Curse you FTX!

[bosflo 53]

Specifically FTX vector and the airport elevations. I am getting so tired of this tool messing up my addon sceneries. It seems no matter what add on airport I choose to fly into the elevations are off and buildings are floating or runways are sunken. I'm pretty sure most of you can relate. Really takes the realism out of a long flight when you land in the ground. Another problem is that if you go into the AEC panel and deactivate an airport the next time you run a complete new scan all the changes that you made are erased. I don't why this program is so unfriendly to the sim. I thought this was going to be fixed and should have been fixed by now. I would appreciate if someone can tell me if there is a better way. I have gone back and forth on uninstalling it or keeping it and I decided to keep it because everything else works but this airport elevation tool is taking the fun out of everything. Sorry about the rant, believe me I had to hold back. Thanks

[DavidP 1,408]

Stopped using it years ago. Not worth the trouble.

[mpw8679 428]

Yup I hate vector.  Horrible product.  Switched back to UTX never been happier.

[qqwertz 770]

I use FTX Vector and like it, it looks so much more real. Yes, I occasionally run into elevation problems, but it usually can be fixed without too much trouble. Vector could be better, but I am happy with it anyway.

Peter

[Dave_YVR 968]

It was a problem when it first came out but it's been awesome for the past few years. If I find an elevation issue now, it's more because I forgot to go in and set the AEC.

Do you have any mesh installed? That will cause massive problems far moreso than Vector ever could. Vector has been a scapegoat for many users over the years.

[dave2013 1,123]

Most of the airport elevation problems caused by FTX Vector can be fixed by manually disabling elevation corrections for affected airports using the configuration tool.  You also should set your FSX/P3D terrain mesh resolution to 10m or greater.  I found that 5m can cause problems with some airports.

There are some vexing problems with certain airports, such as KABQ from my personal experience, which the developers were unable to fix, but for the most part the vector data is quite good and covers the entire world.

Dave

 

[bosflo 53]

Is there a special way to disabling certain airports. I have used the tool to do it but when I run a new scan it erases all those changes.

[Benjamin J 751]

28 minutes ago, bosflo said:

Is there a special way to disabling certain airports. I have used the tool to do it but when I run a new scan it erases all those changes.

I would recommend against doing a scan. What I do is, whenever I install a new airport, first thing I do is to go into FTX Vector's UI and see if there is an elevation correction for it. If yes, I manually disable it. The scans don't seem to pick up sceneries added through the addon.xml, so a lot of the more modern sceneries in P3Dv4 won't even be picked up properly. 

[Rocky_53 1,566]

I've just stopped using Vector since it's release. I don't know whether it's my imagination, but I'm sure the sim seems to perform better. The downside, is that shorelines don't seem quite so nice in some places. But whenever I fly GA it's always in an Orbx region so it's not needed, and if I fly outside of a region it's inevitably in the NGX, so Vector is not really missed in any great way.

[GSalden 4,651]

I only use Vector for the coastlines and performance is good.

[Christopher Low 5,324]

I only use photoscenery, so Vector is a complete irrelevance

[PWJT8D 446]

10 hours ago, Benjamin J said:

I would recommend against doing a scan. What I do is, whenever I install a new airport, first thing I do is to go into FTX Vector's UI and see if there is an elevation correction for it. If yes, I manually disable it. The scans don't seem to pick up sceneries added through the addon.xml, so a lot of the more modern sceneries in P3Dv4 won't even be picked up properly. 

Great advice! The scan is a nightmare because of it not finding the addon.xml sceneries. And on top of that, I have a handful of airports that need to be inactive such as KDEN, but whenever I do a scan it makes it active so I always have to go back and change it. Not to mention it takes 5 minutes of waiting. Thank you for the tip.

[Benjamin J 751]

17 minutes ago, PWJT8D said:

Great advice! The scan is a nightmare because of it not finding the addon.xml sceneries. And on top of that, I have a handful of airports that need to be inactive such as KDEN, but whenever I do a scan it makes it active so I always have to go back and change it. Not to mention it takes 5 minutes of waiting. Thank you for the tip.

You're welcome, hope it helps!

I believe what can drag down performance with Vector mostly is the roads, especially in the more densely populated areas. That said, I'm not sure of the performance impact on my setup, as I've never done proper comparisons... But I may have a look in the UI and see if there's anything I might want to disable, with that thought in mind. I'd love to hear from anybody who has a better idea about that, though!

[ieydis 51]

1 hour ago, PWJT8D said:

Great advice! The scan is a nightmare because of it not finding the addon.xml sceneries. 

You guys know there is a workaround for this, right?  Use Lorby's excellent free Addon Organizer, where you can copy all of your scenery to scenery.cfg, run the vector scan and then restore the scenery.cfg back.  Works like a charm and makes the Vector scan much more effective.

[DaveCT2003 1,820]

14 hours ago, bosflo said:

Specifically FTX vector and the airport elevations. I am getting so tired of this tool messing up my addon sceneries. It seems no matter what add on airport I choose to fly into the elevations are off and buildings are floating or runways are sunken. I'm pretty sure most of you can relate. Really takes the realism out of a long flight when you land in the ground. Another problem is that if you go into the AEC panel and deactivate an airport the next time you run a complete new scan all the changes that you made are erased. I don't why this program is so unfriendly to the sim. I thought this was going to be fixed and should have been fixed by now. I would appreciate if someone can tell me if there is a better way. I have gone back and forth on uninstalling it or keeping it and I decided to keep it because everything else works but this airport elevation tool is taking the fun out of everything. Sorry about the rant, believe me I had to hold back. Thanks

 

Interesting, though I am certainly sorry to hear you've experienced issues.

I'd argue that not very many people in our community have as much payware and freeware scenery added and activated as I do, and that scenery was made by pretty much every scenery developer in the P3D/FSX community.  So I am also running FTX Global and Vector, and I don't have any issues with airport elevation whatsoever.

Since I don't know which scenery you're having issues with, I really can't say if I'm able to run the same scenery without issue, but if I had to guess I'd say that I am.

This is actually good news, because it lets you know that it's solvable.  In tech support, I've seen a lot of cases over the year where someone had uninstalled scenery however some of the files remained and it was those files that caused people problems.  The other issue I've seen too much of is people adding freeware scenery or AFCADs by dumping the files in the Addon Scenery folder... which unless someone is only running a few sceneries, results in major problems down the road.

My best wishes for resolution to the issues you're experiencing!