But still a question: what must be happened with the previous build of the Addon Manager that has been installed on my system initially?
It will be removed by the new installer, so there's nothing you have to do.
Because as I notice It remains in it's original location \FSF_root_folder\fsdreamteam\couatl\.
It shouldn't. Unless you are referring to a NEW version of the Addon Manager that you installed there, by choosing the same folder used by the old version.
In this case, you won't even be ASKED for a new location on the next install, because the installer (the new one) saves your first choice, and won't allow you to change it at every installation: even if you are now free to install everywhere, the product must still stay together.
If you want to CHANGE the location for an already-installed Addon Manager (one that has been installed with the NEW installer), you must to as follows:
- Uninstall everything from FSDT, and reply YES to the question "Do you want to remove the Addon Manager ?". This will clear up your initial choice, and will allow you to choose a new folder for the next install.
As I didn't change scenery.cfg manually, these warnings were totally unexpected for me (unpleasant either)
Then it seems to indicate your scenery.cfg was already corrupted, so the installer couldn't opened it and update the paths. So, you should have accepted the suggestion from the sim to remove the orphaned areas.
Negative. Using a system volume to install addons has more cons than pros. It's getting harder to perform a system backup. Usually the system volume is pretty small relative to a HDD dedicated to flightsims. And any sceneries (especially - hi-res photo-real sceneries) are too large to be placed in a system volume.
That's precisely what I've said, when I said that, thanks to our new installer, which lets you install everything OUTSIDE the root of the sim, you can achieve precisely what you are saying here.
Before, if you didn't want to "touch" your boot drive with FSX, you were forced to install FSX into a different drive. But what if the 2nd drive was a slower one, for example the very common situation of having 1 fast SSD with the OS and 1 large traditional HDD with the sim ? You were forced to load FSX from the slower drive.
The absolute best solution, for performances, assuming you have a larger and slower 2nd drive, is to:
- Install FSX in the default location under C:\Program Files (x86)
- Install all the addons that allows this in the 2nd drive
This will get the best possible performances, because the sim will start faster AND is loading its default textures landclass/autogen, and library model files (which are used *everywhere*) from the faster drive, while your scenery addons will load from the larger drive that, even if it's not as fast as the main one, won't be so much of a problem, since you are usually loading only one airport at the time.
It obviously makes sense to keep the things that are accessed most often in the fastest drive.
OF COURSE, if both your 1st and 2nd drive are fast SSDs, you can just ignore it, and install anywhere you want.
And I never have faced any issue using the FSX folder for any addons installation.
It depends where FSX is installed into. If FSX *itself* is installed into C:\Program Files (x86), you are going to get issues if just ONE of your addons doesn't fully respect UAC rules, and tries to write into its own folder that, as a sub-folder of C:\Program Files (x86), inherits the more restrictive permissions of it, compared to a folder which was created by the addon installer outside of the sim.
FSX:SE gets away with this, by always running in Admin mode, which is a bit of a trick, and it was made precisely to counter act badly programmed add-ons.
Of course, all our add-ons fully respect UAC, so they never tried to write anything in their own folder, and always used the %APPDATA% folder instead, like any proper UAC-respecting product so, it didn't matter if you installed them inside the sim.
