Bin problems at light change?

[seern]

Has anyone experienced problems with crashes when the sim cycles from night to day and back. I have noted it happen when it goes from day to night, things just freeze.

[sniper297]

Nope. First step - is it BIN or unrelated? After making absolutely sure you have a backup copy of the pre-BIN train.exe file:

http://forums.flightsim.com/ts/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=32&topic_id=145&mesg_id=145&page=

Run the uninstaller for BIN. Create a test activity with a starting time of 19:58 (or whatever time your actual sunset is) and see if it still does it. To rule out a route problem make the aforementioned test activity on an unmodified original route.

My SWAG: Most likely cause is you have an SD file pointing to a night texture that's MIA, sim tries to load night texture at sunset, don't find it, and then does what MSTS does best.

[Hawk]

It may not be Bin related as seen in this thread.

http://forums.flightsim.com/ts/dcboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=30&topic_id=350&mesg_id=350&listing_type=search

It could be an object in a route causing the problem.

[Turbo Bill]

In testing this activity with Sharon and another member who was getting a freeze at precisely the same moment in time regardless of position I got a light bulb over my head and it flashed on. Something Hawk said made me start looking for what could be going on at that time. I checked the engine's light section for any Time of Day values and found none. Then if hit me. The sim environment should change from night to day at that time but mine was already light before the witching moment. Sure enough I was using the Badland Clear environment so I switched it to a different one and voila no more freezing of the sim. You must use environments that change from their night to day textures as the default settings or you may get a freeze at the change point in time. Looks like another issure for Bin George. I think this may be tied into how the cabs go from night to day cabs.

[tpilot]

Another lighting issue - not freezing, but related to BIN.

I was testing with Phil Gosney's SD70Mcab.zip cabview and the default Marias route and found some weird intermittent errors.

Sunrise on this route is around 0600.

Started an Explore route at 0300 and had a correct night cab and night environment. Didn't run anything.

Exited and started at 0600 and had day textures on the control handles, but a night texture for the front view.

Exited and started at 1000 and had a full night cab with bright daylight outside. (Also at similar times saw a full daylight cab and twilight outside lighting.)

FWIW.

[Hack]

>You must use environments that change from their night to day textures as the default settings or you may get a freeze at the change point in time.

No time issues here, and I have always used various sunrise/set times in my own ENV files. I do not, however, use animated water or clouds, so I'm not sure about those.

Cheers!
Marc - 3DTrains
http://www.3dtrains.com

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Pro Series v4.0 SuperPacks

[Turbo Bill]

Now that an expert has joined in, is there a way to change the environment time stamp for the night/day change in the Badlands Clear Kosmos environment to match the default settings or vice versa? I really like the nice sunny day you get with that one and the longer day time as well.

[sniper297]

Don't matter if it's Sky Conductor, Kosmos, or default, same applies to all. Go into the ENVFILES folder, find the "nice_sunny_day.env" or whatever it's called, then open in wordpad. Find this:

world_sky_layer_fadein ( 18:00:00 20:00:00 )
world_sky_layer_fadeout ( 06:00:00 08:00:00 )


Change those times to change when starsky appears, then further down;

world_sky_satellite_rise_time ( 07:00:00 )
world_sky_satellite_set_time ( 18:00:00 )

Change that to something wierd like;

world_sky_satellite_rise_time ( 01:00:00 )
world_sky_satellite_set_time ( 23:00:00 )

And you'll have Land of the Midnight Sun. Further down you'll also find the section for the moon, you can have that out in the daytime as well. Build a route on Mars and make some custom ace files, then add another satellite and you can have the sun, Deimos, and Phobos rising and setting. :o

On topic, but what happened to the original poster (sorry, forgot who it was!)? Get the original problem sorted out?

[Turbo Bill]

Thanks for the examples. I will update my Kosmos Badlands clear to match the default time settings so it will quit freezing. And to answer your question on the original poster, yes I did get Sharon fixed up on her freezing problem at the witching moment. She changed environments and all is well.

[sniper297]

If it freezes when changing from day to night, and changing environments fixes it so that it changes from day to night without freezing, then your problem is not in an ESD setting - it's in the ENV file itself. Most likely cause is something in the night datablock, or a missing texture. For example, I haven't tried this yet, but I suspect if you delete starsky.ace from the \ENVFILES\TEXTURES folder, the game would crash at whatever time is specified for starsky.ace to replace daysky.ace. Same with moon.ace, the ENV says the moon should rise at 18:30, when the clock hits 18:30 if moon.ace isn't in that \ENVFILES\TEXTURES folder, then MSTS would throw a hissy fit at that time. Whatever textures are called for have to be there, and like any other unicode file a ")\" where a ")" should be can screw up the whole mess.