25 minutes ago, DrumsArt said:

...and there :

Regards,

Thanks for the links.

However, to add my 100+ addon scenery I find the SCE way much faster and more simple.

Just 20 seconds compared to 2 minutes per scenery.

The scenery.cfg file still exists and it works. Perhaps somewhere in the future it will dissapear.

That is not the case yet..

 

12 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

Which brings me to the conclusion that the add-on.xml method is just a wrapper around the existing logic, the process reads the add-on.xml and injects the paths that it found into the "normal" routine that is parsing those folders. Makes sense too, why would LM implement two different methods.

 

10 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

Hi Dan,

in the SDK->World->Terrain->Terrain Overview, chapter "Place the new files in Prepar3D" it still describes a "Scenery area" as being the element that is added to the scenery library (which is probably why they have their tags named "[Area..."). And an "area" consists of both "Scenery" and "Texture" subfolders, so I thought it natural, that this is what they mean by the component Category "Scenery". Category "Texture" content could be anything, textures for aircraft or objects too - it is just a lookup reference after all. But a "Scenery" in the classic sense IMHO should be visible as a scenery area in the library, otherwise it is just hidden content that you might not be aware of. And I think that it complicates layering, unless you would use my tool or similar external help.

Best
Oliver

I can agree with your conclusion.  Also, shame on me for using FSDT as a go-by on how to create add-on.xml.  First I'd like to thank you for the adult dialog and secondly I will certainly give your tool a look but the engineer in me wants to figure out how this stuff works before relying on tools to make it easy.  That way I'm better prepared to figure out what happened with unexpected results.  Thanks much Oliver.

27 minutes ago, GSalden said:

Thanks for the links.

However, to add my 100+ addon scenery I find the SCE way much faster and more simple.

Just 20 seconds compared to 2 minutes per scenery.

The scenery.cfg file still exists and it works. Perhaps somewhere in the future it will dissapear.

That is not the case yet..

 

Don't limit yourself by thinking of this in terms of scenery.

For me, the main pro aspect above them all is the flexibility. I am no longer bound by a single config file where I have to activate and deactivate every single element. I can group my addons into packages, I can even have the same addons in different packages, and I can switch between different applications with one click and a restart.

As outlined above, think of the possibilities - you can now make a dedicated VFR setup for your sim, where not only the scenery is different, but it also contains only the aircraft that you want to fly in this usage scenario, and every other addon that you might want to have (different weather engine, different AI traffic, different ATC product, whatever). And then have another one for airliners, another for military aircraft, yet another for helicopters - and you can switch between them simply by changing a few checkboxes in the P3D addon manager dialog. There is no limit to what can be done with just a little effort.

My tool can help you make that happen, but you can do it manually too. Btw. the next version of the Addon Organizer has an option to import the whole scenery.cfg in 2 seconds and it creates an XML from it.

Best regards

19 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

Don't limit yourself by thinking of this in terms of scenery.

For me, the main pro aspect above them all is the flexibility. I am no longer bound by a single config file where I have to activate and deactivate every single element. I can group my addons into packages, I can even have the same addons in different packages, and I can switch between different applications with one click and a restart.

As outlined above, think of the possibilities - you can now make a dedicated VFR setup for your sim, where not only the scenery is different, but it also contains only the aircraft that you want to fly in this usage scenario, and every other addon that you might want to have (different weather engine, different AI traffic, different ATC product, whatever). And then have another one for airliners, another for military aircraft, yet another for helicopters - and you can switch between them simply by changing a few checkboxes in the P3D addon manager dialog. There is no limit to what can be done with just a little effort.

My tool can help you make that happen, but you can do it manually too. Btw. the next version of the Addon Organizer has an option to import the whole scenery.cfg in 2 seconds and it creates an XML from it.

Best regards

Then I will wait for your next release and try it.

Up to now I used SCE and with that tool it is very easy to enable/disable scenery.

As I use Prosim I never change my aircraft and I use AS as my weather engine on a client.

I understand the extra possibilities but in my situation using the scenery.cfg file is easy and good enough.

Thanks for explaining 

29 minutes ago, GSalden said:

Then I will wait for your next release and try it.

Up to now I used SCE and with that tool it is very easy to enable/disable scenery.

As I use Prosim I never change my aircraft and I use AS as my weather engine on a client.

I understand the extra possibilities but in my situation using the scenery.cfg file is easy and good enough.

Thanks for explaining 

Hi Gerard,

true, this is not the best option for every usage scenario. The purpose of this thread (as I see it) is just to get the knowlegde out, what kind of new options we could have.

I am enthusiastic, because I have been running completely different simulator setups based around the different types of aircraft. So for me this really is a welcome opportunity to organize everything properly right from the start without having to rely on external management tools with their own databases and whatnot just to control a handful of cfg files.

In the end I hope that we can manage without any external tools, if LM puts a little more work into the usability of the concept.

Best regards
Oliver

3 hours ago, odourboy said:

Clouds, moon etc. type files are exactly what I was thinking of. Please let us know what happens!

It would be really nice if the add-ons mechanism allowed you to 'override'.

Nope, doesn't seem to work that way.

The only solution I could find was to externalize the existing textures too and link them back in via XML. Then I made a copy of the whole folder and replaced the textures with different ones. Now I can switch between two texture sets - but this only works if I clear out the shaders cache inbetween switches. I am not totally sure in which order they would overwrite each other, if both were active, that requires further investigation.

Looks like textures may somehow be referenced in the pre-compiled shaders, so it is not possible to override them without cleaning the cache? No idea, really.

There seems to be room for improvement here...

Best regards

22 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

Nope, doesn't seem to work that way.

The only solution I could find was to externalize the existing textures too and link them back in via XML. Then I made a copy of the whole folder and replaced the textures with different ones. Now I can switch between two texture sets - but this only works if I clear out the shaders cache inbetween switches. I am not totally sure in which order they would overwrite each other, if both were active, that requires further investigation.

Looks like textures may somehow be referenced in the pre-compiled shaders, so it is not possible to override them without cleaning the cache? No idea, really.

There seems to be room for improvement here...

Best regards

Too bad! Thanks for taking the time to try it. As you say, maybe room for improvement here. A suggestion to feed back to LM.

10 hours ago, Lorby_SI said:

I have created a separate scenery folder "BaseScenery\Scenery" for all those files and linked it at layer "2".  This loads it right before all the default scenery areas are read (theoretically anyway)

  <AddOn.Component>
    <Category>Scenery</Category>
    <Path>F:\P3DV4_Sceneries\BaseScenery</Path>
    <Name>My Base Scenery</Name>
    <Layer>2</Layer>
  </AddOn.Component>

Best regards

Is "layer 2" below the Scenery\World and Scenery\Base?  I have add-on that put in AFX file into Scenery\World\Scenery folder, for mesh adjustment or such.  What about add-on that adjust mesh, I guess those have to be in the Sim base folders.

1 hour ago, Anxu00 said:

Is "layer 2" below the Scenery\World and Scenery\Base?  I have add-on that put in AFX file into Scenery\World\Scenery folder, for mesh adjustment or such.  What about add-on that adjust mesh, I guess those have to be in the Sim base folders.

Yeah, I've tried doing this with scenery that does that for elevation adjustments.   It doesn't seem to be effective, you still need to dump them in Scenery/World.   It's *possible* that it might work if you increase the layer of every single scenery by 1 and dropped the adjustments in on layer 1, but I didn't feel like editing all those files to test.

7 hours ago, GSalden said:

Then I will wait for your next release and try it.

Hi Greg, just remember that the "xml method" will be good not only for scenery, but also for addon aircraft.

Cheers, Ed

6 hours ago, Anxu00 said:

Is "layer 2" below the Scenery\World and Scenery\Base?  I have add-on that put in AFX file into Scenery\World\Scenery folder, for mesh adjustment or such.  What about add-on that adjust mesh, I guess those have to be in the Sim base folders.

HI,

you will have to try on which layer your files need to go. All the base scenery folders have always been in the scenery library too, there is no other way for the simulator to find BGL files. These folders are relative paths, as seen from the spot where the Prepar3D.exe itself is, and they designate the directory in which the Scenery Area is. A Scenery Area is according to SDK specification a folder that contains subfolders named "Scenery" (mandatory) and "Texture" (optional)

In case of the lowest levels it is like this:

• Layer 0: doesn't exist, this is the scenery library root, called "[General]"
• Layer 1: \Scenery\World
• Layer 2: \Scenery\BASE
• Layer 3: \Scenery\0000
• etc...
• Layer 113: \Scenery\Global (this is where it loads the default traffic bgl files)

In your add-on.xml, if you set a <Layer> tag, it will end up being loaded before the layer with the same number in the scenery.cfg.

• With <Layer>1</Layer> it will be loaded even before \Scenery\World
• With <Layer>2</Layer> it will be loaded between \Scenery\World and \Scenery\BASE
• etc.

Which is why I have set my external base folder at Layer 2. This external folder contains all files that normally go into \Scenery\World\Scenery.

The only exception are files that overwrite an existing file in the base scenery folders. I wouldn't touch a product that tries to do that though.

Best regards

 

6 hours ago, kaosfere said:

Yeah, I've tried doing this with scenery that does that for elevation adjustments.   It doesn't seem to be effective, you still need to dump them in Scenery/World.   It's *possible* that it might work if you increase the layer of every single scenery by 1 and dropped the adjustments in on layer 1, but I didn't feel like editing all those files to test.

This doesn't sound right. Are you certain that your reference path in the XML is correct? Generally speaking, unless your file overwrites something in /Scenery/World/Scenery (!) it shouldn't matter if you load it at Layer 1 or 2 - or where the file actually is on your computer, as long as it is referenced correctly.

Best regards

Hi @ll,

I have just discovered that setting

<Layer>1</Layer>

is not possible in an add-on.xml!

P3D will ignore this value and put the scenery right at the top instead.

So if you have scenery bgls that go into the base folder, you have to use Layer 2.

(Unfortunately I am not allowed to edit my other posts if they are older than an hour - anybody else seeing this?)

Best regards

 

14 hours ago, downscc said:

 

I can agree with your conclusion.  Also, shame on me for using FSDT as a go-by on how to create add-on.xml.  First I'd like to thank you for the adult dialog and secondly I will certainly give your tool a look but the engineer in me wants to figure out how this stuff works before relying on tools to make it easy.  That way I'm better prepared to figure out what happened with unexpected results.  Thanks much Oliver.

Hi Dan,

I found an exception to that rule.

I have moved my \Scenery\World folder outside of P3D and linked it back in as a scenery area using an add-on.xml - this does not work properly! In this case the "scenery" and "texture" subfolders have to be linked separately. I can only guess, but maybe there are textures in that folder that P3D is looking up independently of the scenery elements - and which it cannot see unless you provide the direct lookup path.

Best regards

12 minutes ago, Lorby_SI said:

Hi Dan,

I found an exception to that rule.

I have moved my \Scenery\World folder outside of P3D and linked it back in as a scenery area using an add-on.xml - this does not work properly! In this case the "scenery" and "texture" subfolders have to be linked separately. I can only guess, but maybe there are textures in that folder that P3D is looking up independently of the scenery elements - and which it cannot see unless you provide the direct lookup path.

Best regards

Good find Oliver thanks