Installing Rail Simulator packages into Railworks

[sniper297]

Those who are buying Railworks and never had the predecessor Rail Simulator often have trouble installing the old packages into the new game. There are four basic package types;

1. Third party executable such as ClickTeam or Winzip self extractors, for those you merely need to point the installer to your Railworks folder.

2. Official addon installers that refuse to install when they can't find Rail Simulator. For these use the "Install Legacy Rail Simulator Addon" button in the package manager.

3. Official packager files with an extension ending in .rpk. For that use the regular Install button in the package manager.

4. RS_Tools packages. These have a RouteSetup.exe or Asset_Setup.exe file along with .xxx or .ggg files containing the data that originally got appended to the master files. Many route developers used this because it had built in error checking and made backups of critical files before overwriting them, so was more foolproof and failsafe than the official packager.

For .rpk files;



Start the Railworks launcher, select the package Manager tab, then click Install, NOT the Legacy Installer. Browse for the .rpk file, acknowledge the warning message, and install the same way you would an .rwp file.

For the ones packaged with RS_Tools you'll need RW_Tools;

http://www.rstools.info/page8.html

Once you have that installed use the converter to change the railsim installer. When unzipped a route looks like this;




That won't work in Railworks because it's designed to append the code from the Route_Setup.xxx file into the master Routes.xml file, which in Railworks has been replaced by independent RouteProperties.xml files in each individual route's main folder. So to convert;



Note it says "select the folder containing the RouteSetup.exe", if the guy buried that inside three subfolders you need to go to the one that has the RouteSetup.exe.



When that's done go back to the folder and doubleclick on RW_RouteSetup.exe and point that to the Railworks folder. All the conversion has been done in that one step, RouteProperties.xml added to the folder, scenarios.bin deleted and all the code from that split up into the individual ScenarioProperties.xml files required by Railworks, so there shouldn't be any hacking required for these to work.



Railsim Port Ogden & Northern USA 2route from February 2008 installed straight into Railworks after converting the installer.

[sniper297]

First item, installation of freeware addons often becomes confusing because there are different ways of packaging stuff. Computer dummies stumble because they don't know the basics of file management, what goes where and why.

http://www.dummies.com/store/Compute...s/Windows.html

If you're one of those, buy and read the dummies book for your operating system, if you have Windows Vista don't buy Windows XP for Dummies, get the one for Vista.

Knowing the basics of how to actually operate a computer makes figuring this stuff out a breeze.

Essential Railworks management tool;

http://www.rstools.info/page8.html

Scroll down to RW-Tools Downloads and click the download button, install RW-Tools and learn to use it.



Using a repaint of an SP ES44 for this example, I download and unzip to a temp folder.



Look to see if it has a readme.txt file, and it does - but the assetsetup.exe he's talking about is nowhere to be found.

At this point, if you're a computer dummy, your best bet is to just delete it and find something else to download. This one has a contact email so you can ask the developer about fixing it, but in many cases the reason these things get screwed up in the first place is because the developer himself is just as clueless. Those who have read the Windows for Dummies book can go on if they really want to, since we know what goes where and why. RSC advises against copying and pasting primarily because there are far too many people who ARE computer dummies, and will paste files and folders into the wrong places. But sometimes these repaints are packaged with the INTENTION that the end user will copy it to the correct place, so let's try that with this one.



This has an SP folder, looking in that I find an ENGINE folder, look for a file that ends with .bin and open that with RW-Tools. I click the Search and Replace, I'm not going to replace anything, just search for "geometry". That shows me the internal path for this file, \Railworks\Assets\ is assumed, everything else inside the \Railworks\Assets\ folder is spelled out in the GeometryID. In this case it's going to be looking for (\Railworks\Assets\) Kuju\RailSimulatorUS\RailVehicles\Diesel\ES44AC\SP and since I already have the SP folder, I merely need to copy that SP folder into Kuju\RailSimulatorUS\RailVehicles\Diesel\ES44AC to match the path it's calling for.



So I open two copies of Windows Explorer, copy the SP folder from one and paste it into the other. If you're new to file management procedures in general, be advised you should double check the correct path, and make a note of where you're copying this stuff so you can delete it if it blows up in your face. Fixing problems that you created yourself isn't THAT difficult provided you keep track of what you did and when so you can undo it if you need to.



Next step is to start the Railworks launcher, click the Tools and Docs tab, then click the Clear Cache button to delete all the blueprints.pak files. This forces the program to read through all the files to rebuild the list, so it will load the new engine that you just installed.



Forgot to mention, while you had the .bin file open in RW-Tools, make a note of the display name so you can easily find it in the list.

[calleighpark]

Tons of really good info here for beginning simmers!!! Thanks for the Heads-up!!!

[B_and_L_E]

Knowing the basics of how to actually operate a computer makes figuring this stuff out a breeze.

Essential Railworks management tool;

http://www.rstools.info/page8.html

Scroll down to RW-Tools Downloads and click the download button, install RW-Tools and learn to use it.

The RS Tools info link -after left or right clicking- is showing up as this:

deadlink1.jpg

Is it something I'm doing wrong, or is it a dead link?

[demando]

I believe this thread should be locked.

[Craig H]

And made a sticky.