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John_Cillis

Xplane broke my scenery

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I love Xplane11, especially now that I have dug into it a bit and found that you can tweak some of the flight dynamics on the fly, amazing!  Had a problem though with XPlane, it seems it opens scenery files in write mode rather than read mode.  I had a rare Xplane crash flying over the Sierras and my photoreal scenery has been trashed since.  The Xplane default scenery insists on showing thru tons of files have come up missing.  I have my Xplane Ortho4XP scenery installed on the same drive as my P3D MSE scenery, and P3D had read that scenery flawlessly.  I ran a CHKDSK and no errors were found.

I reinstalled Xplane and all sorts of weird things started to happen after I installed the beta, kept saying I did not have enough system for the simulation even though the gold edition works perfectly fine.  Xplane is a great simulator, the more I fly it, the more I like it, it's almost romantic.  But it needs to get its act together when it comes to managing scenery as Ortho4XP is heavily promoted and I got hooked.  I love cruising around in the MD-80 or the Cirrus.  I think the graphics are out of this world!  But I do not think I will upgrade Xplane.

John

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This was a profoundly confused post, very sympathetic. You should be fine as long as you are running the Gold edition.


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Belligerent X-Plane 12 enthusiast on Apple M1 Max 64GB

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19 minutes ago, Colonel X said:

This was a profoundly confused post, very sympathetic. You should be fine as long as you are running the Gold edition.

LOL, thanks.  I ran Ortho4XP again and it found a lot of missing tiles.  It's possible that it could be a Windows issue, when Xplane crashed it's possible that the tiles that were opened got dumped, they all seemed to be from a certain section of California.

Regardless I love the default Xplane scenery, I think it exceeds P3D in realism, and is easier on the system.  Their AI too renders much better than P3D.  The good thing is the way XPlane installs, if you run into trouble it's easily backed up or swapable to a hard drive or partition with more space.

John

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I think you should revert to the latest stable version you were using (I presume it was 11.05). To do that, download the X-Plane installer and then before updating, uncheck the "Check for new betas" box. That way, it'll revert back to 11.05.

Avoid betas, since of course they tend to have issues, but my advice is to always update everytime a new stable (non beta) version is released. New versions always introduce new features and correct bugs.

 

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"The problem with quotes on the Internet is that it is hard to verify their authenticity." [Abraham Lincoln]

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One additional thought: even if I can't prove, my overall understanding on X-Plane would suggest that it is extremely(!) unlikely that it corrupted you scenery files. Because it has absolutely no reason to write(!) to them as you suspect. And i highly trust the devs (like Ben, whom I know quite well) that they wouldn't add such a "feature" without a very, very, very good reason.

So I would rather suspect windows breaking down, a driver breaking down, or simply a hardware part going haywire (which I have experienced a few times ... and yes, I have seen cases where this lead to scrambled / messed-up files). Because all of these are much more likely than X-plane suddenly thinking it needs to mess with your scenery files (because - I repeat my self - it has absolutely no motivation to do anything close to this).

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I've never had XP corrupt or remove scenery before, and as @alpilotx (whose work is a staggeringly amazing addition to XP11) said, it's hard to logically perceive how it could do so.  Logic suggests there must be something else going on here.  I'd be more inclined to blame Windows, with some of the dubiously invasive updates it's been doing lately, than X-Plane! :biggrin:

Whatever Gremlins are going on, I hope you get them resolved soon John and can get back to some nice fun, relaxing flying in the best sim o' them all.

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3 hours ago, JYW said:

I've never had XP corrupt or remove scenery before, and as @alpilotx (whose work is a staggeringly amazing addition to XP11) said, it's hard to logically perceive how it could do so.  Logic suggests there must be something else going on here.  I'd be more inclined to blame Windows, with some of the dubiously invasive updates it's been doing lately, than X-Plane! :biggrin:

Whatever Gremlins are going on, I hope you get them resolved soon John and can get back to some nice fun, relaxing flying in the best sim o' them all.

I decided to delete the scenery and rebuild it, not all of it, just a bit at a time like I did before.  Then I will write protect the files.  As I noted, no other files on that drive were touched other than the images themselves.  I let the build run overnight so I am about 75 pct. complete now.

John

 

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Then I will write protect the files.  As I noted, no other files on that drive were touched other than the images themselves.

That is not a bad idea ... but remember: its a "long" way from the bits on your storage (HDD or SSD) to X-Plane! They run trough a lot of hardware (the drive itself, the controller of the drive, the mainboard bus etc.) and software (firmware, drivers, OS) before they end up as scenery in X-Plane :smile: ... And all of that can go haywire. Not to mention possible additional "software" (benign or malicious) which might mess with the data path.
(and in some of the possible error cases, write protecting won't help much)

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1 hour ago, alpilotx said:

That is not a bad idea ... but remember: its a "long" way from the bits on your storage (HDD or SSD) to X-Plane! They run trough a lot of hardware (the drive itself, the controller of the drive, the mainboard bus etc.) and software (firmware, drivers, OS) before they end up as scenery in X-Plane :smile: ... And all of that can go haywire. Not to mention possible additional "software" (benign or malicious) which might mess with the data path.
(and in some of the possible error cases, write protecting won't help much)

I switched sources back to USA_2 from Bing, it seems only the Bing images were getting deleted.  Some of it may also be the Windows indexing service, I've had problems with that service before on my old system and switched it off--IOTW the files may still be there but indexing may not be finding them correctly.  My drive space never went down on my system even though X-Plane said it could not find the files.  I like USA_2 over Bing, I feel the colors are more natural, more muted like one would expect them to look in the flight levels.  I've always thought X-Plane's default scenery and sky rendering looked more natural than P3D, which at unlimited visibility you can see virtually forever.  Only in the dry deserts have things been that clear for me in real life.  When I took my flying lessons at Falcon Field and my trike lessons near Quartzite, I could see forever, literally.  At takeoff out of Falcon Field as soon as I'd climb to 5000 feet, I could make out the San Francisco peaks, more than 100 miles north of Phoenix.

USA_2 also seems to offer better compression than Bing, at 80 tiles and counting my HD space has hardly been touched.  It is still odd how the P3D/MSE scenery, also located on that drive, remained untouched.  Those textures also load much faster than X-Plane's textures, but I have to remember that I am sampling X-Plane's photo scenery one notch above what MSE V2 offers.

Xplane does use a different file management system vs. P3D, which is why it is so portable and easily xfrd to another drive.  I could transfer it back to my C: drive if need be, to see if that improves the situation.

John

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Finished the rebuild of much of my scenery.  When I reinstalled Xplane, I only installed North America and Europe, may install the rest later.  Since I closed the four inbound connections from Xplane, I find it working much smoother.  I have a feeling my firewall was fighting with that for some reason.  I don't plan on running the beta at this time, I tried it yesterday and I did not like some of the changes they had, Xplane detected my photoscenery and tried to slow down the simulation.  There was no override option.  The 11.05 release does not do that.

Regardless, I am happy to be enjoying it again.  I will see what happens over the next few days.

John

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8 hours ago, Cactus521 said:

... Xplane detected my photoscenery and tried to slow down the simulation.  There was no override option.

Sorry to point this out, but sometimes I have hard time to follow this kind of skewed user logic.

Why should X-plane do such things deliberately. Why should it "detect" your photoscenery and then "slow down"? Sorry, but at least usually that is not how IT works ... especially "friendly" (not hostile) IT. Without any motivation, Laminar would be very very very evil to do such things. So, normally - I think most here will agree - we should not expect them doing such things.

(this is very similar to the primary assumption that X-Plane deletes, destroys scenery files ...maybe even deliberately ... heh?)

Yes, of course things can deteriorate in betas (that is NOT the point I am arguing with) and thats why end users should be always very careful with betas ... but having the notion, that some deliberate change is being introduced to selectively mess with how users experience a specific scenery ... well really ... no way :smile:

(again: I do not want to nitpick ... but being someone who is involved with computers for almost 30 years and working in that industry professionally for almost 20 years I would like to correct some user expectations, assumptions and "ideas" about how things work - and how they do not work)

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2 hours ago, alpilotx said:

Sorry to point this out, but sometimes I have hard time to follow this kind of skewed user logic.

Why should X-plane do such things deliberately. Why should it "detect" your photoscenery and then "slow down"? Sorry, but at least usually that is not how IT works ... especially "friendly" (not hostile) IT. Without any motivation, Laminar would be very very very evil to do such things. So, normally - I think most here will agree - we should not expect them doing such things.

(this is very similar to the primary assumption that X-Plane deletes, destroys scenery files ...maybe even deliberately ... heh?)

Yes, of course things can deteriorate in betas (that is NOT the point I am arguing with) and thats why end users should be always very careful with betas ... but having the notion, that some deliberate change is being introduced to selectively mess with how users experience a specific scenery ... well really ... no way :smile:

(again: I do not want to nitpick ... but being someone who is involved with computers for almost 30 years and working in that industry professionally for almost 20 years I would like to correct some user expectations, assumptions and "ideas" about how things work - and how they do not work)

Hi Andras, do you have any plans to update your mesh, for all those (they exist!) that do not want to "switch" to OrthoXP? I'd really like to see UHD coverage for the USA utilizing X-Plane 11's OSM data and autogen... and I suppose I am not the only one!


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Belligerent X-Plane 12 enthusiast on Apple M1 Max 64GB

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11 hours ago, Cactus521 said:

Xplane detected my photoscenery and tried to slow down the simulation.

I agree with alpilotx, there is 0% possibility that X-Plane decided to delete your add-on scenery files. The culprit is elsewhere.

Regarding the "slow down", what is happening is this:

.) If X-Plane runs slower than 20 FPS, it is forced to run in slow motion to keep the flight model stable; so one minute lapse in flight sim will take more than one minute lapse in real time;

.) In X-Plane 11.05 and before, the user had no warning of this; so the main hint that it was running slower than real time, was the slowing down of aircraft reactivity;

.) In X-Plane 11.10, they decided to give the user a forced on-screen warning that the flight sim is running too slow;

.) Since people are complaining about this on-screen warning, it's possible that they will take it away in the next releases.

 


"The problem with quotes on the Internet is that it is hard to verify their authenticity." [Abraham Lincoln]

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1 hour ago, Murmur said:

I agree with alpilotx, there is 0% possibility that X-Plane decided to delete your add-on scenery files. The culprit is elsewhere.

Regarding the "slow down", what is happening is this:

.) If X-Plane runs slower than 20 FPS, it is forced to run in slow motion to keep the flight model stable; so one minute lapse in flight sim will take more than one minute lapse in real time;

.) In X-Plane 11.05 and before, the user had no warning of this; so the main hint that it was running slower than real time, was the slowing down of aircraft reactivity;

.) In X-Plane 11.10, they decided to give the user a forced on-screen warning that the flight sim is running too slow;

.) Since people are complaining about this on-screen warning, it's possible that they will take it away in the next releases.

 

Makes perfect sense now that you have explained it, I found by muting down my rendering options the problem went away.  As far as my files go, I think that was from a folder rename issue on my side.  So I rebuilt most of the scenery, using USA_2 as the source this time, and my issues went away, and as an added bonus, my scenery extends into Texas now.

I love the Xplane sky rendering over P3D, it's much more realistic from a pilot's POV.

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8 hours ago, Colonel X said:

Hi Andras, do you have any plans to update your mesh, for all those (they exist!) that do not want to "switch" to OrthoXP? I'd really like to see UHD coverage for the USA utilizing X-Plane 11's OSM data and autogen... and I suppose I am not the only one!

This is off topic: but in short ... UHD, yes, quite likely  ... But HD Mesh Scenery v4 will come first (technically already on my disks ... but still in testing and needs some preparation).

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