With the migration of Railroads Online to Unreal Engine 5 and the changes to the save file format and the new save system, all of my 3rd party tools are no longer compatible with the game.
I have not worked on any of my tools since back in July of 2022 and I am not planning on updating my tools any further, which means this is an end of life notification for all my tools.

Thank you to all who have found my tools useful.

"Railroads Online World Backup" (tool), as the name suggestes, is a world backup tool for the upcoming game: Railroads Online!

ROWB is an all-included application, intended to run in the background while you are playing the game.
Whenever you through the game's menus decide to save the game, ROWB will detect the save taking place and create a backup.

There is no manual handling involved, other than starting ROWB along side your game and ROWB will take care of all the backup handling.

Features:

• Can run from anywhere.
• Auto-detects Steam and Railroads Online.
• Fully automated backup handling.
• Backups are compressed to conserve disk space usage.
• Built-in easy to use restore tools.
• Options to export backups.
• Access to the save game folder at the click of a tool button.
• Launch the game directly from ROWB.
• Access to the folder where backups are stored, at the click of a tool button.
• Custom purpose built UI system.

The first thing you will be presented with after launching ROWB, is the "Home" view:


The main listing here, lists all 10 save slots, same as they appear in the game, however the time stamp has been prioritized over the date.
The size of each save is displayed along with how many backups exist for that particular save slot.

Hovering the mouse over one of the save slots, will highlight that slot, as expected, but also possibly show a faded out star and a faded out trash bin.
The indicates the most recently saved game.

Clicking any of the highlighted save slots, will switch the view over to the "Backup Archives", pre-filtering to display all backups made for that save slot.

Should you want to delete one of your saves, hover the mouse over to faded trash bin and it will highlight in full colors, indicating the button is now active.
Click the now highlighted trash bin to delete the save. A confirmation box will be shown, to ensure saves are not deleted accidentally.

The bottom part of the window, will hold a listing of up to the 30 most recent backups that have been made.
When a brand new backup is made, the bottom most log entry will be highlighted in bold and bright white, for up to 10 minutes, so this could be used as a reminder on when to save next.


At the top of the window, you will find the toolbar used to navigate through the application. The two right-aligned toolbar buttons shown in the screenshot above, are specific to the "Home" view.
The first one, "Saves" is a shortcut to opening up Windows Explorer in the folder where the game stores the save game files. Quick access.
The second one, "Play" will launch the game through Steam, just as if you had hit "Play" in the Steam UI. While the game is running, this button will be disabled.

This is the "Backup Archives" view:


The side panel in this view, provides a number of different filtering options, when viewing the backup archives.

"Everything" clears all filters and simply displays all backups in chronological order.

"By slot number" filters to only display backups generated for the selected slot number.

"By date" will let you select filtering, by year, then month and finally by day of the month through a small calendar.
When the calendar is displayed, it will highlight days that have one or more backups, as seen here:


The bigger list, will always show backups in chronological order, newest first, oldest last. The chosen filtering determines if backups are listed and how many.

Hovering over a backup as shown in the above screenshot, will reveal three action buttons for that backup. These "in-place" tool buttons, work exactly the same as the trash bin on the "Home" view. They only go active when you hover the mouse over them.

Click the "Restore backup" button to restore this backup, into the slot it was originally backed up from.

Click the "Export backup" button to export this backup to a folder of your choice. Exported backups, will contain the date and time stamp as part of the file name, but you can always rename them later if needed.

Click the "Delete backup" button to permanently delete this backup from the archives.
This will be useful when you want to get rid of old backups that you no longer want to keep.
Note that backups that are identical to existing saves, will automatically be re-generated, so if it appears as if a backup deletion is not taking place, it will be because the backup system is generating it again.

Multi-selection is of course also supported. Press and hold down the Control key on your keyboard and you can toggle selection on multiple backups. While holding down the Control key, the date headers will highlight when hovering the mouse over them, indicating that you can toggle selection on all backups under this date header.
In multi-selection, the "Restore backup" button is not available, however you can still batch export and batch delete backups.

If you have noticed, the toolbar at the top of the window has changed a bit in this view and is now displaying a folder explore button labelled "Backups" instead.
Just like the "Saves" tool button in the "Home" view, this one will also open up a Windows Explorer, however this time the folder containing all the backup archives is the destination.
Should you need to make a backup of stuff on your computer before a reinstall, use this button to get to your backup archives so you can save them before the wipe.

Now that we have been granted a method to detect unique worlds from one another, I can add in options to sort worlds and backups by individual unique worlds and allow some measure of naming worlds.
Changes to the UI are planned, among those world thumbnail previewing when selecting worlds, grouped backup listings and I will also see about potentially add in Cloud storage support for your saves.

Eventually the World Backup Tool will be merged into Railroads Online Operations Manager.

When that happens, the World Backup Tool will likely be retired in favour of better and all-in-one functionality. This will also allow me to focus solely on ROOM, instead of having to spread myself thin maintaining multiple projects.

v1.0.0-612:

• Fixed: Edge-case causing the application to prematurely close.