Here Come the Trainzes!

Read Me

Interface:

• Occasionally, upon starting a Super Session, your train may be audible and moving, but not be rendered… Just Pause the session (type "p") and all will get rendered immediately, then unpause (type "p") to continue. This is a bug in Trainz' pre-caching engine. Complain to the vendor if you care.
• Under some conditions, it may occur that, after running a Super Session for a while, fewer and fewer details are rendered. Just pause the session (type "p"), and everything will be loaded and rendered immediately, then unpause (type "p") to continue. This is a bug in Trainz' pre-caching engine. Complain to the vendor if you care.
• Should you find Trainz to be unresponsive when switching between trains (selecting another train), first Pause Trainz (type "p"), then select another train, then Unpause (type "p"). This is a bug in Trainz' pre-caching engine. Complain to the vendor if you care.
• Sometimes, when selecting another train, Trainz' GUI will continue show the previously selected train's Driver Schedule. You can force Trainz to update its UI by clicking either the curently selected locomotive, or Driver Character. Alternatively, you can ignore this – the UI will eventually update. Complain to the vendor if you care.
• As you are likely not used to running sessions of this duration, you might not be aware that Trainz may sometimes crash when you close a session or quit Trainz while Trainz is running a session. Workaround for this bug is to first Pause the session (type "p"), then close the session (in Driver > "System Menu" > "Exit Driver") or quit Trainz. Complain to the vendor if you care.
• The fugly green and red arrows indicating state and changes of junction positions, and trains' direction changes, cannot be muted, because, according to the vendor, "[…] this is needed for legacy reasons […]". Complain to the vendor if you care.
• Trainz likes to congratulate you on certain "achievements", but includes counting the achievements of automated trains. Thus, even though you're simply watching automated trains, not driving any yourself, you will now and then see Trainz pause the session and show you a window congratulating you on 'your achievement'… Just close that window to continue. Complain to the vendor if you care.
• By default, Trainz' "Driver Notifications" are switched on (shown bottom left of your screen, assuming you have the GUI enabled). Given the number of trains in our sessions, you will see an insane number of Driver Notifications. You can switch those off: in Driver mode, under "Display menu", uncheck the option "Driver Notifications"
• In the bottom-right of the GUI, Trainz shows warning messages like "SPAD", "Speeding", and others.. Some of those apply to your train, others refer to any other train, without providing a mechanism for you to find out to which one… Thus in practice, those messages are meaningless, useless, a waste of screen real estate and an annoying distraction from the actual game itself. Yet Trainz provides no mechanism to mute them. Complain to the vendor if you care.
• By default, Trainz shows an overlay when trains are loading/unloading passengers or freight. You can switch this off under "Display menu" > "Commodity Overlays" > "Always Hidden". (Btw, the option "Show if Recently Changed (My Trainz Only)" hasn't worked since TRS19. Complain to the vendor if you care.)
• Even though Trainz provides the option to specify driver characters' names in sessions, TRS22 sometimes ignores those; instead showing their default names in Driver. Complain to the vendor if you care.

Known Problems:

• Trainz allows you to change the driving mode (the three dots, bottom-right of the GUI) of automated trains, without warning you that this will permanently remove the train's schedule (in TRS22, the schedule will return, but visually only – it won't be executed). Feel free to do so, but understand that there is no way to get its schedule back, other than starting the session anew. Complain to the vendor if you care.
• Trainz' debug option to speed things up, only speeds up animation; not other events, like switching junctions etc. Therefore, trains will derail if you use Trainz' speed-up function. (Happens with any session, on any route. Nothing to do with our Super Sessions; just a flaw in Trainz' design. Complain to the vendor if you care.)
• Despite Trainz pretending to allow you to save a session in progress, it does not actually do so – it only partially saves the session's state. Upon opening it, automated trains will not actually know what command they are executing. Thus, at best, they will run until the first obstacle they happen to encounter. Complain to the vendor if you care.
• Trainz contains a bug that causes the automated switches between lineside- and cabine view (typically at tunnels) to occasionally fail, even disallowing the user to manually change the view. Should this occur, your only options are to wait until the view reverts to lineside, which it eventually will, or quit the session and start it anew.
• TRS22 insists on showing insane amounts of passengers on some platforms. We haven't yet found a workaround for this bug.
• In routes created in TRS19 or earlier, TRS22 may show bumps in the track where TRS19 did not. When you run a train over them, it will then complain about "Rough Handling"… (But at least it doesn't derail the train.) This is caused by track spline points having not been assigned a specific height, thus the track following the terrain. TRS19 hid such mistakes – TRS22 shows them. Complain to the author of the route if you care.

• While trains of course sometimes need to wait for each other, when you find that, during the day, multiple trains have stopped doing anything at all for over 30 minutes, especially while blocking a single-track stretch, you'll know for sure that you've encountered Trainz' broken cache engine (it caches session variables – complain to the vendor if you care).

  Should you run into this, you can fix it by waiting until the next full moon, then offer a decent sacrifice to the Godzes. The bigger your offer, the better. We find sacrificing a virgin or two, preferably a first-born, generally does the trick.

  Alternatively, a "repair database" (the "extended" variant may be necessary) followed by a quit, may or may not fix this.

  When not, you'll want to (quit Trainz first) manually delete the contents of its cache folder (except the file "performance.conf"), preferably followed by a database repair (followed by a quit).

  When all else fails, the most aggresive method we have found that you might need, is the following procedure, which assumes you've made your own back-ups; do not rely on Trainz' back-ups:

  1. prepare by locating Trainz' data folder on your file system (you can find its path in Trainz' Launcher Window > "Trainz Settings" > "Install" > "Local data folder")
  2. quit Trainz
  3. launch Trainz into its Launcher window
  4. open Trainz' Content Manager (in Trainz' Launcher Window click "Manage Content")
  5. delete the Super Session (only the session, not its dependencies!)
  6. close Content Manager
  7. do a 'rebuild database' (in Trainz' main menu, select: Developer > Rebuild database)
  8. quit Trainz
  9. from Trainz' data folder, delete
     • the file "asset-cache.tdx"
     • everything inside the backups folder
     • everything inside the cache folder, except for the file "performance.conf"
     • (possibly everything inside the "editing" folder – we're not entirely sure yet whether this affects this TRS bug)
  10. empty the trash
  11. launch Trainz into its Launcher window
  12. run an 'extended database repair' (go to Trainz' main menu bar and select "Developer" > "Rebuild Database" while holding the Control key)
  13. quit Trainz
  14. launch Trainz into its Launcher window
  15. click "Start Trainz" in its Launcher window
  16. If the Trainz window opens correctly, quit Trainz. If however it fails to fully render the splash screen, select "exit Trainz" in the botton left of the Trainz window, then try to quit Trainz. Most likely it'll have frozen solid and won't quit. Use your OS to force-quit Trainz.
  17. launch Trainz
  18. install the session file anew
  19. quit Trainz
  20. launch Trainz, click "Start Trainz" in its Launcher window, start the session and hope for the best…

  Note that the initial load of the session will take a bit longer after you've done this, because it will now need to cache everything anew.

• dead routes

  1. From TRS19 SP5 on, the signals that many routes use are rendered fugly: often, light signals show no or incorrect lights; arm signals do crazy rain dances. Still, this is only a visual issue; the signals do function. For routes that use those old signals, such as "Niddertalbahn TRS19" and "Central Europe Mini", use TRS19 SP3 if you care about this.
  2. From TRS22 SP3 on, Trainz doesn't even recognise those same signals as signals anymore… This means that routes such as "Niddertalbahn TRS19" and "Central Europe Mini", which use those signals, are now dead; they have passed away; they are no more; they have ceased to exist; they are bereft of life; they rest in peace; they are ex-routes; they are routes no more.

     The last version of Trainz capable of running any session on those routes is TRS22 SP2.

     For whatever reason, the author of those signals has not upgraded them to work with current versions of Trainz. The authors of those routes aren't likely to bother to replace all of those signals with ones that do work.

     The vendor does not provide you with the option to download TRS22 SP2 anymore. Complain to the vendor if you care.

     Hopefully you kept a copy of TRS22 SP2 yourself.

     We advise you keep copies of TRS whenever you install a new version, to avoid running into similar problems in the future.