Prepar3D cannot run without a valid Scenery.cfg

[skysurfer 76]

Good day all.
I am new to P3D and I cannot figure out what is causing this message: "CANNOT run without a valid SCENERY"
I googled the solution, did not help. Reinstalled v4 and after some time same message pops up.
One of the suggestions was to paste scenery file from Program Files into the Oldscenery file. When I opened both those files all I saw was this:

捛㉲਍਍䅛敲⹡崱਍楔汴㵥啕䕅䴠獯潣⁷桓牥浥瑥敹潶堠਍潌慣㵬㩅停䐳䅜摤湯匠散敮祲啜䕕⁅潍捳睯匠敨敲敭祴癥൘䄊瑣癩㵥牔敵

What the is that? Is there any other solution other other that keep reinstalling the whole sim?
Thx 

[skysurfer 76]

Update.

It appears that DRZEWIECKI DESIGN is causing this. I saw other people are complaining too. 

[swiesma 625]

Seems like they mess up the encoding :-)

P3D v4 uses UTF-8 as far as I have read. You can change the encoding with Notepad++.

[gamer19 23]

Where ? On which file exactly ? Prepared.cfg ?

I'll try about anything, I'm having not ctd's but complete freeze of pc, only hard reset is option and I realize that it happened, I would say exclusively, when I enter some options in drop down menu while flying. Such a shame since I've just managed to raise my fps again to 50+.

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

6 hours ago, skysurfer said:

What the is that?

A program, probably an installer, read the scenery.cfg file assuming an incorrect encoding and wrote it back to disk again in that incorrect encoding.

A a general rule, you should not run any automated installers of addons that have not been updated to P3D V4. Apart from the addon itself perhaps being problematic, you may end up with corrupted config files - in your case the scenery.cfg.

Best regards

[skysurfer 76]

3 hours ago, gamer19 said:

Where ? On which file exactly ? Prepared.cfg ?

I'll try about anything, I'm having not ctd's but complete freeze of pc, only hard reset is option and I realize that it happened, I would say exclusively, when I enter some options in drop down menu while flying. Such a shame since I've just managed to raise my fps again to 50+.

scenery.cfg file 

[skysurfer 76]

3 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

A program, probably an installer, read the scenery.cfg file assuming an incorrect encoding and wrote it back to disk again in that incorrect encoding.

A a general rule, you should not run any automated installers of addons that have not been updated to P3D V4. Apart from the addon itself perhaps being problematic, you may end up with corrupted config files - in your case the scenery.cfg.

Best regards

The developer stated that new installer was compatible with v4 and during installation P3Dv4 was available. Installation went fine but P3D stopped working though. I went on their forum and I saw other simmers gad the same issue. 

Thx 

[RoboRay 126]

1 hour ago, skysurfer said:

The developer stated that new installer was compatible with v4

The developer is wrong.

[skysurfer 76]

Yep. The developer has just confirmed that too and disabled the products 

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

1 hour ago, skysurfer said:

The developer stated that new installer was compatible with v4 and during installation P3Dv4 was available. Installation went fine but P3D stopped working though. I went on their forum and I saw other simmers gad the same issue. 

Thx 

If developers look to their installers in terms of where they put their files, than he is correct. But what he either did not know or ignored was the fact that the character encoding of the config files has changed in P3D V4. So if he is using the exact same tool to add the scenery to the library that he was using with the previous version, he "shot" the scenery.cfg.

There is a sticky right on top of this forum where this issue is discussed.

And this is precisely the reason why especially developers should stick to the add-on.xml route, as advised by LM.

Best regards

[Jim Young 2,356]

I had the same problem after installing Wash X.  My solution was to save the bad scenery.cfg to scenery.off, restart P3D and let the scenery.cfg rebuild.  I then added Wash X manually.  It did not mess up any of my other installed scenery as it was all added automatically (FSDT/FlightBeam stuff) and I went to FTX Central and opened it up and it added those entries automatically.  I also had to enter MyTrafficX again too.  So, a little inconvenience but all is well again!

Best regards,

Jim

[skysurfer 76]

Good to know, Jim. Will keep that in mind. I fear with 3rd party addons transition to v4 this issue may appear again. 

[virtuali 4,421]

9 hours ago, swiesma said:

Seems like they mess up the encoding :-)

P3D v4 uses UTF-8 as far as I have read. You can change the encoding with Notepad++.

It uses UTF16LE by default, but it can also read .CFG files in Ansi or UTF-8.

Problems will start if a 3rd party installer or utility assumed a file might be use some encoding, and used the wrong way of opening or parsing it, because it will end up corrupted when it will be written back.

To clarify better:

- The sim will still work if a .cfg file is being read as UTF16 (default), opened with the proper string handling routines that can read UTF16 and for some reason, it will be saved back in Ansi or UTF-8, as long the writing routine were the correct ones for Ansi or UTF-8. It will be still WRONG (IMHO) if an installer did this, but it won't cause any problem to the sim. It MIGHT cause funny text issues if the file was, for example, an airplane.cfg with descriptions using non-English characters, or (even worse) non-Western characters.

- The .cfg will be get CORRUPTED, if it started as UTF16 (default) and an installer or utility that modified it, *assumed* it was an Ansi file without checking first, used Ansi string parsing functions, thus getting garbage, not realizing it, and just write on it, causing a whole big mess, that would require restoring the original file, which is saved as "OldScenery.CFG"

[swiesma 625]

Thanks for the insight @virtuali