p3d.cfg files

[Zimmerbz]

I've seen a number of folks using other peoples p3d.cfg or scenery.cfg files for tweaks and settings.  While I have always been a bid skeptical of doing so in the sense of not wanting to break the sim, I might want to give it a try.  Is it as simple as making a copy of your current .cfg files and then replacing or copy/pasting the other one you are looking to do?  If something goes wrong you just put the original back?  I just want to make sure I am covering my steps so I don't have a situation where I have to do a reinstall.  Thanks!

[Jim Young]

You should never use another person's p3d or scenery.cfg.  Doing so is at your risk as your simulator may not start up or there will be performance problems.  In addition, if you ever reinstall P3D, you should never use your old p3d or scenery.cfg.  Always start with a new configuration. If you ever have problems with your p3d or scenery.cfg, delete them and P3D will rebuild the configs when you restart.  Is using someone else's config dangerous?  No.  But why risk performance problems.  Even if your computers are exactly alike, you should always use your own config.

The scenery.cfg contains the listing of all of your scenery installed and tells P3D where the scenery is located on YOUR computer.  For P3Dv4, most are now using the Addon Organizer for any added scenery and creating add-on.xml's instead of entries in the scenery.cfg.  So there is no value in using someone else's scenery.cfg.

 

[Zimmerbz]

Thanks!  That saves me some headache!

[Zimmerbz]

What about someone's prepar3d.cfg?  Would that mess anything up?  

9 hours ago, Jim Young said:

You should never use another person's p3d or scenery.cfg.  Doing so is at your risk as your simulator may not start up or there will be performance problems.  In addition, if you ever reinstall P3D, you should never use your old p3d or scenery.cfg.  Always start with a new configuration. If you ever have problems with your p3d or scenery.cfg, delete them and P3D will rebuild the configs when you restart.  Is using someone else's config dangerous?  No.  But why risk performance problems.  Even if your computers are exactly alike, you should always use your own config.

The scenery.cfg contains the listing of all of your scenery installed and tells P3D where the scenery is located on YOUR computer.  For P3Dv4, most are now using the Addon Organizer for any added scenery and creating add-on.xml's instead of entries in the scenery.cfg.  So there is no value in using someone else's scenery.cfg.

 

 

[Lorby_SI]

7 hours ago, Zimmerbz said:

What about someone's prepar3d.cfg?  Would that mess anything up?  

That was what Jim was talking about. Each prepar3d.cfg (and all the others) is individually adapted to the computer it was created on. There are several entries that are invalid on your machine (for example the sound devices in the prepard3d.cfg). While nothing bad can happen under normal circumstances, you can save yourself the trouble, because it will never work 100%.

What people usually mean when they talk about tweaks is not that you should share their cfg - doing that is pointless. Instead you are supposed to manually edit in only the tweaked parameters into your own file. Be aware though, that you shouldn't edit a cfg file for example with Windows Notepad. That will probabaly break it, because it can't handle the advanced text encoding of the P3D cfg files. See this thread, what vic is writing applies to all .cfg files!

Best regards