Scenery Cfg file contents deleted by P3Dv4 on startup

[Guest JustanotherPilot]

Had a strange occurrence in Prepar3D v4 which completely deleted all of the scenery data in my scenery.cfg file. I opened Prepar3D v4 and was confronted with the message box which informed me of the following "You do not have permission to delete scenery files" "click enter to abort Prepar3D v4, You will need to reinstall Prepa3Dv4". I then opened my scenery.cfg file using Explorer, in the Program data folder and found it empty. I tried to run P3Dv4 again and was informed that there was no scenery file and that the program would close...LUCKILY, I had made a backup of the scenery.cfg with Scenery Configurator and Lori Si, I restored the cfg file, started P3Dv4, scenery files rebuilt and all is good.

I have logged about a 100 hours use in Prepar3D v4, with no issues prior to this.

This post is made to warn to all to back up the scenery.cfg file with all new scenery added. With all my ORBX and 3rd party scenery I have installed it would be a mammoth task to reinstall this again. I have yet to find anyone else who has experienced this problem.

Steve

[aeronauta 67]

Had you used FTX Central before this happened?? or any of the scenery config external programs??

Jorge

[aeronauta 67]

Also if P3D finds there is no scenery.cfg file it will create a new pristine one and wont say a word...you wont have any  extra scenery but no errors.. so your problem was not P3D , it was caused by something else...

Jorge

[Guest JustanotherPilot]

1 hour ago, aeronauta said:

Had you used FTX Central before this happened?? or any of the scenery config external programs??

Jorge

No, FTX Central or other not used. I only turned some .bgl scenery files(3)  to .OFF in OZx FTX using windows explorer. I had done this before without any issues.

[razalom 19]

You didnt happen to install an airport/scenery by Drzewiecki Design did you as I know their first release of Washington X (and others) update for P3D v4 caused the file to become corrupted :( 

[garydpoole 183]

Installed Justsim's V4 Nice Côte d'Azur last weekend and for some reason only known to itself, it completely emptied my scenery. cfg file bar its own entry. 

Fortunately, a backup saved the day, but very annoying nonetheless... 

Gary

[virtuali 4,419]

55 minutes ago, garydpoole said:

Installed Justsim's V4 Nice Côte d'Azur last weekend and for some reason only known to itself, it completely emptied my scenery. cfg file bar its own entry. 

Fortunately, a backup saved the day, but very annoying nonetheless... 

Gary

The scenery.cfg in P3D V4 is encoded in Unicode ( UTF-16 ). Previously, it was encoded in Ansi (Windows 1252 or Latin1).

A scenery installer that was made assuming the scenery.cfg is still Ansi and tries to change it, WILL surely corrupt it. A "proper" installer, should first try to detect the encoding, and only then modify the file, using different text parsing routines.

But even using the scenery.cfg is not really a good practice in P3D V4. An even more proper installer, should instead use the Add-on.xml method to add its areas, and should use the commandline Prepar3d.exe services to enable itself, so it won't have to modify any of the P3D configuration files and it won't have to be concerned with encoding.