Hi All, I'm new to RRRE, having just bought the DTM Experience 2013 and the DTM 1992 Car Pack in the Steam Sale. However, I'm a long-time user of all of the previous SimBin content (GTR, GTR2, GTLegends, Race07, WTCC, STCC, etc.) Anyway, I really want to get RRRE working well and see why most people here say it's a great sim. I'm experiencing two problems so far and hope some of you can help out! All of the car and track images are missing from the various spots in the menus where you choose them. I instead sometimes see a generic browser-type image icon, but never the actual car or track preview image. For someone like me, this is rather crippling, since I have very little idea what I'm picking. I've tried various things to get these images to appear (some advice was here: https://forum.sector3studios.com/index.php?threads/ok-wheres-my-purchased-content.1162 ) - In Steam, I deleted the local files and completely reinstalled. - I also "Verified Integrity of Game Cache..." multiple times. - I found the EXE (\steamapps\common\raceroom racing experience\Game\RRRE.exe) and set it to run as Administrator. - I also tried setting a couple different Compatibility settings on the EXE (Windows 7, Windows XP SP3) and also disabled visual themes (just shooting in the dark here). - Finally, I let the program just sit idle for 5 or 10 minutes in case it needed time to grab images online and update a local cache. I didn't want to do this for too long, as I'm still in the 2 hour refund window with Steam and don't want to burn that up if I can't get this to work. Anyway, after all that, the images are still missing. I did try changing the "Experience" at the top, from RRRE to DTM 2013, but that didn't improve anything. Specs: Windows 7 Pro SP1 64bit Intel i5 2500k 16.0GB GeForce GTX 660 2GB RRRE Build 0.3.0.4503 Any help would be greatly appreciated. (The other issue is bad steering lag with a G25, but I'll post separately if I can't fix it.) Thanks! Justin
So, I haven't seen any responses yet and now I'm excited about picking up more content in this coming 50% sale. However, if something as simple as being able to view the menu screen car and track images doesn't work, I'm concerned about the overall state of this sim. Can anyone please help me to resolve this (preferably, before this sale is over )? Thanks!
It has nothing to do with the sim, its sometimes a common occurrence in the store, but I wouldn't be concerned. If you go into the store via the web it usually does better there vs ingame, that's how it is for me.
Thanks for the info, James. So, you're saying that the car and track images in the game menus (not for the in-game "Store" link) are actually pulled live from the web store and not stored on the local file system? That does explain the trouble, if that connection is somehow broken. I did just ensure my Windows Firewall settings were allowing RRRE through (and then also tried turning it off completely) but that made no difference. Is there any way to read the logs here: \Documents\My Games\SimBin\RaceRoom Racing Experience\UserData\Log\ ? I tried checking for problems there, but they appear to binary files I can't view.
Send the logfiles to helpdesk. Here in the forum it's a thread with the Information what u need. https://forum.sector3studios.com/index.php?threads/purchase-errors-go-to-helpdesk.195/
Thanks, Tarik. I've sent my logs to the help desk. Here's hoping they'll be able to help. (Of course, if these were simple text files, I might have a chance at correcting the issue myself -- oh well.)
I have some of the same issues. The missing images doesn't show up in game or effect it. Having been with the game since it's start I can say the state of it is pretty blame good. The AI for instance is worlds better.
Yeah sending the dump file to help desk is best. But im thinking this is happening because of the chang over from free weekend. Normally lately this hasnt happened. In the past this was like I said a common issue.
So, I'm getting somewhat frustrated by this as it seems so simple and the only thing suggested by support made no difference. They asked me to delete all files in here and then use Steam's "Verify integrity of game cache.." to force the re-download: (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\raceroom racing experience\Game\GameData\General\ I'm really loving the actual driving, but having a crippled menu is such a pain. I'm just wondering if any of you know where these actual image files are supposed to be in the file system? I'd like to confirm they're missing and let support know so they can fix the Steam package. I did search around, but never could figure out where they ought to be. One possible issue is that I am using Win 7 junction points to keep my Steam games off of my SSD, while Steam itself is on the SSD. I doubt that's related because I'm pretty sure that's transparent to the application and I've never seen any other issues with this with my hundreds of other games. Thanks for any help!
I have exact the same issue with missing icons since a few days. Thought is was a bug. Guess what I did a day or so earlier.... I moved R3E to my SSD and made a symlink to my HDD. (So Steam doesn't notice any difference.) I didn't think of this until I saw you post. I am pretty sure this is the reason for the missing icons.
Ok, reinstalled the game the quick way and this fixes the issue, icons are back. Steps to take without downloading the game: 1. Add new Steam library at new location 2. Move appmanifest_211500.acf (in Steam\SteamApps) to your new location (same folder) 3. Move the game directory to the Steam folder to the new location (Steam\SteamApps\common) 4. Backup your profile (to be sure) C:\Users\USER\Documents\My Games\SimBin 5. Delete local R3E content in Steam UI 6. Play the game from the Steam store page so its starts downloading the game, choose the new library and it will discover the copied content and not download it again. 7. Edit the file GameInstallDir.ini in C:\Users\USER\Documents\My Games\SimBin to reflect the new location so old profile stuff still works. Enjoy the icons again
Hi This is a tough one since we cannot reproduce it in-house but we will investigate and see if we can find a solution to the assets not rendering issue as more than a few people started reporting the same. The suggestion offered via Helpdesk tends to solve the problem for most but there have been few cases such as yourself where the issue persists.
Maybe you can test moving the game to a different location and create a symlink. This is how to do it: Move "raceroom racing experience" to new location ie. D:\Games Then make the link: mklink /d "C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\common\raceroom racing experience" "D:\Games\raceroom racing experience" Everything including updates works fine. Other games work fine also. I guess the images are hardcoded and still direct to the old location.
Thanks so much for testing and suggesting this method, rbn. It did also work in my case -- yay. I really was under the impression that symbolic links/directory juntions (created through mklink under Win7) were completely transparent to any application fileSystem calls (since everything is handled by the OS). Maybe that's not the case, perhaps with very old API calls (long-in-place code from the early SimBin days)? However, I'm going to run a couple tests to try to confirm what the true fix was. Maybe it was the mklink stuff, but it could also be the different reinstallation method. Regardless, I can finally see what I'll be driving (car/livery/trackConfig). Thanks!
Thanks, Sonat. I certainly understand the difficulty in debugging a problem you can't reproduce (I'm a Software Engineer in real life, too ). Since rbn's fix worked for me, I will be trying to break it again and confirm the pattern. If I find anything useful, I'll report back here. One thing that would help is knowing exactly where the image files are stored (and a few example fileNames), so we can check for their presence, accessRights, etc. I know with games, often these will be hidden within some proprietary asset file, so it's hard for a user to have any idea where to look. Also, the log files are binary, so we can't read them and have any hope of understanding logged problems on our end. If the logs could be in plain text, you might get more help from users, easing your support burden. Just a thought Thanks!
So, I ran through some tests to try to confirm that the problem stems from the mklink symbolic links/directory junctions. That certainly appears to be the case. After shifting my working install directory to a different drive and using "mklink /j" to supposedly fool any apps into seeing it in the same place, the images were again missing (although the rest of the game seems to work fine). Undoing that shift and running it all actually from the same installed location worked again. Since the OS is supposed to hide that dir/file redirection (stemming from a mklink cmd) from any applications, I wonder if this is a result of some particularly low-level file access code in RRRE. I know, since games need to squeeze as much performance as possible out of machines, the developers sometimes write their own code for what are normally simple OS API calls. Maybe that's what's going on here and if that file access code is low-level enough, it doesn't take advantage of the OS' seamless mklink redirection. Just a thought! Here are the details of how I took my working game (with images), setup using rbn's instructions, made it fail, with missing images, and then got it working again. The difference was accessing the game directory cleanly or through a "mklink /j" cmd. I hope this helps you guys figure it out. - followed rbn's steps to install the game to a different location ---- under a new Steam library folder: E:\games\SteamLibrary\ ---- installed and working here: E:\games\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\raceroom racing experience\ ---- there are no symbolic links or directory junctions involved in this path - moved game to different drive using directory junction ---- moved E:\games\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\raceroom racing experience\ to F:\games\RRRE\ ---- created directory junction: mklink /j "E:\games\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\raceroom racing experience" "F:\games\RRRE" - game starts and runs fine, but the images are now missing again, so that's the trouble! - compared complete directory structure with WinMerge -- no differences (of course) - moved game back to the location I used when fixing this with rbn's suggestion ---- deleted the directory junction I had created earlier here: "E:\games\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\raceroom racing experience" (was pointing to "F:\games\RRRE") ---- moved F:\games\RRRE\ back to E:\games\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\raceroom racing experience\ ---- deleted this dir: F:\games\RRRE\ - game starts and runs fine this time, with all the car and track images properly showing
Hi, We believe we fixed the issue in this hotfix patch we just released. Please let us know if you confirm that it works. Thanks for the detailed repro steps. It helped us find the cause.
I can confirm it works. Re-installed the game an created the symlink, icons appeared as normal. Great stuff, I was not a deal breaker but hopefully it saves a few posts/tickets. Can you give a bit of insight off the issue? How can a game overwrite the OS transparency of the junctions?
It doesn't overwrite. The game was not resolving links/junctions properly for one of the protocols after symlink.