Smr Simple!

I need some help please to sort out why I cant get a couple of maps to run. The maps are : Basin and Range demo, Middle East and Utah.With b and r demo the scenery dissolves soon after the start of track laying/train running.
With Utah I can get the first track and train from Green river to the wheat paddock. Soon after starting to lay track for the second train the first track vanishes and the scenery dissolves in places.
Middle east just ctd's after about 20 mins.
The maps I have on are:
B and R demo
Chicago to rockies
Ohio
Middle East
Sids place
Side to side
Superbowl express
Texarkana
UK pennines
Utah
Dog World
Santa from here
The scenery dissolving is similiar to what happens with Mesa Madness' I really dont know what to do any advice would be appreciated. The computer is only a few months old. Its specs are;
AMD 64 x 2
Running XP
G Force 8800 GTS

I have a GEForce 8600 and just got new drivers from Windows Update

It allowed me to play Mesa Madness for the first time without a crash

I am also noticing that things seem to be more stable when you don't run all of the graphics options to their minimum values. I am not sure about that, but it seems to be the case.

Go Figure.

Good luck... I hope others have better help for you.

I'm guessing that you already know to run only 1 CPU....
You're not running Vista, so you're OK there.....
Gforce....Should be an ATI to go with the AMD......
(just kidding... )

What you didn't tell us was how much memory you have, what your Virtual Memory(VM) settings are and what you have running in the background. SamuraiProgrammer also has pointed out something important. Cut down to 2X and minimum or low on the rest. Set VM to 4 to 8 Gb. Stop as much memory usage as you can.
This game is a memory hog... with the material that memory has to hold with all of those Mods, it can require 1Gb mem and 800Mb VM. I have 2.5 Gb right nowand it can still have problems. One thing for you and many others to look into is TweakGuide and Black Viper. There are many things running on your system that you may not know about or need. Are you aware that XP starts up 802.11? (what do i need wireless for?) And unless you are playing online, you have no need of any virus protection, Spy-bot or Ad-aware running.

I have the problem with B&R also. At least I did, I haven't tried it since I reloaded the game(a few of the maps run or run better) and tweaked my system.

Let us know if any of this helps.

Utah is a pretty big map. So when "the scenery dissolves", I hit the Window button, between Ctrl and Alt. Then I switch back to SMR. Works for me every time.

mikeyc wrote: With Utah I can get the first track and train from Green river to the wheat paddock. Soon after starting to lay track for the second train the first track vanishes and the scenery dissolves in places.
Middle east just ctd's after about 20 mins.

You may need more memory or use the Large Address fix for your Railroads exe. The game drinks memory on large maps. 2gig should do the trick but I run 4 at 800mhz. The 8800 card is fine I use the same...I think mine is the one with 320 megs of ram on it, although I feel the 8800's with the 750megs of ram would be much better. The Basin and Range Demo map has a "map-name confilct" inside it...when they came out with the final version it killed the old version because of the name confilct in the two files. A couple of the other maps you have mentioned above FAIL in the Scenario Manager and have not been fixed. If you have trouble with "any" map made you should go to the thread where the map was posted and post a comment there so the map maker can respond.

Have you set in your "Graphic Options" the "Shaders" to medium?
We have discussed this before and it helped with the Mesa scenario.
Jancsika

Gentlemen. thanks for your replies.

Samuari: The 8800 card has been updated. The graphic settings I am using in the game are;
anti a, 4x
Texture, high
Clouds, off
trees, low
Shadows, off
Shader, off

Snoopy : I will have to get back to you. I dont understand much of what you wrote. I will get my son to decipher it and find out the info. I'm not trying to be smart but I dont understand what goes on under the bonnet of the computer.

Lowel;Same as Snooopy. I take your point about posting in the thread of a particular map and will do so.

Thanks for your interest everyone. To be continued

More of those things for Wiki write-ups........

Your Shaders will need to be set to medium...or you will have problems.

Lowell wrote:Your Shaders will need to be set to medium...or you will have problems.

Not true, I have run my shaders on High since I got the game. Only use Medium or Low if you get visual anomalies or are suffering performance issues.

SMR does not crash for me unless there is a problem with the custom content. Which is not very often and usually caused by me.

I use 2x Anti-Aliasing and Texture/Tree/Shadow/Shader set to High. The game runs great for me and I don't have a high-end system.

So experiment a little as each system is different.

The static swap file seems to be a good choice though and I have mine set to 1024. But I've been running static for years so I probably have had fewer crashes and a more pleasant experience than others until it was uncovered that it seemed to help SMR.

AA will eat up your GPU, set everything else to high before you start raising the AA setting.

What I ment was there are several maps that if you run low of off on the shaders you will tear the landscape when running track...then other things just don't render good when set to off or low. As I said in my post above I run mine at High as well.