Using Activity Wal - Military Movement, in Route Black Country -LNWR-1920

Hello All


Possibly Brian may be the best person to answer this (?)

I have loaded and run the above activity successfully many times before. I have now downloaded Brian's four 1920s routes, including Black Country which I have installed in an ORTS directory (ie no MSTS folders or directories in it) in a folder called "Black Country - LNWR -1920" - I am only using Open Rails. All of Brian's activities work flawlessly. I then tried installing Eric Holly's "Wal - Military Movement" and came up with a couple of problems. The first is that it would not install in "Black Country - LNWR -1920" using either the installer or the APK, it insisted on creating its own folder "Black Country - LNWR". Not a problem, I copied all the folders from the new folder to "Black Country - LNWR -1920" and I was ble to run it. The second problem arose when I tried to save the activity - it saved OK but with error messages saying that the route was saved with an unexpected name. When I try to resume it stops and asks me to browse to the folder containing the .act file, ie "Black Country - LNWR". I checked the Route ID in the .act file, and it is "Black Country - LNWR" exactly the same as Brian's .act files.

This is not patholgical, but it is certainly very irritating.

Might I ask if anyone can make any suggestions on this one? Clearly the problem is that the .exe installer does not install into the new directory.

Somewhere in the files there must be a reference to the file ID "Black Country - LNWR", but I can't find it. (I also tried modifying it without success, but I didn't expect the change to work since Brian's .act files are identical.

Regards

Tony

tonya37 wrote:Hello All


Possibly Brian may be the best person to answer this (?)
Tony

G'day Tony,

I appreciate what you are saying, however the act in question is now around six years old and subject to a significant disruption caused by the closure of UKTS. This also applies to Eric's other Black Country 1920 activity - Coventry to Wolverhampton.

There are two totally separate situations here - BEFORE the closure of UKTS, and AFTER the closure of UKTS.

I note that this act has a list of stock that contains a number of locos (Claughtons, Prince, Experiment, 19" goods, etc) which are NO LONGER available from the remaining file libraries. If you want to try to continue using this act, you will need to substitute some of the stock in the consists that ARE AVAILABLE.

Unfortunately, I am not in a position to adjust/tweak an activity written by another author - that is one reason that I have provided an updated set of my activities for the route. In my own installation, I have two separate installations, one, OR-LMS Pre-Group (contains all previous stock downloaded from UKTS), and the other, OR-LMS Pre-Group TSSH (contains ONLY stock currently available for download from TSSH).

It is really a matter of the original author taking the time to modify his activities so that it can run on what is currently available from TSSH

Brian

Thanks for your reply Brian.

I appreciate what you say, especially about changing other people's work - it was not my intention to suggest that you do that, I was really looking for any insights that you might have. I'm sorry if it came over that way. I have all the necessary stock, and the activity does work. The problem is that when resuming a run in Open Rails it looks for the .act file in "Black Country - LNWR". This appears to be because I couldn't install the .act in "Black Country - LNWR -1920" (it created and installed itself in "Black Country - LNWR -1920") and I copied the .act file from there. Somewhere there must be a reference that needs changing - I thought perhaps you might have an idea what it was. Next step is to try renaming "Black Country - LNWR -1920" to "Black Country - LNWR" and install it there - see what happens. In any case the problem is only irritating, not terminal. Your file IDs in the .act file are identical to the fileid in EHolly's .act - but your .acts work perfectly.

I like your idea of having an installation allowing UKTS files and one restricted to TSSH files, I'll apply that to my installations. This I think would solve this particular problem anyway.

Regards

Tony

tonya37 wrote:Thanks for your reply Brian.

................I like your idea of having an installation allowing UKTS files and one restricted to TSSH files, I'll apply that to my installations. This I think would solve this particular problem anyway...................Regards Tony

Yes, I found it was too disruptive to make new activities when my single OR installation held 'absolutely everything'. By dividing it up into TWO installations, one based on former UKTS stock and a  separate one based ONLY on TSSH stock, it means that when I make any new activities, etc, for the AFTER UKTS situation, that I don't accidentally include any stock that is no longer available. mostly I use the TSSH installation for my 'daily running', but from time to time I fire up the UKTS installation for a bit of nostalgic running with older models that are no longer available.

Brian