Suddenly all settings + addons GONE

[disco79stu 15]

Hi there,

today something strange happend. I boot up P3D and it asked me if I want to activate certain plugins. Furthermore, it didn't start active sky, UTL and chase plane etc. with the application. So I guess the exe.xml got rewritten. But not only that all of my settings were back to default, also every add on scenery was gone. Every default scenario was also back in there (i deleted them a while ago). It's just like I re-installed P3D, except my planes are still there and so are my saved scenarios. 

Has anyone an Idea what happended here? Did P3D somehow trashed my scenery.cfg, p3d.cfg and exe.xml? Has that something to do with the upcoming v4.3? 

Thanks for any hints,

Stu

 

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

Hi,

sounds like something removed/renamed/reset "C:\Users\...\AppData\Roaming\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4" (the whole folder). That is why all settings are back to default and the sim asked you if you wanted to activate the addons that have been installed with add-on.xml files in "C:\Users\...\Documents\Prepar3D v4 Add-ons"

Please note that fully P3D V4 compliant addons don't install into EXE.XML / DLL.XML any more (to my best knowledge UTL doesn't either, at least it didn't on my system - UTL should have been among those that you were asked to activate).

Best regards

Edited June 11, 2018 by Lorby_SI

[disco79stu 15]

well, oviously something was deleted, but I really wonder why this happened. It‘s kinda scary and unfortunate, I will have to re-install everything now (better yet, uninstall everything that is left first, to male sure I have a clean installation). 

windows10s admin logic could be an issue, because it‘s really confusing a times. 

thanks for the reply,

bg

stu

[Skywolf 992]

Same thing happened to me this weekend.  This is why I keep telling LM to force all developers to install outside the sim directory.  I sound like a broken record now.

LM needs to force the major players - Orbx, pmdg etc to install outside. 

UK2000 and now the defunct Real Air birds all install outside the sim and everything is perfect once the sim is reinstalled.

Now that 4.3 is going to be out this month, i am not installing any major sceneries in my system in order to save time.  My time is money

Edited June 11, 2018 by Skywolf

[disco79stu 15]

That sounds scary. Is LM somehow changing things on my machine? 

Anyway, waiting for 4.3 before reinstalling everything sounds like a good plan. 

Bg

[Lorby_SI 2,038]

 

1 hour ago, disco79stu said:

well, oviously something was deleted,

I specifically named that folder because of the symptoms that you described. Deleting the \Roaming\... folder will 

- reset all controller and keyboard assignments to default
- reset all graphics and other app settings to default
- add-ons.cfg would have been removed too, but that is not a big deal. When P3D is next started it will automatically rediscover the addons that were in there and ask you to activate them
- exe.xml and dll.xml are lost, but should not have been in use anyway if you were only using up-to-date addons. There are only a handful of addons that still insist on using them - or if you install old FS-type addons. Besides, there is another set of those two files in C:\ProgramData - not a clone, but a separate set, that could have been used as well by an addon installer.

So generally speaking this should be easy to fix - at least the "pure" P3D V4 part. It would be another matter if the P3D folder in "C:\ProgramData\..." has been removed too, then all (legacy) scenery would be lost as well, and all modern addons that have been installed via the P3D command line tools.

Not sure if I am allowed to say it, but here goes: the freeware P4AO ("Prepar3D Addon Organizer", available on the Lorby-SI website) has a backup function that will create a copy of all your simulator config files (and it can restore them too). Plus you can establish external XML based configurations for all your addons with it, so this scenario becomes less likely.

I would expect something like this to happen after an unintentional - almost - uninstall of P3D, copy protection of some kind or a virus attack. I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there are attack scenarios now that specifically target the flightsims - especially since many people regularly bypass basic system security to install addons (or the sim itself). But I don't really know, this is just conjecture. Hackers like to strike where it hurts, and destroying a simulator setup that took the user weeks - months - years to get right is certainly an attractive target for that lot.

Edit: or maybe a failed "big update" for Windows 10 that rolled back to an earlier restore point by mistake? Not sure if that can even happen though.

Best regards

Edited June 11, 2018 by Lorby_SI

[Mace 1,921]

If you do regular backups, you should be able to pull your dll.xml and other files from there.

That's definitely strange, and I wish you the best in getting things back.

Skywolf -- I share your sentiment very strongly.  However, right now I suspect there are still some legacy issues in P3D which require files to be in certain spots within the P3D folder structure.  For example, one of them is (or used to be) \SCENERY\WORLD\SCENERY, which to the best of my knowledge, is still the place where airport altitude change bgl's must go (i.e. Orbx Vector - AEC).  I'm sure there are other "magic spots" too -- I wish LM would finally, once and for all divorce the sim dir, from *all* add-on dir's.  It would be painful at first, as lots of add-ons would have to be adjusted, but in the long term, a huge plus for everyone.