Thank you to you both for making a new member so welcome.
I had taught myself how to alter the .db files on this game today, but I boshed it up trying to change the Kildare Novices to the Killiney. I'm happy to wait for the update.
Please don't forget to re-balance the pools.
I agree that Cheltenham is (Bobs)worth the extra effort. The chutes thing is a problem. My mind keeps going back to the Grande course at Longchamp. It all helps massively with the immersion, which is why people mod games, isn't it?
I wouldn't play this game without the hope you hold out.
MjTags - you should get into NH. I love the flat. I love the breeding, and my dream is to discover the new Nearco, who founded the Royal family of racing both sides of the Atlantic.
But only one of his descendants ever beat The Beatles in a popularity poll. And he was a chaser.

On the Cheltenham course, I understand that it's MjTag's mod.
That said, he asked Bobsworth for the use of his new work, and it does seem unfair to then use it in a way that is clearly leaving Bobsworth having to answer questions about its functionality.

Once I get the schedules in good form I plan to redo Longchamp. For one, got to replicate the renovations to the course since the one in game is outdated, and two to get all of the major races run on the correct course. It probably will be one of the largest undertakings I've had for a course since I worked on Meydan, but should be fun. I've been actively trying to redo most of the major racecourses since SO6 came out, so like all the US & Canadian courses have been done, Flemington, Randwick, Rosehill, Ascot, Meydan, Sha Tin, Happy Valley, Niigata, King Abdulaziz, Kranji, and probably a few others have been touched thus far. Longchamp is well overdue.

Looking forward to seeing the new Longchamp mj. A few years ago, on SO6, I was doing a load of research about which races were run on which course, or piste as they say in France: grande, moyenne, nouveau and the straight 5f. I can send you the list of races from Longchamp along with the course it is run on. Shall I send you my version of the Longchamp course map as a guide?, as I have the grande piste as flatTurf1, the nouveau piste as flatTurf2 and the moyenne piste as flatTurf3. The straight 5f unfortunately I had to put on dirt1.

Just to clarify with 85 pages...is the initial post updated with the current version?

Yes - the first page has the most recent update to the mod pack.

I went ahead and downloaded from the initial post. Got it installed and working. Man...the lag with this is INCREDIBLE.

Normally the game advances as fast as I can click the buttons. The initial "Building Form" is 1-2 minutes at most. With the mod it took over 20 minutes. Even the first day auction, selling my starting five horses, not a huge passing of time but 2-3 seconds to process.

Is this normal? Due to the amount of data in the mod? Or is this unusual and something that I can maybe tweak?

Yes, this is normal, especially with the US game. This was not an issue in SO6 with this much data, but seems to be something in SO7, though I've only seen it with the US game (not with UK, Ire, or Aus, even though they have far more races in the schedule). Once I get the bugs out with the Combined UK/Ire and Jumps schedules, this is something that I will be looking into adjusting.

Bobsworth - so I might have found the solution to the jumps schedule crashing. I realized that in the racecourse.db files, there are tracks that list courses that they don't have in the map file. So the game things there are more courses at a track than there are mapped out. I fixed up the irish courses for this but need to take a look at UK and French next (I think French courses is probably where the error is, as I've always had trouble with them). Will let you know.

Hit a snag tonight with the combined. While got rid of duplicates, fixed Punchestown festival, and balanced things out, I can't get the schedule to load when I use Cheltenham in the racecourses file; will crash if I try to add jumps2 and hurdles2 (but jumps 1 and hurdles1 works, most of the time). Need to spend tomorrow trying to fix this.

Reporting back this fix worked for only some of the courses. The below list plus more which I will update as I continue my save appear to still be broken and crash the game:

Kyneton
Gosford
Kalgoorlie
Bendigo
Sandown Hillside
Geelong
Grafton
Port Lincoln
Eagle Farm

Is there anything else that I could do to try fix them?

Good spot mj. What did you find in the Irish jumps schedule that had stopped it from working? Punchestown is the only Irish course that has metadata for a second hurdles and jumps track. And they both are mapped in the .map file.

I remember having problems with jumps2 and hurdles2 on the CHeltenham racecourse file but can't remember how I fixed them.

Bobsworth ...is the upshot here, then, that unless both hurdles courses at Cheltenham can be got working, many of the top hurdle races at the Festival will feature a 40 yards run-in?
Great to hear progress is being worked on. Like you, I'm very pleased to hear about Mj's future Longchamp. Don't understand why its not right in the game in the first place, really.

In the courses file, any tracks that only race jumps also had a flat course added. But these don't exist in the map file. So I removed those and it fixed some crashing errors that I had when trying to use those courses. Looks to be the right pace forward but still need some work to check other courses.

In the end, if a merged course doesn’t work, I will do as what Bobsworth had with the Old and New, though will need tweaking to ensure the game never autogenerates races at both on same day.

Hi MjTags

The old and new hurdles courses are very different in the same way as the jumps ones are. The old course is all about speed, and the new course, which has only two hurdles in the last six furlongs or so, is designed to be a lung-buster.
I hope it is only tweaks. Thanks again for this brilliant mod.