After more than 6 months of ongoing development, we're getting close to the official Service Pack 2 release for Trainz A New Era. This means it's time to expand our testing to a much broader audience.
We're offering all our "SimulatorCentral/Trainzportal" T:ANE build 84204 customers the opportunity to patch to the latest SP2 Beta release.
There are some fundamental changes in SP2 with significant parts of the program rewritten to provide fixes and optimisations to core systems. This process ensures far greater compatibility with future versions of Trainz and, for example, enables TMR17 content to operate in TANE.
One of the biggest changes is to the route and session file format which will enable (in a future version) significantly faster loading times. We have also replaced Auto-Save with an ongoing write-to-disk operation. Routes are left open for edit while being edited, and any changes are rapidly written to disk.
We've also fixed a couple of hundred bugs ranging from crash fixes to major fixes for bridge spines, to ruler labels now being culled according to draw distance.
You can check out more details of all the updates in these news updates:
While we have come a long way since the first external beta testing back in November 2016, we know that there are still a number of issues that are not yet resolved. If you aren't interested in finding and reporting any bugs that you find (and you WILL find some bugs), then we suggest you wait until the official release (which we expect to happen in the coming weeks, as opposed to months away).
If you have 84204 installed (the build number shows on your launcher) we've already provided you Beta Access. If you have this build and do not have access to the 'Beta Stream', please click on the bug report link at our Beta Test Center
To update your build to SP2, please follow these steps carefully:
The update from 84204 is 2GB in size and therefore may take some time to download depending on your bandwidth and how busy our servers become.
If you get a connection error, click Retry and the process will pick up where it left off.
Once updated, the 'Engine Start-up' process will take another 5-10 minutes then you are ready to begin testing and submitting bugs that you find.
Please note if you have any of the following builds you can already update to 84204 by visiting this page.
For existing customers with build 79000 or lower, we recommend you upgrade to TANE SP1 by installing the full version available for download from your MyTrainz.com account.
For this beta release we still have "Assertions" enabled. So, what is an assertion?
Here is an example of a mesage that you may see when using this beta version. First of all, DON'T PANIC!
These messages are indicators to provide information to our programmers about code that is running at that time and may or may not result in something being broken.
If you see an assertion message, simply take a screenshot using windows PrintScreen of an external image capture tool, click Continue and submit a bug report
The following list includes items that were required as a result of significant "under-the-hood" changes and may not make much sense, but will give readers a good indication of the amount of work that has been going on behind the scenes. Many of these items have ben addressed as a direct result of users providing us their assertion reports which have been enabled in the latest beta