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Bachian

Best way to add sceneries, Add-ons or Scenery Library?

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2 hours ago, Jim Young said:

I made the changes in the Lorby_Si Addon Organizer first and saved.  But it will return if you do not also change the layering and areas in the scenery.cfg so I opened the scenery.cfg and reordered the area/layering for all of the addon scenery there (currently just FTX and UTX2 stuff) and made sure they followed the layering I had in the Addon Organizer.  You will see when you open up the scenery.cfg that those addons are not in sequence.  I then save it and now, whenever I open up the Addon Organizer, the areas and layering are exactly the same (before they were being reorganized).  It is NOT the best solution as I now have to edit the Addon.xml Organizer and Scenery.cfg when I add new scenery or they get out of sequence.  I do not think LM techs designed it that way.  But, like Oliver at Lorby_Si said, he is very surprised some commercial developer has not come up with a commercial organizer that does everything.

Jim,

Are you sure you're using the latest Lorby Addon Organizer. Currently, there are two versions...Addon Organizer 1.16 for P3D 4.0 or 3.3; (Prototype) Addon Organizer 1.18 for P3D 4.1 or 3.3.

I am using Lorby AO v1.18 with P3Dv4.1 and all issues you discuss about layering between xml and .cfg addons has been fixed. With AO 1.8 you can layer any xml and any .cfg scenery in any order, even mixing the two and the problem of them relayering when you open AO again has been fixed.

For example, I have my 3 fsaerodata layers (.cfg) at the top of my scenery list, followed by a bunch of airports sceneries (.xml), followed by Orbx airports (.cfg), etc. This works marvelously and it makes scenery management SO easy and predictable.

Before v1.18 of AO, indeed you had to manually edit the .cfg to coincide with .xml ordering.


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2 hours ago, pgde said:

Wrong -- it is compatible (version 1.1.9) and works great for me. All you need to do is to make sure that your software is not installing both in the scenery.cfg and add-on.xml. Ultimately, I agree that the Lorby tool may be the only option but until LM enforces the xml method, SCE works great (and yes Jim and I disagree about this).

I stand corrected, a victim of my outdated experience. Thanks for the update! Full disclosure: since my unhappy experience with un-compatible SCE, been using SimStarter NG.

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2 hours ago, somiller said:

Are you sure you're using the latest Lorby Addon Organizer. Currently, there are two versions...Addon Organizer 1.16 for P3D 4.0 or 3.3; (Prototype) Addon Organizer 1.18 for P3D 4.1 or 3.3.

I use V1.18 as I have V4.1 installed.

2 hours ago, somiller said:

I am using Lorby AO v1.18 with P3Dv4.1 and all issues you discuss about layering between xml and .cfg addons has been fixed. With AO 1.8 you can layer any xml and any .cfg scenery in any order, even mixing the two and the problem of them relayering when you open AO again has been fixed.

That's a negative.  Yes, it changes the area/layers automatically as you move them up or down in the list but it did not change the areas/layers in the scenery.cfg.  So, whenever I arranged the areas/layers in the Organizer and save.  It saved it but when I closed it and restarted it, I would find FTX Regions/UTX2 entries (located in the Scenery.cfg) would be in between the Add-on.XML scenery.  Only way I could fix that was to manually change the areas/layers in the scenery.cfg for FTX and UTX2 scenery.  You say 1.18 fixes that but it does not or at least it did not for me.  Oliver knows there are issues.  I think that's a major problem that needs to be fixed but only way I can see to do it would be to create Add-on.xmls for the FTX and UTX2 entries.  That would be impossible as you can enable/disable UTX2 entries via their utility and that could not happen if they were Add-on.xmls.  I think FTX and UTX are going to have to come up with a method to create the Add-on.xmls and the ability to disable them on the fly. 

My problem with the new Add-on.xml is that I only have a few minutes to play with it each day as my job here at AVSIM takes up most of my time.  I just discovered the above this past weekend.


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I found all add-on.xml details and parameters here:

http://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv4/sdk/add-ons/add-on_packages.html

It's possible to set a specific layer for the scenery using the <layer> tag.

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Felipe Bachian
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1 hour ago, Jim Young said:

It saved it but when I closed it and restarted it, I would find FTX Regions/UTX2 entries (located in the Scenery.cfg) would be in between the Add-on.XML scenery.  Only way I could fix that was to manually change the areas/layers in the scenery.cfg for FTX and UTX2 scenery.  You say 1.18 fixes that but it does not or at least it did not for me.  Oliver knows there are issues.  I

Hi Jim,

didn't know about that one. Unfortunately I am on a business trip and it will be a while until I can look at it.

Changing layers numbers in the scenery.cfg always worked just fine, and I have had no reports suggesting otherwise (except yours here). One issue is FTXCentral itself, because it re-injects the scenery.cfg entries all the time, shuffling the layers.

Best regards


LORBY-SI

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1 hour ago, Jim Young said:

I use V1.18 as I have V4.1 installed.

That's a negative.  Yes, it changes the area/layers automatically as you move them up or down in the list but it did not change the areas/layers in the scenery.cfg.  So, whenever I arranged the areas/layers in the Organizer and save.  It saved it but when I closed it and restarted it, I would find FTX Regions/UTX2 entries (located in the Scenery.cfg) would be in between the Add-on.XML scenery.  Only way I could fix that was to manually change the areas/layers in the scenery.cfg for FTX and UTX2 scenery.  You say 1.18 fixes that but it does not or at least it did not for me.  Oliver knows there are issues.  I think that's a major problem that needs to be fixed but only way I can see to do it would be to create Add-on.xmls for the FTX and UTX2 entries.  That would be impossible as you can enable/disable UTX2 entries via their utility and that could not happen if they were Add-on.xmls.  I think FTX and UTX are going to have to come up with a method to create the Add-on.xmls and the ability to disable them on the fly. 

My problem with the new Add-on.xml is that I only have a few minutes to play with it each day as my job here at AVSIM takes up most of my time.  I just discovered the above this past weekend.

Jim,

Indeed it does change the scenery.cfg order (actually, I guess P3Dv4.1 changes the scenery.cfg order...I just forgot one step...after adjusting scenery order with Lorby AO v1.18, make sure you launch P3D, go to "World", "Scenery Library", and simply click Okay, without making any modifications. P3D will do it's re-shuffle, rebuild indexes, and re-writes the scenery.cfg with the changed layer numbers.

When you open Scenery Library in P3D, you'll notice that whatever change you made in Lorby AO is reflected in the Library order...I guess it just takes P3D to actually confirm and write the new order to the scenery.cfg.


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35 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

Hi Jim,

didn't know about that one. Unfortunately I am on a business trip and it will be a while until I can look at it.

Changing layers numbers in the scenery.cfg always worked just fine, and I have had no reports suggesting otherwise (except yours here). One issue is FTXCentral itself, because it re-injects the scenery.cfg entries all the time, shuffling the layers.

Best regards

Oliver,

Same here...I'm certain it changed the layer numbers in scenery.cfg...but I wonder if that was with 1.17. I am positive, that with 1.17 I did a test, and visually checked the scenery.cfg after making a change with AO, and that it changed the numbering. Did 1.18 possibly break it again?

In any case, a temporary work-around is to do as I stated above, after making a change with 1.18, open the Library in P3D and just click okay...P3D will then write the number change to scenery.cfg.


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Is anyone familiar with a good tutorial explaining how to use the add on xml method? Specifically on how to add scenery which is present not only under the add ons folder but also contains files in P3D v4 general folders (effects, world scenery etc..)?


Shom

 

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11 hours ago, Jim Young said:

I made the changes in the Lorby_Si Addon Organizer first and saved.  But it will return if you do not also change the layering and areas in the scenery.cfg so I opened the scenery.cfg and reordered the area/layering for all of the addon scenery there (currently just FTX and UTX2 stuff) and made sure they followed the layering I had in the Addon Organizer.  You will see when you open up the scenery.cfg that those addons are not in sequence.  I then save it and now, whenever I open up the Addon Organizer, the areas and layering are exactly the same (before they were being reorganized).  It is NOT the best solution as I now have to edit the Addon.xml Organizer and Scenery.cfg when I add new scenery or they get out of sequence.  I do not think LM techs designed it that way.  But, like Oliver at Lorby_Si said, he is very surprised some commercial developer has not come up with a commercial organizer that does everything.

Also my experience. First noticed it when I started using Lorby_Si tool, and then went to FTX manager and saved their ordering preference. After that, I had my FreeMeshX between FTX entries. When I then sorted it with SCE, using FTX didn't move FreeMeshX entries. That was the "gotcha" for me.

I also wish we had an AIO, but until then, I have 0 problems using both to sort out the mess :biggrin:

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4 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

Hi Jim,

didn't know about that one. Unfortunately I am on a business trip and it will be a while until I can look at it.

Changing layers numbers in the scenery.cfg always worked just fine, and I have had no reports suggesting otherwise (except yours here). One issue is FTXCentral itself, because it re-injects the scenery.cfg entries all the time, shuffling the layers.

Best regards

That it is, but it's possible to "solve" it, at least it worked for me. I have my openLC below UT Landclass - Urban, and FTX Entries at the top of the lib. FreeMeshX is placed above Bathymetry via SCE. And nothing shuffles neither through FTXCentral, nor SCE, nor AO.

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Here are couple of gotchas that I collected since I started my journey. Note also those are all tests, probably not facts. I don't know if it applies to exclusively everything, but with couple of sceneries I've been testing, it does seem to apply:

Effects: when declaring effects, if there is texture folder, doesn't have to be additionally declared (=added into xml). Effects "act" as they did until now, as if they were in the effects folder in the sim. Filenames also must be unique.

Scripts: if there are for instance lua scripts which define seasonal textures, they usually have texture subfolder. This folder must be declared, otherweise textures won't load. This folder must also be declared as global, otherwise it won't work.

Texture: using world will prevent textures to be used in another scenery (test from one developer), call it "local" if you wish. Global will. And here also comes the danger of using same filenames, because if declared global, which is the default, if the texture name is same, then you mess up your other textures. And that's the problem (or something you have to careful about) with globally declared textures from scripts...

Scenery Area: whatever the way for declaring this, either scenery area as a whole (like with did with .cfg files) or scenery and texture separately, there is a certain advantage of declaring separately, since you can assign world to the texture folder, thus force it to be "local".

Now the question that's burning on my mind:

When you add the scenery area into .xml, much the same like into scenery.cfg, it will "read" addon\scenery and addon\texture folder. Now, how does it declare the addon\texture folder? Global or world - let's say for the sake of the default global? And if you then additionally declare the \texture folder as world, is the texture folder then declared globally or locally (world)?

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5 hours ago, Bachian said:

I found all add-on.xml details and parameters here:

http://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv4/sdk/add-ons/add-on_packages.html

It's possible to set a specific layer for the scenery using the <layer> tag.

That is what @vgbaron was talking about, that solves the problem for Scenery Layers, but still leave issues for Effects, Sounds and Textures which can override other add-on's files depending of the priority order assigned by PD3 and the way of how the user declare the XML file.

The latest would only cause problems if the user creating the XML files is not aware of the file name resolution techniques of PD3 and perform mistakes as I have explained already on many other similar forums topics.

Best Regards,

Simbol

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10 minutes ago, simbol said:

That is what @vgbaron was talking about, that solves the problem for Scenery Layers, but still leave issues for Effects, Sounds and Textures which can override other add-on's files depending of the priority order assigned by PD3 and the way of how the user declare the XML file.

The latest would only cause problems if the user creating the XML files is not aware of the file name resolution techniques of PD3 and perform mistakes as I have explained already on many other similar forums topics.

Best Regards,

Simbol

Nothing changes: effects/sounds/textures within P3D folder, and filenames were always unique (they had to be, otherwise would get overwritten by other addon). They have to stay unique. Now we only have additional job - we have to check for uniqueness, because of separate folders for addons. The priority at which sim loads, if I understand it correctly, is now that .xml loads last, and what is declared there, wins. Right? (except what I wrote above about texture folder)

But I think there would a very cool solution to our problem:

There should be an ability to declare autogen/scripts/effects/sounds/textures etc. globally and locally. We should be able to set that per declared .xml entry, as we are now able with global/world, if that's correct anyway.

Question aside: did anyone try to declare FSUIPC or EZCA or Activesky via .XML? Basically exe/dll.xml files. It should be possible. Will try later :)

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14 hours ago, Henry Street said:

Not compatible and is not recommended to use with P3Dv4 XML add-on installation. Lorby-SI tool is, however, compatible and recommended to use with P3Dv4.

Where did you get the idea from that SceneryConfigEditor is not compatible with V4.1 ?

It is working perfectly and to it. It is the easiest way for scenery library control.

All my addons are installed outside the P3D root . 

You are not good informed about SCE..

 


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6 minutes ago, GSalden said:

Where did you get the idea from that SceneryConfigEditor is not compatible with V4.1 ?

It is working perfectly and to it. It is the easiest way for scenery library control.

All my addons are installed outside the P3D root . 

You are not good informed about SCE..

 

Gabriel, how do you manage out of the main P3D v4 folder addons which require updates under effects/sound/global scenery and other P3D main folders using only SCE?


Shom

 

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