Hi all. A simple question. How much of a risk am I taking if I install V4 scenery into V5.3. I’m doing a fresh install of V5.3 and don’t want to mess it up. Thanks in advance.                                            Malcolm Hancock 

If you install via the add-on.xml method (ie not in the sim folder itself) then it's very easy to remove the scenery if it turns out not to work. You just need to disable the add-on in the sim. 

I would imagine V4 scenery will work fine with V5 in most cases, just the installers might be a problem because of paths. 

I can't think of any risks. I've installed a great number of V4 scenery add-ons into 5.3, and even older add-ons (V3 and FSX), and while some don't look as nice as newer add-ons, there haven't been any crashes or similar...

You may already know this, but when installing V4 scenery to V5 there will be a bleed thru of scenery objects from V5 thus

buildings from V5 will show thru the V4 scenery, i.e. V4 will show a hanger that is halfway inside a V5 hanger or part of a V5

runway will not be aligned with V4. Bits and pieces of V5 objects will not jibe with V4.

 

 

This is true, you might (not in all cases) need to exclude the newer default buildings that V5 provides. You can either do that yourself, or often you can download mods that exclude them.

I think probably half of my 370 add-on sceneries were made for v4 and even earlier.  There's no risk in trying...if it doesn't work, you can uninstall/delete it.

The two biggest roadblocks are, as already mentioned, the possibility that v4 autogen scenery objects in the default scenery will conflict with the add-on's (autogen objects, as opposed to the standard scenery objects used before v4 came around, have to be removed in a separate exclude layer placed below the add-on in the scenery configuration).  You can do that yourself with ADE, or outfits like iniBuilds have a score of already-made "compatibility files" made expressly for that purpose.  The other, potentially more difficult problem is that the digital elevation models were rebuilt from updated data when v5 was compiled (FSX and all versions of P3D prior to v5 were all made from the same 2006 elevation data), so there are small but occasionally significant elevation differences that can interfere with ground texture layering, cause floating/sunken buildings etc.  Whether there's a problem with a particular scenery is a hit-or-miss thing, but there are some of my v4/v3/FSX sceneries that proved unusable in P3Dv5 for that reason...I'd guess maybe 10% of them are so affected.

Thank you Gentlemen for all of your input. I feel a bit better now about moving ahead with my fresh install.

It's worth doing the Windows Registry tweak to get the v4 installers to install into P3D v5. Take a backup of the 2 Registry keys first (by exporting them) before you make the change and then you can easily go back just by double clicking the exported files. I just leave the tweaks in place as they don't affect v5 installers.