Maniaplanet Forum

Several times I calculated shadows or drove a MT ghost, reopened the track and the shadows are gone or mediatracker complains I need to "validate the track".

Anyone know what triggers this? Staring at a progress bar for 12 minutes three times in a row gets old...

Absolute same issue for me. Sometimes only the tunnel shadows are lost though.

Someone said in another thread that this might be related to saving the track under a different name.

Very annoying.

I'm hoping that if I bump this thread there will be some sort of official answer from Someone Who Knows.

What causes shadows/ghosts to be invalidated/discarded?

I calculated high-quality shadows on a track a few minutes ago, then validated it, then saved the track, and did something else for a while (closed TM2).

When I reopened the track, the autosave of my validation is sitting in the "Autosaves" folder, and the proper AT is still shown, and the track has nice shadows, just like it did when I closed it, but the editor is telling me that there's not an existing ghost, and shadows haven't been calculated.



This isn't the end of the world--it just takes a few minutes to re-drive it and re-calc shadows, but it's buggy and annoying, and it would be nice if it were fixed...

Pretty much anything you do to a map requires recalculating the shadows and validation. Even if you just changed one tree tile in the corner of the map, everything resets because as far as the editor is concerned, any change could affect the whole course.

FifthStreet wrote:Pretty much anything you do to a map requires recalculating the shadows and validation. Even if you just changed one tree tile in the corner of the map, everything resets because as far as the editor is concerned, any change could affect the whole course.

In my case, at least, it didn't require revalidating (the AT was still good)--it just threw out the existing ghost for some reason (although, even though it said there wasn't a ghost, my replay still played when I raced--go figure). Also, I didn't change the geometry in the track at all--I only validated and saved.

I never seem to have this problem. But then again I always validate the track before computing shadows upon save.