Hi,

Only very recently I installed MSFS, so I'm discovering/wondering/learning every day 😉

In our earlier flight sim days, we had to layer our sceneries carefully.
Are those days over? Just copy/past into the community folder and that's it?

Egbert

 

In most cases, yes. Layering of airports on True Earth etc. are not necessary as MSFS comes with its own "True Earth" included.

This said, there are rare cases where layering is required. I had one of them with an airport close to Moscow clashing with Moscow landmarks. In this case, there is a layering tool in the "Experimental" menu (which I guess only few people know about).

Kind regards, Michael

Edit: I should add that some addons take care of layering by alphabetic order (prefixing a- or z-.) I saw this on some global freeware addons. This is similar to the  alphabetic layering X-Plane does, btw.

Edited May 3, 20233 yr by pmb

Yes, the stuff you dump in your community folder is dumped on top of the MSFS base scenery. Simple as that. 

However, apart from the base scenery, MSFS has a number of bespoke airports that are also available in usually better versions by 3rd party devs. For example, KLAX is pre-installed with MSFS with custom airport buildings for free, but you can buy a better version from IniBuilds with lots more details. If you install the one from the 3rd party developer, you should usually uninstall the MSFS version of the airport in the content manager to avoid conflicts (and also save some disk space).

Edited May 3, 20233 yr by JacquesBrel

21 minutes ago, JacquesBrel said:

Yes, the stuff you dump in your community folder is dumped on top of the MSFS base scenery. Simple as that. 

Note that the community folder contents are loaded A-Z.. so if some detail needs to be higher priority, add a Z or ZZ in front of the name.. 😉

3 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

Note that the community folder contents are loaded A-Z.. so if some detail needs to be higher priority, add a Z or ZZ in front of the name.. 😉

Until everyone latches on to that. Then we're back at square one. 😉

1 hour ago, Ron Attwood said:

Until everyone latches on to that. Then we're back at square one. 😉

Quite so! But then I suppose we could always manually edit the folder names to XXX, WWW etc.!

Side question: Is it generally ok to rename community folder titles to put in some sort of sensible order ?  (Never tried it) Does FS then just re-index on next load ?

2 hours ago, flyhalf said:

Side question: Is it generally ok to rename community folder titles to put in some sort of sensible order ?  (Never tried it) Does FS then just re-index on next load ?

You can call them anything you like..

9 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

Note that the community folder contents are loaded A-Z.. so if some detail needs to be higher priority, add a Z or ZZ in front of the name.. 😉

Ahhh... Thanks
That's easier that fiddling around with numbers in a file

All of my scenery object libraries are prefixed AA and anything I tend to move into the community folder and out like sceneries for particular countries I prefix ZZ.

Sometimes I need to prefix addon airports above photosceneries to get a better result.

Be careful changing the folder names of addon planes though as some may not work 

There is also the "Package Reorder Tool" if you need to change the scenery priorities. Under "General Options>Experimental". 

And it is also possible  to edit the "content.xml" file manually and define priority.  In case of an evident conflict between packages this helps.

4 hours ago, Sunay said:

And it is also possible  to edit the "content.xml" file manually and define priority.  In case of an evident conflict between packages this helps.

That used to be the case.. but has been dropped as best I know..

19 hours ago, JacquesBrel said:

Yes, the stuff you dump in your community folder is dumped on top of the MSFS base scenery. Simple as that. 

However, apart from the base scenery, MSFS has a number of bespoke airports that are also available in usually better versions by 3rd party devs. For example, KLAX is pre-installed with MSFS with custom airport buildings for free, but you can buy a better version from IniBuilds with lots more details. If you install the one from the 3rd party developer, you should usually uninstall the MSFS version of the airport in the content manager to avoid conflicts (and also save some disk space).

There is a way in content.xml to define what files are excluded from what one seed in scenarios.
For example, see two conflictingh runways (one from the M<OD in community and another one from the stock scenery ).

17 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

That used to be the case.. but has been dropped as best I know..

Hello Bert, I made two tests this morning, in my case the content.xml edits  are  still very much working 🙂

 

5 hours ago, Sunay said:

Hello Bert, I made two tests this morning, in my case the content.xml edits  are  still very much working 🙂

 

It is a bit confusing... the purpose of the content.xml file changed with SU10...

It used to be automatically generated, but now has been made optional and with a different syntax.

Most users do not have it installed, and would not need it..

https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/articles/9407/changes-on-contentxml-behavior.html