Hi fellow MCE pilots (wait, you are all AI!). ^_^ MCE takes quite a bit to startup since it seems to scan the active scenery. While this may be useful for certain features, I was wondering if there was a way to make this scan optional.

 

Caching may not help much since I tend to set up my scenery in regard to the planned flight, so only the areas I fly to are active. Therefore, it always differs.

Hi fellow MCE pilots (wait, you are all AI!). ^_^ MCE takes quite a bit to startup since it seems to scan the active scenery. While this may be useful for certain features, I was wondering if there was a way to make this scan optional.

 

Caching may not help much since I tend to set up my scenery in regard to the planned flight, so only the areas I fly to are active. Therefore, it always differs.

 

Nope, no scenery scan at any stage of the startup process..

 

Things that could slow it down...

 

Option "Debug=1" in "mce.ini"

 

And even with that, shouldn't take more than 40 seconds to start.

 

Since the speech engine runs inside "mce.exe" process anything wrong with audio device would eventually affect it"

 

For instance, when using USB headset, you may want to check you don't have an unreliable connection, and that the headset is plugged straight to the back of the PC and not via a USB HUB.

 

Sometimes, unplugging the device and replugging it will do wome "magic" to it. 

 

Other than that, check you aren't running low on C drive in which case Windows will struggle with the swapping process.

.

Thanks for the tips and notes.

 

I've just updated to the latest version and checked that debug option. It's set to =0 which is ok, right? Then I started to wonder what I saw and I think I've interpreted the initial search for aircraft.cfg files as scanning the scenery. The reason why I looked at it like that is that MCE doesn't focus on the SimObjects folder alone but really picks up every aircraft.cfg it can find in a FSX subfolder. For example, A2A takes a backup at A2A\B377\BACKUP\WoS_B377 and that folder gets accessed by MCE as per viewing in the Win7 resource monitor.

 

Now it seems like the startup is ok and maybe there was something else delaying it with the previous install. So I'll keep an eye on it and report back if problems arise.

Gerald, I don't know what triggers the behaviour but I've just witnessed another one of those scans for over a minute. Here's the screen from the resource manager. It pretty much goes through the while FSX folder and accesses sounds, textures and even pdf files.

 

Now I hope that people don't read it the wrong way. There's no privacy concern or something, it's just that the scan takes a while and from reading your post there isn't even a purpose to it.

 

That's with version 2.5.68 where it seems to happen less often than with 2.5.62 which I had before.

Gerald, I don't know what triggers the behaviour but I've just witnessed another one of those scans for over a minute. Here's the screen from the resource manager. It pretty much goes through the while FSX folder and accesses sounds, textures and even pdf files.

 

Now I hope that people don't read it the wrong way. There's no privacy concern or something, it's just that the scan takes a while and from reading your post there isn't even a purpose to it.

 

That's with version 2.5.68 where it seems to happen less often than with 2.5.62 which I had before.

 

The purpose is to find every single "aircraft.cfg" file

 

A few years ago, it used to scan only the <Simobjects> folder.

 

Some users drew our attention to the fact some imported FS9 aircraft may reside outside that folder, therefore it will scan the whole FSX folder.

 

It doesn't actually open any files. Just enumerates the files in every folder and takes note of the path when it finds "aircraft.cfg".

 

All found aircraft.cfg files paths are stored in "fscfgPaths.cfg" file found i same folder as "mce.ini"

 

Maybe it's taking a minute because you have massive amounts of AI traffic, possibly duplicates (backups).

 

Could you send your "fscfgPaths.cfg" file?

 

Thanks

Ah, I see. It lists all the aircraft.cfg files it found in the cfgPaths.dat which includes places like.

E:\FSX\A2A\B377\BACKUP\WoS_B377\Aircraft.cfg
E:\FSX\A2A\B377\BACKUP\WoS_B377_Pregnant_Guppy\Aircraft.cfg
E:\FSX\A2A\Spitfire\BACKUP\Aircraft.cfg

And of course a lot of stuff in the SimObjects\Airplanes folder or SimObjects\UT2 Aircraft when it comes to my UT2 AI traffic. So I've marked it solved since I now know why it does this and what it looks for.

 

Perhaps additionally. Moving 'unneeded' aircraft.cfg files away won't help speeding it up, right? It will still run through all the FSX subfolders and look for aircraft.cfg files no matter what.

 

Gerald, would it be possible to include a 'dev option' in a future biult to set the scan path to certain folders only? This would allow me to set SimObjects\Airplanes which will always lead to all my flown airplanes being recognised while the AI thingies or those backups from A2A are not. No loss, even faster startup because that single folder won't take long.

 

I'm assuming MCE now runs a routine checking for the FSX path in the registry and then starting to look for aircraft.cfg there. So if there was an extra parameter to manually set the scan path, I'd be thankful. Well, if not, I can live with the small downside since now I know about the background. Aha moments. ^_^

Ah, I see. It lists all the aircraft.cfg files it found in the cfgPaths.dat which includes places like.

E:\FSX\A2A\B377\BACKUP\WoS_B377\Aircraft.cfg
E:\FSX\A2A\B377\BACKUP\WoS_B377_Pregnant_Guppy\Aircraft.cfg
E:\FSX\A2A\Spitfire\BACKUP\Aircraft.cfg

And of course a lot of stuff in the SimObjects\Airplanes folder or SimObjects\UT2 Aircraft when it comes to my UT2 AI traffic. So I've marked it solved since I now know why it does this and what it looks for.

 

Perhaps additionally. Moving 'unneeded' aircraft.cfg files away won't help speeding it up, right? It will still run through all the FSX subfolders and look for aircraft.cfg files no matter what.

 

Gerald, would it be possible to include a 'dev option' in a future biult to set the scan path to certain folders only? This would allow me to set SimObjects\Airplanes which will always lead to all my flown airplanes being recognised while the AI thingies or those backups from A2A are not. No loss, even faster startup because that single folder won't take long.

 

I'm assuming MCE now runs a routine checking for the FSX path in the registry and then starting to look for aircraft.cfg there. So if there was an extra parameter to manually set the scan path, I'd be thankful. Well, if not, I can live with the small downside since now I know about the background. Aha moments. ^_^

 

Might be even possible to add an option not to scan on every startup.

 

The only draw back, you may end up scratching your head the next time you install a new aircraft add-on and MCE complains it cannot recognise it.

Good point.

 

Here's a more generic one regarding the sheer FSX operation. A user won't be able to run any aircraft being located outside of SimObjects folders. They won't even show up in the aircraft dialogue. There is a fsx.cfg option to include additional paths, but one has to know about it.

 

So, when forcing this kind non standard operation, he/she might be the one having to deal with MCE too. That's with thinking that the person being able to edit the fsx.cfg paths would also be able to take care of optional MCE settings.

 

Currently, it's the other way around. The standard users take the load as you are scanning complete FSX installations (which can be huge) for the sake of recognising a few aircraft.cfg files most likely not being of any use.

 

So we could even turn it around with rendering the scan of additional folders an optional item while sticking to the FSX standard for the rest of the time. Saves all users some startup time while the few which have a need for extra folder scans can join the club by defining them in the ini file. Even saves them some time since not the whole FSX installation is scanned but only their few extra files.

 

Now I don't know how many of those special cases still make up your customers in 2013. But I wouldn't expect that many folks running these kind of FS9 ports. The few FS9 'based' aircraft I have all stick to the later folder conventions from FSX.