I've been playing with the old Bristol and Avonmouth route (Just Trains). I cloned the route, and have been working with it for ages now, modifying it on and off. In general I've found the route editor to be as flaky as hell and have seen it crash on numerous occasions. The whole editing process has been very frustrating overall. Then yesterday, in my cloned route, a whole pile of stuff simply went missing. Signal gantries have vanished, leaving signals floating in the air. Lots of buildings have gone too. The editor crashed (again) right on a save, after I had modified some of the platforms, and so I think this is the culprit - leaving the route in some incoherent state, but I'm not sure really. I was also playing with the "Asset" filter, so I'm wondering if I unticked and thus unloaded some assets the route was using, however, I'm pretty sure that all of these are now ticked again. The gantries still appear in the original Bristol and Avonmouth route, and focussing on them, it appears as though they are from an Oxford - Paddington asset pack. Is there any way of reconstructing all the missing stuff, or is that it now? Game over? Overall editing this route has been pretty frustrating, the editor is very user unfriendly and not very robust either to be honest.
This is one of the most frustrating things in TS, the editor... I don't touch scenery but even the scenario editor is a bit (lot) of a pig. I would suggest turning all of the asset filters to ON (or at least as many as you can remember) to see if you've simply unselected them, but I also don't know if unselecting and then saving removes the assets from the route anyway... Hopefully someone with more knowledge on route editting can be of help. I would only remind you that backing up is your friend, so hopefully you have some means of rolling back to an earlier stage
Oh yes. I've been through tons of pain with the scenario editor too! It looks as though you are right. Removing the assets from the filer box causes them to be removed from the world - even when you re-instate the assest group in the editor, the stuff doesn't reappear in the world. I proved this by simply adding the Wherry Lines pack. Plopped a set of wooden level crossing gates outside Temple Meads and then unloaded the Wherry Lines asset pack. The level crossing gates remain in place when you do this, so you think all is well. Until you save the world and reload it next time they vanish. So all in all not a very intuitive way of doing things. So it really boils down to whether there's an easy way of adding all the stuff back in. Otherwise it's game over for this experiment. I really can't be bothered to go through the pain all over again. I've noticed that in the Scenery directory for the route there are lots of .BAK versions of the files. The BAK files for a given file appear to be numbered in sequence: 1, 2, 3... So maybe there are backup versions there and it's possible to reinstate the route to a couple of days ago. In this case I'd want to go a couple of days back - how would you know which files to re-instate?
I would say trial and error. change the current file to ".old" and then put a .bak in it's place. If it's the wrong one you can either delete or rename that bak to .bak and try another one. Hopefully one will be the "best of the bad"
Yes, I think you are right. It would be useful if the backup files were dated correctly - that is, when the backup were made, but they are not. Sigh. I've just tried one and the scenery reappears.......except one gantry is in a slightly moved position.......
I think the windows properties are your best bet on that one. The file metadata should tell you when it was created and when it was last editted / modified
