[sawyer811]

A picture will explain this much better than I ever could:

http://imageshack.us/a/img545/5858/h28n.jpg

as you can see, the track, buildings, and trees on the route are just a bunch of grey blobs basically. At first I thought it was because I didn't have X tracks or new roads installed (I thought I had downloaded them previously, but I must not have judging from the fact they installed fully and didn't complain when I went to test that theory). This is the result of firing up the route again after the install of both new roads and Xtracks. I'm currently running the latest stable version (0.9 I believe?), and this issue seen above has not been encountered before for me, nor does it affect any of the other routes I have installed to the best of my knowledge (only had time to test 2 or 3 others yesterday). Before you ask, I haven't tried this route in MSTS yet. Normally good ol Microsoft Train Sim is so flaky on my machine -- and I still don't have the slightest clue why -- that I refrain from running it: I had it corrupt a route I was tinkering with once, and since then have been running scared somewhat. I'll try to get into MSTS today and see how the route behaves though.

EDIT: I just tried to run Northwest Lines in MSTS, and the game crashed to desktop on me. That kind of behavior is why I use ORTS exclusively nowadays...

[wacampbell]

It appears there is a problem with your TEXTURES folder. Did it uncompress and install properly? First easy thing is to look in your route directory, and see if the TEXTURES folder exists. If its there, look inside to see if it is full of .ace files.

[sawyer811]

I was actually kinda worried that was it: I have the Texture folder in the directory, but it only contains the seasonal sub-folders: Autumn, Autumn snow, Night, etc.

Actually, even as I typed this, I re-read the readme file and realized I missed a step: as usual, I'm an idiot and didn't fully follow the instructions. Forgive me for wasting your valuable time people. :)

[Falcus]

You're not an idiot, its a mistake, one you've probably already fixed ^^. We've all made them.

I would suggest that if you're running Orts, MSTS should run decently on your computer... Though "Tinkering" with Files in Routes is an easy way to throw a Wrench into MSTS any day.... ORTS is currently more forgiving, but it may not stay that way, as its a work in progress. As some one already pointed out in another thread I've been following recently, most of making MSTS work right is just Folder Organization, IE, Making sure what needs to be where it needs to be is there where it in fact needs to be.... There are a large variety of tools to help you do this. Route Control, Route Riter, Train Store, and even indirectly things like Shape Viewer, Conbuilder/Convoi. Getting MSTS working properly is a good way of eliminating errors from ORTS (Since ORTS is primarily a new and improved MST-Simulator at this point, reading all of its databases and files for its simulations, though this is slowly changing with the release of more OR only content....).

I guess I just feel like, MSTS is so old, basic, and generally cantankerous, that if you can make MSTS work, then you'll save yourself alot of headache later dealing with newer stuff like ORTS particularly since, to the best of my knowledge, all of the utilities that are essentially required to make MSTS work decently are very easy to use for ORTS content as well...

Regardless, the choice to pursue (Optional: replace"Choice to pursue" with "Chance of Adventure", because it really is) MSTS or not is of course yours, and I wish you luck in whatever you end up doing.

Falcus