Author Topic: GSX scans the right AFCAD for all modified airports then scans the wrong AFCAD  (Read 1801 times)

Danielgarzag

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 61
So I have been running into this problem for quite a while now and it's driving me crazy. I have the GSX level 2 jetways in some airports, and sometimes GSX loads up the right AFCAD with those jetways which are good. There are times when GSX scans the right AFCAD ad the AFCAD that I want, but then suddenly GSX scans the wrong AFCAD for all airports that were modified.

Why is this happening and is there a fix?

Thanks

virtuali

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 51235
    • VIRTUALI Sagl
GSX doesn't scan the wrong AFCAD.

The AFCAD in use must have been changed and, as explained many times on the forum, in order to speed up the cache regeneration time and the simulator startup time, GSX doesn't check each and every file you have (there might be dozen of thousands), but only the last modification date of the folder the file is located. This means, if the file is renamed, GSX cannot always tell the cache needs to be rebuilt, since the folder last modification date might not change, depending how the scenery has been originally installed. That's why there's a manual cache rebuild option.

The most common cause of a rename of the AFCAD that might not be detected, is if you use 3rd party utilities, even the ones supplied with the airport, depending on what they do) to switch between different AFCAD.

Whenever you see the  wrong AFCAD chosen, that's usually solved by selecting "Restart and rebuild the airport cache" option.

And of course, if you have multiple set of AFCADs for each airport, you must have a GSX customization .INI file for each of them.

Depending on the reason *why* there are multiple AFCAD for an airport, it might be required to do the customization or not. If the multiple AFCADs are used only to switch the active runways (for wind reasons), and don't change the parking spots, you can just make a copy of your .INI file with a different name, and edit the name of the AFCAD it should relate to in the [General] section of the .INI file itself.

If, instead, the different AFCAD have different parking spots, for example to use static planes or AI, some work might be required to fix the missing/added parkings.
« Last Edit: April 29, 2019, 11:46:26 pm by virtuali »

Danielgarzag

  • Jr. Member
  • **
  • Posts: 61
This airport has only 1 AFCAD and that AFCAD's name is not changed and GSX still detects the default airport AFCAD and not the scenery one....
« Last Edit: May 01, 2019, 07:37:16 pm by virtuali »

virtuali

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 51235
    • VIRTUALI Sagl
This airport has only 1 AFCAD and that AFCAD's name is not changed and GSX still detects the default airport AFCAD and not the scenery one....

As I've said, GSX surely doesn't scan the wrong AFCAD. As discussed many times on the forum, there are many reasons why the AFCAD that comes with the scenery is not used:

- The AFCAD might be too large. In order to speed up the loading time, GSX doesn't try to scan .BGL which are considered too large to be an AFCAD.

Some authors like to place everything in one .BGL, including textures and, while is surely possible, it's not a very good idea, since it lose flexibility (having to distribute the whole file, even if something as puny as an airline code on a parking, for example), so these AFCADs, by default, are skipped if they are larger than 2.0MB.  You can configure this value using the airportCacheMaxBGLSizeBytes command in the %APPDATA%\Virtuali\Couatladdons.ini file, as explained here:

http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php/topic,17221.msg121243.html#msg121243

- The AFCAD might not be self-contained. This means an AFCAD that is supposed to be used together with the default one, for example one that provides additional parkings only. GSX doesn't support reading from multiple AFCADs at the same time so, in this case, it will use the default one.