Scenery.cfg takeover causes crash on P3D V3

[wiss]

Hello everybody

I am an owner of GSX, some FSDT and some Flightbeam sceneries. I have only P3D 3.4.22 installed on my computer. No other simulators present.

The other day I updated to GSX 2.0. Since then I started to have a problem with my simulator. When I want to reload my Scenery Library from its menu I press OK and then the simulator simply crashes with no error messages. The only scenery I installed on the last few days has been the new Las Vegas by FSDT. Is important to note that the modifications to the Scenery Library will load after the next P3D startup, but it's still annoying to have a crash after working on it.

When browsing on the internet I came up to this discussion (link http://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7880) where a similar problem is reported, the cause behind it is the absence of REQUIRED=FALSE at the end of the entries in the scenery.cfg file.

I noticed that since installing GSX 2.0 a new Scenery.cfg became the "master" scenery file for the simulator, which is located on ProgramData\Virtuali\Couatl\prepar3dv3 . I noticed that this scenery.cfg lacks these REQUIRED=FALSE entries. This scenery.cfg also put all the FSDT and flightbeam sceneries locked at the top of the scenery library, as shown on the following screenshot.



My question is. Is there any chance to use again the "original" scenery.cfg file, located at ProgramData\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v3, as the "master" file? I would really feel more comfortable with me defining the order of the sceneries. And also maybe this might solve the described problem.

Thanks

[virtuali]

You have a big confusion about this.

There's no such thing like a new or "master" scenery.cfg. We simply DO NOT use the scenery.cfg anymore...all sceneries are now added using the new add-on.xml method, which is the OFFICIAL and proper native method suggested in the SDK, we are just one of the first developers using it, but many will switch to it, and it's best if users start learning it, because it's going to be the new standard.

We explained so many times on the forum why this system is so much better so, best if you just search the forum, to find more detailed explanation.

However, the only issue with it, is that's not possible to rearrange areas added this way. Which, for airports, it's usually the best solution, since airports should always stay on top of everything. The system supports layering, just not from the sim UI.

I noticed that since installing GSX 2.0 a new Scenery.cfg became the "master" scenery file for the simulator

Not the case. This is just an internal copy of the scenery.cfg which is used by GSX ONLY, so it finds all sceneries, even those that has been added using the new method, together in the same list. The simulator doesn't know anything about it.

[wiss]

Okay, I understand about the new method used. To be honest I didn't know about it because I'm a very rare visitor to these forums.

However the crash of the simulator everytime I reload the scenery library started after the instalation of GSX 2.0. Do you know any way how to solve this? Could this be related to the add of these sceneries by the XML method?

This crash has been reported mostly in P3D v4, but I have only v3.4.22 installed on my computer

https://www.prepar3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=124893
http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php?topic=15757.0

Thanks

[virtuali]

However the crash of the simulator everytime I reload the scenery library started after the instalation of GSX 2.0. Do you know any way how to solve this? Could this be related to the add of these sceneries by the XML method?

That's something that only LM can fix, so GSX doesn't really have anything to do with this, it seems it's a bug related to the number of scenery areas added with this method so, I guess it might have happened just the same if you added other sceneries yourself using the same method.

Yes, there are still several other minor issues to deal with this system, but it's so vastly superior, that's it's worth having a bit of patience until LM will fix all the remaining bugs. They are fully aware of this.

But have a look at this post:

https://www.avsim.com/forums/topic/511937-cannot-run-without-a-valid-scenery/?do=findComment&comment=3639999

In this case, the scenery.cfg was TOTALLY corrupted, apparently by an installer that didn't know how to deal with the new default Unicode encoding of it, but the poster was able to restore it from the default file, and he didn't had to reinstall any of the FSDT/Flightbeam sceneries.

If ALL developers adopted this system, and used the proper way to add a scenery (which is starting Prepear3d.exe from the command line to do all the changes), the scenery.cfg would never get corrupted in the first place, but even if it did, it would't be a problem. Not to the sceneries that use the new system, at least.

[wiss]

I understand that adding by XML is the method recommended by the SDK, still, would be possible to edit some files to re-add these sceneries by the old method? With this I could at least test if this is the cause of my problem.