Duplicate scenery objects. Necessary?

[Dave Morgan 68]

Hi. I've noticed that a lot of freeware scenery has EZ Scenery, Runway 12 or Nova objects mixed intimately with custom objects in the ../Texture and the ../Scenery folders. A small number of scenery creators are good enough to zip library objects into separate folders and leave the decision regarding their installation to the user. Sadly, many fail to separate library from custom. I've found a good utility for identifying and removing duplicate textures, which has liberated several megabytes of disc space. I'm wondering now about the duplicate files to be found in the ../Scenery folders. Ought I to retain those files despite having duplicates already installed in another folder? I have a dedicated FS9 scenery layer for the EZ Scenery library and another for Runway 12. If removing them will not have any detrimental effect on the addon in question, is there a utility similar to the duplicate texture finder that can identify and remove them for me? Cheers,D

[N60JBravo 27]

As far as the utility is concerned, I wish. If you remove the textures for object libraries without removing the libraries themselves you will, not maybe, have display issues with objects not being textured. If you have duplicate libraries you are better off having complete texture sets for each library. regards,Joe

[Dave Morgan 68]

Thanks for that. Taking Runway 12 as an example, there were three places I could have left textures: ../FS9/Textures../Runway12/Texture../[Downloaded airport]/Texture. Duplicate Texture Finder seems to treat FS9/Texture as the base and removes duplicates from any other ../Texture folder. I spent some time reinstating the ../Runway12/Texture/ files, expecting that something might go awry if the textures were not in the same layer as the scenery objects themselves . I haven't reinstated the texture files removed from the various addon layers (else what would be the point of running Duplicate Texture Finder?). What I'd like to know is whether or not, now that the textures are gone, I can get away with removing their associated scenery files, such as ../[Downloaded airports 1, 2 & 3]/Scenery/add_dwag_hangars and keeping only one ../Runway12/Scenery/add_dwag_hangars I suppose I should go home, park up at an addon airport and see what effect removing them has. Regards,D

[N60JBravo 27]

You only need one copy of the .bgl in an active scenery folder. FS will only recognize one copy anyway, and that is what causes problems. If FS is using a scenery library .bgl that does not have the needed textures in either the texture folder associated with the scenery folder containing the .bgl or ...\FS9\texture the objects will be displayed without textures. IMO, placing the textures in ...\FS9\texture is not the best way to go. You will end up overwriting textures with other textures that have the same filename but are not the same texture. regards,Joe [edit]I have never used the Duplicate Texture Finder and have to wonder if it actually compares the textures to see if they are duplicates, or simply goes by the filename.[/edit]

[Dave Morgan 68]

Thanks Joe. I'll be spending some time soon winnowing out the duplicate bgls. I'll stick, as you suggest, to removing duplicate textures from ../[Downloaded airport]/Texture, and leave the others in place. Duplicate Texture Finder certainly works by filename and filesize, but in the log, which lists each operation by file for a given folder, there are often also lines such as Filename.xxx Different contents File not moved so I suppose it does actually perform some check of the contents too... Regards,D