Another question for you, Christian, please....What exactly does cleaning up the world Folder do? What does it delete and what does it leave? What's it's purpose, specifically?What does it do compared with using "Manage Service Caches"?I'm thinking that managing the caches clears out the pertinent folders completely... as opposed to the "Clean Up World Folder" doing what?Appreciate if you (or any other user/addicts :) ) could help me get my head around this.Thanks!

My understanding is this - when you go into "Manage Service Caches" and delete some areas (or all) of a particular Service, it deletes the JPG files that the Service has previously downloaded. When you "Clean up world folder" it deletes the scenery files that have been generated by TP from the downloaded JPG files. I am not sure what happens if/when you fly in the same area ( say Hawaii) using 2 different Services at different times.Barry

Thanks for the response, Barry.I guess what I am trying to understand is:Can I fly around a location, collecting all the data and then go in offline mode and fly (much more efficiently with a jet, for example?) and have this already downloaded data load into my flight?Do the "Manage Service Caches" & "Clean up world folder" options affect this? How? Will it delete my precious downloads?Thanks!PS: I went to Megascenery X and bought their Hawaii mega scenery for FSX (for a comparison to this) but ended up canceling my order because the download of 1.4GB was only given to me at 60KB/s (which would take over 5hrs!). They had better refund me for my canceled download as requested. I have a 6MB connection with Comcast and can download at a real-time rate of 1MB/sec on 'free' servers like Fileplanet, ATI and nVidia. Anyway - that's just a word of warning to any of you that may be thinking of ordering from them. And for scenery for FSX you can ONLY download - no CD/DVD orders!

"Do the "Manage Service Caches" & "Clean up world folder" options affect this? How? Will it delete my precious downloads?"In a nutshell - YES!Barry

TileProxy uses a two-level system to store its files. The first level, the service specific caches, usually lives in several cache.serviceN folders inside the TileProxy folder. This is where the (unaltered) .jpg images downloaded from the servers are stored. The second level lives in the TileProxy Photoreal World folder. This is actually not really a cache, it's more like TileProxy's output folder. This is where all the scenery (.bgl) files are that make FSX think there is photo scenery installed for the whole world, and accordingly, this is also where TileProxy puts all the texture (.bmp) files it creates. Or put another way, the TileProxy Photoreal World folder is (a major part of) the interface between TileProxy and FSX, but FSX is completely unaware of the service specific caches.>What exactly does cleaning up the world Folder do? It removes all the .bmp files from the TileProxy Photoreal World/wxyz/Texture folders. That is, the textures TileProxy created for FSX.>What does it delete and what does it leave? It leaves the .bgl files alone, so that FSX still thinks there is photo scenery installed for the whole world. Moreover, it doesn't alter the service specific caches in any way.>What's it's purpose, specifically?Basically, to reset the TileProxy Photoreal World folder to its pristine state, as it was right after installing TileProxy for the first time. You should do this when you swich services, in order to prevent textures created from different services from becoming mixed up in FSX. Moreover, cleaning up the world folder from time to time is probably good for performance.>What does it do compared with using "Manage Service Caches"?This one, on the other hand, does not alter the TileProxy Photoreal World folder in any way. Instead, it lets you remove selected (or all) .jpg images from one or more of the service specific caches. So, you can clean up the world folder without risking your precious downloads. TileProxy will recreate all the needed textures anyway, without the need to redownload anything. Just don't touch the 'Delete' button in the Service Cache Browser.If you think offline mode will improve performance, think again. All this does is prevent TileProxy from accessing the internet. If you already have all the needed images cached, offline mode doesn't make any difference because TileProxy would have used the files in the cache anyway, even in online mode. If, on the other hand, you stumble upon an area which you don't have all the needed images cached for, you will get very blocky, ugly looking textures. Moreover, the internet usually isn't the major performance bottleneck anyay - your harddisk is (or more specifically, FSX's weired way of handling file I/O and loading scenery).Hope this helps,Judith

Hi JudithThank you for that very comprehensive replyJUst a quick question if you are able to answer itIn some of the texture folders of my TileProxy Photoreal World folder, I have some ***.FLAT files. Do you know what these are ?Thanks Barry

Thanks for taking the time to explain all of this. Makes perfect sense now.Thanks!

Basically, these .flat files are Christians attempt at making FS9-style scenery a little more efficient. Ordinarily, FS9 uses one texture file per square kilometer, no matter what the resolution. That means that, while LOD 13 consists of quite reasonable 256x256 pixel textures, the lower LODs are made up of an incredible number of absurdly small textures (down to 1 pixel at LOD 5). Which means even a small photo scenery contains thousands and thousands of texture files. Which Windows isn't really able to handle efficiently (try opening a folder containing tens of thousands of files in Explorer). To alleviate this potential performance bottleneck a little, TileProxy combines several texture files into one .flat file if they are smaller than a certain limit. That's one reason why you can't use the TileProxy scenery standalone, without TileProxy running - FS doesn't know what to do with these .flat files.

Use this linkhttp://www.pcaviator.com/dlstore/home.php?cat=49Purchase it through PC Aviator, you get fast downloads.Gary P.p.s. I have similar questions about Manage Service Cache and Clean up World Folder.

>Use this link>>http://www.pcaviator.com/dlstore/home.php?cat=49>>Purchase it through PC Aviator, you get fast downloads.I did. Hence the problem. Have you used their service? Did you get fast downloads or is it just me that gets crappy download speeds from them? I get great download speeds from literally everywhere else I d/l from (except where's there's a deliberate cap for marketing purposes). Here's a typical side by side comparison...By spybaz