Can I combine scenery?

[PLazarus 0]

Hello,As time goes on I now have a huge number of addon scenery files.Is it possible to combine the contents of 2 scenery areas... for example... I have many fantastic freeware Thai airports... I wonder if I could put all the texture files in one texture folder... and the same for the scenery folder...??? I would then have 1 scenery for thailand, rather than 6 or 7 different entries in the scenery config.Do you guys do this? Does it work?The idea is to try and reduce the number of scenery layers I have.Thanks,Paul ( SPIM )

[Dark Moment 0]

Sure.Just be careful that in the README for any given scenery, there are no instructions about EXCLUDE or FLATTEN entries in the SCENERY.CFG ... rare these days, as most designers build that into their files. Also, that there are no specific 'priority' requirements.The only disadvantage is that if a specific designer upgrades his scenery, and says you must remove all previous files, you may have trouble finding them! But that is rare, and can usually be done anyway with a bit of common sense.By way of example of what you suggest, I have all Daniel Gauthier's Swiss scenery ... about 35 files .... in one folder.I do, however, make sure that with any given scenery I extract AF2_ files (AFCAD) and keep them in a separate scenery layer (at the top) ... also landclass files in their own folder, which are usually files with LC in the name .... and I put mesh in separate folders by region.Hope this helps. Basically yes, you can do it.Mark "Dark Moment" Beaumonthttp://www.swiremariners.com/newlogo.jpg

[PLazarus 0]

Thanks Mark,I think I have my work cut out in the next few days then...It was the UK refineries file that prompted my question, as I have some UK vfr stuff already and thought it would be a good idea to combine it...Is there some advantage to keeping the AF2 files all together? Mine have been spead about all over the place as I've added and removed things.Do you know of a utility that can find AFCAD files? Or is it best to just search for AF2?Thanks again,PaulPS I lived on Connaught Rd ( West ) for 6 months once...

[Guest jennifer]

There is a superb utility called Scan AFD which will search your files and find all Afcads, including duplicates or two different versions for the same airport. You should get this. It'll make your task so much easier. I think it can be obtained here on Avsim I used to keep all my Afcads to gether but now I tend to keep them in the folder with the airport with no problems. If it's an Afcad for a stock airport then it foes into my Addon Scenery/scenery file. Having them spread around isn't a management problem once you have Scan AFD installed.

[Guest panda234]

What Jennifer says. Even though I try to be very careful, sometimes I'll run scanafd just to be sure and usually I'll find duplicates anyway. It's almost impossible to be adding scenery and not end up with a duplicate. Scanafd is essential. billg

[sluihn 68]

Great question.... just one more thing that might help out and I havent seen much about it on the forums but deserves cudos is a program called Scenery align which I was weary in using but glad I did. I added so much scenery that the scenery configuration fs9 was reading from was just a list of various sceneries with no organization, which case I dont know if it has to be organized, but I know one thing... I hate everytime I started FS9 it would always take more time cause it had to go through all the files and then continue to load. Not a problem any more what i did last night was to open a bunch of word documents one called eastern usa, western usa, north america, south america... you get the point, I opened FS9 scenery config in the main folder and cut out the airports and pasted them to the appropiate word document. I believe I had 8 different word documents. When I was done cutting out the various airports and utilities ( I also use usa roads and Rails and rivers from FS Geneisis...lago...runway12) you have to be careful to replace the text (back onto FS9 config) so one doesnt cancel out major payware packages like roads and such. This is easy, I just started after the default listings and replace freeware and payware listings (now organized by region and utility) The great thing about it is you dont have to worry with renumbering the location or layer... just get the list to look like what you want and then hit one button (the align button) and bingo everything is numberically ordered ... I was floored last night. One more point I noticed after adding scenery packages was that a back up scenery file was created in the main folder. I had maybe 6 of these type file so I just created a folder on the desktop named it back up scenery files and dumped those files in there so only one file remained in the main fs9 folder.btw the program is avail on avsim scnaln11_159762 get updted version otherwise it requests taht you remove earilier versionHope this also helpsSteve