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JimD737

Addon Scenery: Individual Airports Vs Geographical Area

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Hi All,I started something today and was curious if there are other simmers that have done the same.I have the standard FS9 setup of one scenery entry for each airport. I usually de-activate the previous airports and activate the current airports (and restart FS9) as part of my pre-flight routine.I was thinking of creating just a few scenery folders, based on geographical location (North America, South America, PACRIM, Europe, Mid-east, etc...). This way, instead of choosing each and every individual airport, I could just activate the area I would be flying in.As an example, a normal airport folder (scenery/texture) may run from Kilobytes to 10-20Mb. My PACRIM folder was 138MB (Tokyo, Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Christchurch, Honolulu and Ninoy Aquino).I tried it with my PACRIM folder activated and ran into one issue, some textures overwriting other textures with the same filename.Had anyone else tried something like this? Where there any performance issues? Could there be performance issues of loading a mass of scenery (138-200Mb)?I'd be testing the scenery anyway beforehand as a single scenery entry. If I liked it and it works well with my system, I'd move it into the geographical folder. I'm thinking of breaking out the North America to additional folders as East/Central/West.Thanks!

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I am not fond of that idea for several reasons, one big one you mentioned.That being the issue of textures having the same name, but not being the same textures. As an example, I installed several sceneries from the same author into a common folder and that forced overwriting of textures. This led to some of the custom buildings not showing textures. When I re-installed them into individual folders everything was OK. I have seen this more than once.Your idea of combining all of a geographical area into one folder also makes updates difficult and troubleshooting next to impossible.Better off to leave them all in their own folder and change the way you organize them in the scenery library.I use a system of labeling that looks like -WA_KFHR_Friday Harbor AirportI then enter them in the library in alphabetical order, this makes them easy to find.I also recommend fsscenery.exe by Steve Greenwood. It is a simple utility that cleans up your scenery.cfg after you make changes. You can find it here - http://home.earthlink.net/~smgreenwood/resources-g.shtml . You want the "utility to sort and renumber scenery.cfg layers"You have the right idea of disabling scenery areas that you are not flying in, it will speed up the sim startup time.If your comfortable editing the scenery.cfg you can turn on and off scenery areas with simple edits and not need to start the sim, make changes and restart the sim. Having sensible labels in an obvious order (made simple with Steve's utility) makes this an easy process.Hope this helps.


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You might also want to check out this scenery management program -http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID...amp;DLID=110722I have not used it but the description sounds as if it might be of use when you only want to load scenery for a specific area in which you plan to fly.If you do give it a try, please post your reactions.Hope this helps.

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I don't think your performance concerns should be too serious. FS inventories all the bgl files in active scenery areas and gets the lat/long extent of each file as listed in the bgl file header. It then builds a database of bgl files. The database is designed such that fs will locate any bgl file covering the current position. Thus, the main performance question is the area covered by a single bgl file. The main thing I've ever seen, is that scenery object library files in addon scenery typically have world-wide scope, and fs often reads these bgls when out-of-area. I doubt this is much of an issue, though, since I think fs is just looking for specific scenery model GUIDs and that goes fast.scott s..

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Thanks to all who responded. My goal here is to minimize the pre-flight steps to get going.I have d/l'd both utilities and will let you know what I find.Regards,

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I want to THANK everyone again for their suggestions.The first utility suggested, "...fsscenery.exe by Steve Greenwood." http://home.earthlink.net/~smgreenwood/resources-g.shtml, found eight sceneries out of order and fixed them.The second, "FS Scenery Manager" let me do everything I was looking to do. I created new folders within this program, named for the geographical area, and then associated the respective sceneries with that geographical area. I can activate scenery by geographical region (by folder) as a pre-flight task, without having to start and stop FS9. Mission accomplished.Within FS Scenery Manager, you could also just activate scenery, just like within FS9.Blue Skies and Tailwinds,

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You might also want to check out this scenery management program -http://library.avsim.net/esearch.php?CatID...amp;DLID=110722I have not used it but the description sounds as if it might be of use when you only want to load scenery for a specific area in which you plan to fly.If you do give it a try, please post your reactions.Hope this helps.
OPA,Happy New Year and thanks for the suggestion.FS Scenery Manager is just what I was looking for. I have fit all of my scenery into the geographical and operational scenery groups that I had wanted to do.In the attached picture, you can see I set up a BASE group which has ALL of the sceneries I want whenever I fly. As part of my pre-flight routine, I then choose the geographical locations I plan to fly in and off I go.Kudos and Thanks go out to Lionel Uzan for this product!

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Has any of this reorganization disturbed the scenery rank? It is important that some have higher priority (closer to top position number one) in the FS scenery library list.

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Has any of this reorganization disturbed the scenery rank? It is important that some have higher priority (closer to top position number one) in the FS scenery library list.
Good question. The only scenery I have that requires this is AES and I let it re-position to the top. I am not aware of any rankings for the other scenery. I have not observed any other issues.Jim

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