Ok so yet again a dtg update has completely ruined 100s of hours of work! I've just opened a route I've been working on for the best part of 3 years to find every single bit of railway is missing! Does anyone know a way I can get all the tracks back please?
Try renaming the Tracks.bin file in the Network folder to (say) Tracks.bin.bak. I had a problem with tracks not appearing in Munich - Rosenheim and this sorted it.
So it's happened before and you still have no back up? I strongly advise having back up. There's more than just DTG updates that can cause you issues. Having no back up is leaving you wide open to data loss of all kinds.
I back up the modifications I make to a route, but I don't back up the .ap file as I assume, other than Steam ceasing trading, that this will always be available to me as a de-facto cloud back-up. This may be what the OP is referring to. What's the purpose of Tracks.bin as that was what messed up my re-install of M-R?
If you back up your entire Railworks folder, nothing will be missing no matter what happens. In fact, you should be backing up your entire machine, unless you only use it for Train Sim. I've lost count of the times I've been saved by having a "3-2-1" back up strategy, and many of these cases would have cost me money due to lost client files etc. I appreciate that Train Sim is only a game, but as with the case of the OP, can you put a price on your time if you have invested a great deal of it on a project? Then think of all the other stuff you may have that would be lost should the worst happen. You can get a USB3.0 1TB external SSD for around £29. That should be enough for most people's Railworks folders. It's not going to give you that "3-2-1" aspect that good back up requires, but it will rescue you from casual data loss due to things like updates overwriting stuff, or even accidental deletion.. just don't leave it plugged in. I'm fairly evangelical about back up, and I make no apology for it, particularly in instances like this, where it is not the first time it has happened and there's still no back up present. That's just like twice previously being injured because you weren't wearing a seatbelt, and still continuing to not wear a seat belt. If you get back up, hopefully, you'll never need it, but if you do, you'll thank me for this advice even if you think I'm being an overbearing zealot right now.
I think you can certainly put an emotional price on it, if not a financial one. I lost about 15 of my own music tracks I'd done the mixing and mastering for on my computer a few years ago, due to a lack of solid backup protocol. Didn't cost me anything in terms of lost business as I'm a hobbyist, but it did leave me feeling extremely gutted. Lesson learned.
I have a backup of my route. Reinstalling the route does not fix the problem. I though maybe it's delisted dlc but the dlc is still present in tsc. The route worked fine a month or 2 ago I closed tsc and it hasn't been used since. Opened steam on the computer that only has tsc on it had to wait a minute for a update and when I loaded the route there's no tracks anywhere, open the 2d map and it's blank. Tried to rename the tracks bin and it did t work. It's not a small route either. It's Faversham high speed merged with chatham mainline plus North South and East London. Spent months backdating everything. Added the bowaters light railway. Sheppey light railway plus every every bit of track that served every bit of industry in the 1940s. Elham valley line I added and many other branch lines of the area. Run a line from hoo junction too hoo. Was extending the North Kent line into London. Devastated is a understatement.
This sadly is why I am loath to start building routes in TSC again, preferring to do so in Trainz, even though the driving experience is pants and route building comes with its own pitfalls. Nevertheless I got stung by DTG (probably RSC back then) after building my freelance version of the Lithgow zigzag railway in Australia and the parallel NSW main line. Along came a DTG update and all the Dorman style signals I'd used on the main line had their links nulled and the signal post numbers I'd used had been zeroed.
That's bad. Updates won't touch your own creations, but their dependencies. No developer can rule that out completely to be fair. I actually like restoring things, and using MassSearchAndReplaceTool (google for it) you can fix your route tiles and tracks.bin (just use SerzMaster.exe to mass uncompile them to xml) if you know the path of the changed dependencies. It's just an automated Search and Replace thing which can be quickly done. I'm up for helping on this, can be done in less than an hour. As bad as it is, I think updates of that kind are *very rare*, and not to be expected in the future. (maybe only if you're using assets from newly released content that is subject to fixes). Different thing is modded content getting removed by Steam file verification - so backups are mandatory.
Oh this all happened years ago Maik. I grumbled a bit, fixed the signalling and reuploaded to UKTS, where I think the route is still available. But it does make one very reluctant to touch the editors particularly because for casual route building, Trainz Surveyor (with Transdem from Roland Ziegler) is just so much easier.
Maik? That's the one who's left the TSC building right? Ziegler Tools, they're also used for Zusi. Trainz? What's that? A mizspelling? Will check your route on UKTS Vern. What's it called? ............................................................................................................................................................ Attention DTG! Not interested in TSW in the slightest way!
