioning anything which is not yet working as it should, the team is no doubt aware of.

It will take a long time to make all this work as is should and hope that at the age of 81 I am young enough to see the finished version !

Good luck and keep up the good work !

Take care, O t t o.

I agree, this has the potential of being the train sim of choice over Railworks, Trainz, and of course replacing MSTS. I tried it on the PRR and it ran up til BWI, before crashing. That however was the smoothest I've ever seen an MSTS route run. It ran at a constant 85FPS, and not one stutter or pause. It was even smoother then my flightsims, FSX or X-Plane. Great Job!!!

[longiron]

it ran up til BWI, before crashing.

Hi, thanks for the compliments on OR's performance. Can you describe the crashing issue? What happened? This is the first time I've ever heard of OR crashing. Lots of other stuff, but never a CTD. Would you also provide your HW and OS level to assist the team.
Thanks

[sniper297]

Do a search in the MSTS Routes section of the file library for "prr eastern", if ANY route would cause ORTS to crash that would be the one. It's the biggest megaroute there is, and the developers had to use a lot of bailing wire and duct tape to get around assorted MSTS limitations. Be a good route for destructive testing of the main program.

[tcain1]

Hi, thanks for the compliments on OR's performance. Can you describe the crashing issue? What happened? This is the first time I've ever heard of OR crashing. Lots of other stuff, but never a CTD. Would you also provide your HW and OS level to assist the team.
Thanks

Sure, I was using an activity on the PRR I created that just ran an Acela (The good one in the library, not the default) from Washington to New York, at the point in the activity that the train should have switched from the center tracks to the Northbound track, it never switched. The train just got above BWI then I got a App error Dialog box. (Sorry I should have taken a screenshot at that time.) When I clicked ok I lost the video signal on my projector (I use a Mitsubishi XD490U projector). I was unable to get it back and had to do a hard reboot. I'll try and run it again for you and see if I can recreate it, If so I'll take a screenshot of the error before I lose the video signal (Which BTW that was the first time I've ever seen this behavior, but I just put it down to using Beta software, and that it probably only happened because I was using a projector instead on a monitor at 1920x1080 which the projector can display but compresses the image, so I wasn't too concerned with it.)

My system specs are an E6850 @3.0Ghz (No Over clock) 4GB memory Geforce 9800GTX 512KB video card and Window XP 32 Bit home edition with the /3GB switch activated. Which BTW I just checked with CFF explorer and the .EXE's are not high address aware, so maybe this was an out of memory issue? The PRR is the largest route for MSTS, and it runs out of memory itself. I'll run it again to see what happens, and if it fails again, I'll set the >2GB memory address switch with CFF Explorer, and see if that solves the issue. This was how I solved my OOM's with MS FSX!

[tcain1]

This time I got much further, it went up to about 20-30 miles South of Wilmington before the error. This time though I didn't lose the video signal. Memory shown on the display at the time was about 481MB. (Is that system memory reading, or the video memory? I'm going to try now setting the Address >2GB switch. Will post results. Switches are still ignored, but I assume that just hasn't been programmed yet.

[tcain1]

Ok same thing happened at about the same area. Got a box saying Run Activity encountered a problem and had to close. One thing I noticed this time though the open rails app was still running. When I opened it the sim was still running but without track or scenery. Here are the screenshots

[muskokaandtahoe]

I've seen that myself. I dunno what actually is happening... I suspect one of the threads has died (but not the updater, which makes trains go). It'll take a fair bit of debugging to track down.

[OTTODAD]

The PRR - East Region can be obtained only from their official site, referred to in this post: https://www.trainsim.com/vbts/showpo...30&postcount=1

Testing my copy of it, using one of my 2 activities, running my 2000 mph HST SFExpress huge routes tester, below is all that ORTS does.

It's OpenRailsLog.txt reports the last used run only, which was another test running the Horseshoe activity, stopping after the 4th TDB error.

Is there a specific activity I should test, I can install again from my V.12 ?

Having been updated since, it's TDB is 3.Feb.10 and the most recent WORLD file is 7.Feb.10.

O t t o

[OTTODAD]

Re-installed the original activities and ran the Drive the Broadway Limited activity . Below is what happened, again stopping as before.

O t t o

[longiron]

Memory shown on the display at the time was about 481MB. (Is that system memory reading, or the video memory? I'm going to try now setting the Address >2GB switch. Will post results. Switches are still ignored, but I assume that just hasn't been programmed yet.

Memory switches are ignored by OR as it uses MSFT XNA framework, not the MSTS EXE. If you push F5 twice, this activates the OR advanced dev HUD, you can see the amount of RAM Open Rails is using.

[longiron]

Re-installed the original activities and ran the Drive the Broadway Limited activity . Below is what happened, again stopping as before.

O t t o

Otto,
This is probably better addressed by the PRR beta team, OR is finding TDB references (40969, 40963) that are not in the TSECTION.DAT. My experience is that OR is usually correct when it comes to things like this.

[GaryG]

I wonder if some of the .eng, .wag and .sms file errors could be leading to the problem. The Open Rails loading panel gives us an excellent MSTS error checking tool.

GaryG

[OTTODAD]

Otto, this is probably better addressed by the PRR beta team, OR is finding TDB references (40969, 40963) that are not in the TSECTION.DAT. My experience is that OR is usually correct when it comes to things like this.

The PRR - East Region has no problem running in MSTSBin and neither should ORTS have any.

If ORTS can not handle routes which are not 100% perfect, not causing any problems in MSTS, then there will be problems it trying to run many of the add-on routes which have been created by less experienced route developers.

It's TDB and local Tsection.dat was corrupted with hundreds of adjacent tracks problems, caused by the merging of routes which had used the default Tsection.dat with others that were created with a Standardized version.

I fixed these problems for them a long time ago and there could still be a few useless orphans left even after one of their team found another method of repairing it.

Here is my tutorial on that subject: https://www.otto-wipfel.co.uk/msts-d...oblems-fix.zip

Will let TSUtils run checks on the PRR to see what it reports and also ORTS test run my GOLD-SPIKE.

O t t o

[longiron]

Will let TSUtils run checks on the PRR to see what it reports and also ORTS test run my GOLD-SPIKE.

Otto,
Thanks for offering to assist on this issue.

The PRR - East Region has no problem running in MSTSBin and neither should ORTS have any.

Otto,
Backwards compatibility is always a balance, as you know from your programming days. Our goal is not to ensure 100% compatibility with anything ever produced for MSTS without errors. There are a lot of strange and unfathomable things in MSTS that OR will not try to reproduce. :>)