Migrating scenery manually?

[Boeing or not going 578]

I am looking to switch over to P3D but I have a lot of older scenery that is not P3D compatible out of the box. A few Aerosoft sceneries I would like to use in P3D. Can I manually migrate these sceneries over, or do I need to purchase the payware migration tool? I'd like to keep costs low because I already have to buy the GTN since RXP doesn't work, and if I want to fly PMDG the 777 and NGX are so expensive for P3D. Same with A2A. Thank you

[vgbaron 3,510]

Usually, scenery is one of the easiest to migrate but you have to go on a case by case basis. Many who have scenery installed in FSX just add the folders in the P3D acenery library and are good to go. Obviously if the product has a dedicated P3D installer, that would be the way to go.

 

Vic

[jason99vmi 157]

Aerosoft's page has which ones are compatible with v3.  Unfortunately most are the newer ones. 

 

I migrated the Mega Airport Dublin over even though its not supported.  Just pointed it to the P3D installation and it worked.   I do have the migration tool but not sure this effected the install. 

[Boeing or not going 578]

Thank you both. Will the installer not work unless I create a FSX folder and trick it?

 

What about when scenery installs itself into the effects folder is that just copying over files to the P3D effects folder? Sorry I do not have P3D purchased yet to mess around, I'm still debating back and forth whether to go over. I'd like Aerosoft Dublin, Luxembourg, and Nice moved over.

[Jim Young 2,356]

There's a lot of scenery that will not install into P3Dv3 but many scenery developers have upgraded their installers.  I know the Orbx KORS (Orcas Island) will not install into the latest version.  It did with v3 but not with v3.1.  Even though I had a dummy v3 folder, it still would not work.  Most installers look in the system registry for the location of a compatible product.  I would think that some of these older products that state only that they are compatible with P3D would not need to be installed again.  You would just tell the P3D Scenery Library where it is located on your computer system (if you had it installed for FSX or FS9).  So, in those cases, no reinstall is required.  Whenever I upgrade my P3D to a newer version, I just replaced the default scenery.cfg with the one I had in the previous version.  Almost all of my scenery showed up in the latest version, the only exceptions (as I recall) were FSDT and FlightBeam Stuff.  FSDT updated their installers on the day of the P3D release and FlightBeam was a few days later.

 

Best regards,

[Lorby_SI 2,036]

There is no telling in advance if an FSX installer will work or not. Some do, some don't. Aerosoft scenery is especially critical, as some have to be activated in the Aerosoft Launcher, and they won't, unless installed properly. The easiest way to go is to keep your FSX installation parallel to P3D and just add the sceneries you want to the scenery library of P3D. If special effects were used (they seldom are) these either have to be either copied over, or put into their own external Effects folder which you then link to P3D via its config files (folders are no longer set in stone as they were with FSX).

 

But bear in mind that Aerosoft airports will not have the custom ground traffic in P3D (cars, buses, tractors etc.) because AES ("Light" or otherwise) is not working any more.

 

If a scenery does not work in P3D even if added to the scenery library properly (like flickering textures, low-res ground shining through, textures and lights behaving strangely) then this scenery is simply not compatible - and no migration tool will change that (those do not convert textures, AFCADS, effects or anything)

[Boeing or not going 578]

I plan on wiping my hard drive and installing Windows again to start fresh, I will also install FSX to be sure. Last I checked, Aerosoft updated all their installers to at least not require the Aerosoft Launcher anymore which is nice.