15 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

Unfortunately there is a bug in P3D V4.1 where a certain number of entries (seems to vary by PC) in the Add-On.cfg will cause the wrong textures from being loaded and/or not being loaded at all.  The solution was to disable Add-On entries and use only what is need for the specific flight.  As a result of this bug, 3rd party are probably going to use the "old way" of installing.

Fortunately this bugs has been fixed and will hopefully be available soon.

Cheers, Rob.

 

Do we even have a 'ballpark' figure for that value Rob?  I have a huge number of AI Aircraft that I usually install that way.

14 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

Hello Ryan,

The old way was OK because the platform itself was not going anywhere. That has changed with P3D, and you have to make provisions for updates to the base software, so you don't have to reinstall everything all the time. Furthermore, with the "old way" a single addon could kill your simulator dead - with the external installation that is a lot less likely. Finally Windows security / UAC.

Best regards

While we're on this subject, please accept my vote of gratitude Oliver, for your amazingly simple to use 'Addon Organiser'.  If even folk like myself can use it without having to constantly ask for help, then it was clearly very well thought out.

Thank you very much!

1 hour ago, Dougal said:

Do we even have a 'ballpark' figure for that value Rob?  I have a huge number of AI Aircraft that I usually install that way.

I found many users hitting the problem after 17 .XML ad-don's inside their documents folder, were others have hundreds of them without any issues.

So it is hard to tell, I advise my customers and friends to keep them below 17 if posible and use @Lorby_SI add-on organiser, I also tell them to combine multiple add-on's on single .XML files to keep the numbers of XML files below the "problematic number", so for example you could put all FDST add-on's under a single add-on.XML file, all Aerosoft  add-on's in another, etc. 

Hopes this helps,

Simbol

Wow really! LM sort of shot themselves in the foot then;) Insisting on using a broken system. Do we know when the fix will be released?

1 hour ago, simbol said:

users hitting the problem after 17 .XML ad-don's inside their documents folder, were others have hundreds of them without any issues

Just speculation on my part, but I wonder if this problem may be related to the number of AddonComponents of type "texture", and the lookup of these taking too long when there are too many XMLs - hence the corruption?

You can install scenery in two different ways: either target the top folder (=the scenery area) that contains \scenery and \texture - or instead add two components, one each for "scenery" and "texture". Maybe if there are too many of these "split" definitions that is what causes trouble? The way that I read the spec is, that the first method is correct for sceneries = targetting the scenery area. Maybe textures are cached if they are part of a scenery area. I have a customer too who has literally thousands of legacy scenery areas split over a large number of XMLs without problems.

But anyway, IMHO it is vey important to understand that you don't need one separate add-on.xml for every single addon. You can group the content in any way that makes sense to you. For example, sceneries by continent and aircraft by developer. If you do this, then you wont have so many XMLs in the first place - and you can for example disable a whole continent or several aircraft by disabling the XMLs and saving the loading times for areas and planes that you don't currently fly anyway. (with the P4AO you can disable individual sceneries or groups of them too, but strictly speaking that is a hack.)

Best regards

2 hours ago, Dougal said:

While we're on this subject, please accept my vote of gratitude Oliver, for your amazingly simple to use 'Addon Organiser'.  If even folk like myself can use it without having to constantly ask for help, then it was clearly very well thought out.

Thank you very much!

You're welcome. It somehow seemed necessary with the advent of V4, 64bit and all - I just couldn't be sure that the stuff that I install even works. Better to keep it separately, I have had my share of complete reinstalls over the years and it would be nice to make do without them for a while.

Best regards

23 hours ago, Dougal said:

I'm really pleased I posted this now.  I thought I was the only one and didn't understand offensive initials not allowed was going on.

Seems I'm not the only one that doesn't understand, nor the only one thats frustrated with developers;-)

Puts us mere mortals (users) in a REALLY difficult position....  LM says 'this is how you must do it', yet 99% of developers don't actually allow us to do as LM advises:-(

So when things go wrong, and error messages start to appear, thats a complete no win situation for the end user!

 

Someone else pointed it out, but there's a few doing it, Flight Sim Labs included 

 

As an aside - from the name and avatar, are you a low end doodler? I feel like I recognise you from a bass forum!

14 minutes ago, tumtiddle said:

As an aside - from the name and avatar, are you a low end doodler? I feel like I recognise you from a bass forum!

Lol no, not in the last 25 years at least;-)

Anyone remember back in the old days of where software was contained in their own folders (DOS/Win3.11)? Even X-Plane takes a page from this where there are no registry entries. You could move your software to different drives, add remove features just by removing/adding a subfolders and nothing would break.

I hate the fact that there if you need to 'configure' something you need to go into your AppData\Roaming and AppData\Local and/or ProgramData folder just to fix/configure something. Everything is spread out all over your drive and registry, honestly it's ridiculous. (Granted your license and XPlane location are in a couple if files in your AppData folder, but even those get rebuilt if you move somewhere else). Try that with FSW or P3D.

Not suggesting we go back to .INI files, but If I want to move X-Plane for example or add/remove scenery I can just delete/add it and it works. I'm not that big if an X-Plane fan, but at least it's not hard to configure and everything is on one place and I can add/remove what I want without breaking it.

It's seems such a simpler process than anything else out there. I agree that 3rd party developers should stay out of the main folder like RealAir or UTLive (GSX even), at least at that point you got some control over your add-ons.

Believe me, I know the pain of having to re-install P3D or FSX with tons of scenery and addons because something borked the main folder and files, even a simple uninstall of the offending software didn't work.

Sometimes the simple things are the best way.

Hi Folks,

Win3.11 - LOL - where they finally added networking to the OS ?

Regards,
Scott

 

The more threads like this I see, the more it encourages me to stick with P3D v3 until there is no other choice.

1 hour ago, Lorby_SI said:

Just speculation on my part, but I wonder if this problem may be related to the number of AddonComponents of type "texture", and the lookup of these taking too long when there are too many XMLs - hence the corruption?

No Idea Oliver.. I helped over 7 users remotely with the same issue but I didn't went to the extent to record such details, all I can say is that I fixed it by combining multiple add-on's into single chunks and I organised it by add-on's brand so the users had a sense of what was going on, from 7 users 6 were having CTD after launching P3D with over 17 add-on's.xml files inside their documents folder, were 1 was having wrong textures being displayed.

1 hour ago, Lorby_SI said:

But anyway, IMHO it is vey important to understand that you don't need one separate add-on.xml for every single addon. You can group the content in any way that makes sense to you. For example, sceneries by continent and aircraft by developer. If you do this, then you wont have so many XMLs in the first place - and you can for example disable a whole continent or several aircraft by disabling the XMLs and saving the loading times for areas and planes that you don't currently fly anyway. (with the P4AO you can disable individual sceneries or groups of them too, but strictly speaking that is a hack.)

Best regards

Correct, I passed long time ago this advise to my users via newsletters alongside with recommendation to use your add-on organiser.

Best Regards,
Simbol

1 hour ago, AAN1718A said:

Even X-Plane takes a page from this where there are no registry entries.

And I wish they would have registry entries ... because XP11 doesn't, this requires prompting the user to tell the installer where XPlane is located.  Not having installers and uninstallers also introduces the problem of having to remember what folders belong to which add-on/plugin.  As my list of add-ons/plugins increases for XP11 (this is a good thing), my ability to remove them gets much more complex, especially plugin requirements.  I think it's a pipe dream to think people are going to remember all the folders they copied over for each and every 3rd party product they own.

39 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

more it encourages me to stick with P3D v3

Don't understand this, P3D V3 introduced the Add-On approach, it's NOT new to V4?

The Add-On.xml process is good and solves real problems and will be essential for the future, it's been fixed so hang tight and hopefully soon. 

Cheers, Rob.

14 minutes ago, Rob Ainscough said:

And I wish they would have registry entries ... because XP11 doesn't, this requires prompting the user to tell the installer where XPlane is located.  Not having installers and uninstallers also introduces the problem of having to remember what folders belong to which add-on/plugin.  As my list of add-ons/plugins increases for XP11 (this is a good thing), my ability to remove them gets much more complex, especially plugin requirements.  I think it's a pipe dream to think people are going to remember all the folders they copied over for each and every 3rd party product they own.

Don't understand this, P3D V3 introduced the Add-On approach, it's NOT new to V4?

The Add-On.xml process is good and solves real problems and will be essential for the future, it's been fixed so hang tight and hopefully soon. 

Cheers, Rob.

And if you system crashes, you can't recover your drive and have to install your OS? X-Plane will still be there (assuming of course you didn't install it on your system drive in the first place.) I don't totally disagree with your argument. There are definitely good points to having it. Perhaps an add-on manager for X-Plane would alleviate that issue (don't know if one exists or not), although the folders for Aircraft and Plugs-In are pretty straightforward as to what they contain.

5 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

The more threads like this I see, the more it encourages me to stick with P3D v3 until there is no other choice.

This is the route I have taken. Most of my addons are in P3Dv3 because it is stable. P3Dv4 is like an experimental aircraft for me. I just put a couple add-ons in it at a time. When a new version of P3Dv4 is released it is easy to uninstall the few addons and start fresh. I can't wait until P3Dv5 is released. I don't really care what v5 brings but then I will have a stable 64 bit P3Dv4 that I can load up. I've been doing this with the last couple versions of P3D. I didn't plan it that way it is just that I had more problems with the ever changing latest version and the addons trying to keep up with the changes in the base sim. I have always been able to control the VAS in the 32 bit versions.  I am glad that Lockheed Martin is advancing the sim and I always buy the latest sim to support them, but I have found the next to latest versions more reliable and less work.

Ted