WANTED: autower 2.0 Testers

[Christoph Langguth 0]

Both versions find 24230 airports (in 149 scenery layers). 1.03 does it in about 4:15. 2 does it in 25990 milliseconds or 0:26.

Thanks!Does v2 also expose the problem with LSZH_GND_H1?

[Mike... 7]

Nope.

[johnk51 2]

I ran everything again and got 23808 with v1 and 23807 with v2. V2 also did it in 9219 milliseconds, I believe that is what it was using. But I still got an error with egkk. After giving the file location it said the system cannot find the file specified. Now I have all my afcads in the addon\scenery folder. So there's not an afcad for egkk in its folder. This is egkk pro and I also have egll extreme, which I also have the afcad in the addon scenery folder. I had also deleted the scenery.dat for egkk and let fs recreate it. Still had that problem, but when I went there the tower location was right. I don't have away of looking at the scenery.dat files. Does any one know which program lets you see what's in the scenery.dat file?

[WallysWorld 4]

1.04 ran for about 3:25 and found 24329 airports. About 5 errors.2.0 ran in 1563 milliseconds and found 24325 airports. No errors.Thanks for your work, Chris. It's much appreciated.

[Christoph Langguth 0]

I ran everything again and got 23808 with v1 and 23807 with v2. V2 also did it in 9219 milliseconds, I believe that is what it was using. But I still got an error with egkk. After giving the file location it said the system cannot find the file specified. Now I have all my afcads in the addon\scenery folder. So there's not an afcad for egkk in its folder. This is egkk pro and I also have egll extreme, which I also have the afcad in the addon scenery folder. I had also deleted the scenery.dat for egkk and let fs recreate it. Still had that problem, but when I went there the tower location was right. I don't have away of looking at the scenery.dat files. Does any one know which program lets you see what's in the scenery.dat file?

Thanks, John!Hmm, that sounds kind of weird. Let me recapitulate:- autower complains about a file (say, c:\programs\fs\...\EGKK\scenery\egkk.bgl) not existing- even after deleting c:\programs\fs\...\EGKK\scenery.dat the error persists.- the file actually exists (did you check in windows explorer?)Could you please send me the scenery.dat that refers to the file, and the complete filename it complains about? (by mail, or attachment)I'm not aware of any tools that allow looking at the scenery.dat files -- except for a hex editor :( , which is how I made sense ofthe bits that are important for autower. In a nutshell, they're index files to speed up figuring out what is where, and in which file.Thanks!PS @all: I'll be rather busy next week, so don't hold your breath for v2 to be released. But whenever I find the time, I'm working on some other substantialimprovements to the logic. I hope, as a rough guideline, to be done within the next couple of weeks.

[Christoph Langguth 0]

OK guys,thanks to everyone who replied!I've essentially finished version 2 now, from my point of view everything is in there and should be working.Download it here: http://christoph.rosenkeller.org/fs/autower/autower2b.zipThe major changes now are:- automatic detection of scenery changes. No more manual deletion of autower.dat!- Much faster datafile creation- Completely rewritten code to handle the layers. Now all the AFCADs for an airport are considered, instead of only the first (highest) one found. In version 1, tower positions were sometimes not applied, if they were defined in a different ("lower") AFCAD. Thanks to Geoff for pointing this out!- Out-of-the-box compatibility with AlacrityPC (in other words: it also works when the "Server" service is turned off)- Possibility to force a tower position reset at every iteration, to work around situations where other addons (like FSHotSFX) muck around with it. To enable this, edit the configuration file.Could you please download that version and let me know if everything is working correctly?I'm still labeling it as a "beta" for now, but if I don't receive any complaints, this is what will be released as version 2 next Sunday.Thanks again for testing, let me know the outcome or any other suggestions you have!Chris

[WallysWorld 4]

Chris,The update version works fine. It ran in 11.5 seconds and found exactly the same number of airports as the first edition of version 2. The AlwaysSetTower variable in the config file also sets the tower view back to its correct position after FSHotSFX moves the view. I'm very happy about that.Many thanks for your work. It's much appreciated.

[Mike... 7]

Running the latest version. Seems to work fine as well. It's definitely noticing changes on its own, great little feature!:(

[G7USL 117]

Hi all,I'm looking for people to help in testing the upcoming version 2 of autower.If you're already using autower (v1.0x), I'd be grateful if you could spare a few minutes to test-drive the new version.Version 2 is an almost complete overhaul of autower, focusing on some deficiencies of the previous version.Most notably, I'm trying to incorporate:(1) dramatically faster creation of the database(2) automatic reconstruction if scenery has changed(3) not aborting when FS9 takes a long time to load(4) handling obscure errors related to switching off the "Server" serviceThe bullets are in order of relevance and priority... Anyway, especially for topic 1, I'm not yet 100% sure that mysolution is correct (only 98% ;-) ), so I'd appreciate some help and feedback. If you'd like to help out, please downloadv2 alpha from http://christoph.rosenkeller.org/fs/autower/autower2a.zip and install it.The most important issue I'm wondering about is whether the optimized code still finds all airports, so please do the following:- BEFORE installing v2, delete autower.dat from v1 and restart. It should build its database. Please note the number of airports it finds,and (approximately) the time it took to finish.- overwrite autower.dll with v2 alpha and start again- Note the number of airports it finds. If it's not the same, please, by all means, let me know!- it should be considerably faster. To make sure it's not related to caching, please restart your computer and start FS up again(should be slower, but hopefully still much faster than v1)- from the actual functionality point of view, it should behave identically to v1.Please post your results (especially if something goes wrong or it doesn't find all airports!) in this thread.If there is anything else going wrong (error messages, crashes or so), also, by all means, please let me know.If you have been affected by problems (3) or (4) above, I'd also like to know whether they're fixed with the new version. Any other comments are of course welcome.Oh, and this might be a good time to ask for other features or improvements, if you have any suggestions ;-)Finally, please note that this is not intended to be a production version (yet). It does not use the database at all, and keeps the window open for a rather long time (20 seconds).Both of these are intentional, to ease testing, and will be modified in the release version.Thanks in advance for your help!Chris

Download, no longer obtainable? :(

[Christoph Langguth 0]

Download, no longer obtainable? :(

Not the alpha, no. The beta is here: http://christoph.rosenkeller.org/fs/autower/autower2b.zipFor future readers of this thread: That link will also stop working at some point in time. But by then it will be released and you can download it via the homepage http://christoph.rosenkeller.org/fs/autower/CheersChris

[Christoph Langguth 0]

All right folks,it's out!I've just "officially" released version 2.0, available in binary and source at http://christoph.rosenkeller.org/fs/autower/Thank you all for your feedback!(of course, if there's anything new popping up, feel free to let me know...)Happy flying & cheers,Chris

[Christoph Langguth 0]

Hi all,just wanted to let you know: there are a few other fixes and improvements that I incorporated during the last month.The latest release version is now 2.1.1.From my perspective, that's pretty much the final one (unless, of course, there are other bugs that remain tobe found, but hopefully that won't be the case :( ).Cheers,Chris

[Mike... 7]

Hi Chris,Downloaded 2.1 the other day, will upgrade again now, but could you clarify "the most important new feature is that the DLL variant now seamlessly integrates into the Flight Simulator UI when re-indexing, or when showing messages."Last time I started up FS9 (fullscreen mode), it should've re-indexed (and it did, because the dat file was created), but I didn't really see anything. With 2.0, re-indexing showed just fine in fullscreen mode.

[Christoph Langguth 0]

Hi Chris,Last time I started up FS9 (fullscreen mode), it should've re-indexed (and it did, because the dat file was created), but I didn't really see anything. With 2.0, re-indexing showed just fine in fullscreen mode.

Well, maybe you just didn't even notice it because it's so well integrated? :( The attached screenshots should show the difference in behaviour ("traditional" vs integrated).If you don't see anything that looks like the second screenshot when re-indexing, then let me know.(edit: As indexing is relatively fast now, the progress window may disappear rather quickly. You can temporarily change the "ProgressDisplayDelay" setting in the .ini to make sure you get a chance to see it, and that it appears correctly)Cheers,Chris