noted LOWI Won't Install

[cyberpilot]

Having a problem installing LOWI.

Downloaded and installed it through ORBX Central and got message saying installed correctly.

Opened control panel and checked box for static aircraft enabled.

Fire  up XP11, select LOWI, but no static aircraft.

Go to XP11 folder in E Drive and there is no entry for ORBX LOWI in Custom Scenery - there is one for LOWI Demo Scenery. 

Uninstall LOWI through ORBX Central and do manual download/install - same results - no static aircraft and no entry in Custom Scenery.

All my other ORBX XP11 scenery has installed perfectly so at a loss to understand what is happening with LOWI.  

[cyberpilot]

Have just discovered that LOWI is in C:USERS /ORBXLIBRARY/XP11/LOWI INNSBRUCK AIRPORT/CUSTOM SCENERY/LOWI INNSBRUCK, LOJT,OVERLAY,DRAPED ORTHOS,ORTHOS.

How do I transfer all of this to where it belongs on my E Drive where XP11 is installed?

[craigeaglefire]

45 minutes ago, cyberpilot said:

How do I transfer all of this to where it belongs on my E Drive where XP11 is installed?

 

i totally use XOrganizer as the 'go to' utility for all my XP11 scenery organization...

 

still waiting for an answer for how XOrganizer will work with the new Orbx Central v4 system/library/procedures...

 

sorry i cannot be of more help, cyberpilot, as so far, all my XP11 sceneries are indeed in the root XP11 Scenery Folder (i installed LOWI XP11 with FTXC3)

[Nick Cooper]

4 hours ago, cyberpilot said:

Have just discovered that LOWI is in C:USERS /ORBXLIBRARY/XP11/LOWI INNSBRUCK AIRPORT/CUSTOM SCENERY/LOWI INNSBRUCK, LOJT,OVERLAY,DRAPED ORTHOS,ORTHOS.

How do I transfer all of this to where it belongs on my E Drive where XP11 is installed?

 

Hello,

how to choose your Orbx Library and where to place it is covered in great detail in the User Guide that I guess that you have not yet found.

C:USERS /ORBXLIBRARY/XP11 is the default location that probably every customer will want to change.

 

You can read the User Guide by opening Orbx Central, clicking on Help and then on Open under the User Guide text.

[craigeaglefire]

that sounds odd, Nick

 

as an XP11 newbie, why would Orbx Central 4 not place LOWI automatically in the XP11 Scenery Library (with warning if not enough disk space available)...

 

3 hours ago, craigeaglefire said:

i totally use XOrganizer as the 'go to' utility for all my XP11 scenery organization...

 

still waiting for an answer for how XOrganizer will work with the new Orbx Central v4 system/library/procedures...

 

& please, Nick, if you can help me plan my Orbx XP11 disk/file structure/s,

 

do you have any available info on current XOrganixer compatibility with the Orbx Central v4 operation/s?

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

 

it sounds odd that a downloaded product would be placed in a default Orbx Library

location if the customer does not change it from default?

 

Orbx Central places shortcuts into the Custom Scenery folder of the customer's copy

of X Plane 11 which are managed by X Plane 11 and presumably XOrganiser in exactly

the same way as customers' own shortcuts to their "orthos" were before Orbx came along.

 

[craigeaglefire]

thanks, Nick

 

i have heaps of XP11 Orbx & heaps of 'Orthos' - all managed by XOrganizer - & not a single 'shortcut' deployed - all in root Custom Scenery Library...

 

21 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said:

presumably XOrganiser in exactly the same way

 

jeez, it would be nice to have absolute verification of that fact, Nick - XOrganizer utility is a must for me...

 

Orbx Central v4 has caused a lot of people a lot of problems - i will be very cautious, before proceeding with Orbx Central v4...

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

I have no experience of X Organiser but I read this on its product page

 

Quote

New: scan for broken/bad links/shortcuts in the Custom Scenery folder

 

and deduce that it can therefore recognise and manage shortcuts, which although not used by you,

are widely used by the X Plane 11 customer base.

 

Orbx Central has not caused problems to anyone who does not use P3D v4.

Even the most diligent opponents of Orbx and Orbx Central cannot find anything worthwhile to criticise

in the way that it deals with the installation of files into X Plane 11, so of course there is virtual silence.

 

The installer is Orbx Central by the way, there is no 4.

[andy1252]

4 hours ago, Nick Cooper said:

how to choose your Orbx Library and where to place it is covered in great detail in the User Guide that I guess that you have not yet found.

C:USERS /ORBXLIBRARY/XP11 is the default location that probably every customer will want to change.

 

Sorry about this, but I have to say something about that second statement. Acknowledging that probably everyone will want to change it might possibly suggest that the chosen default locations is somewhat less than ideal? Again, this is meant as a genuine suggestion, but if the product (Central) is able to identify the location of the actual sim (XP-11), then surely a better default would be to install products in to an \orbx\ folder created automatically in the root of the same drive as the sim? Given the apparent desire to avoid using \custom scenery, for which I still don't understand the reasons.

 

24 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said:

Even the most diligent opponents of Orbx and Orbx Central cannot find anything worthwhile to criticise

in the way that it deals with the installation of files into X Plane 11, so of course there is virtual silence.

 

I suspect you're including me in the former here, so I would like to say I did have a suggestion/criticism in another post in this forum regarding the way installing Skagit apparently caused a reshuffle of all my non-TE entries in the .ini file. My complaint was that there was no warning about this before it taking place, and more importantly no backup of the ini file was taken beforehand, something that would be so simple to do and is done in similar contexts by all sorts of software when amending user files. As I said in that post, I do have backups so it wasn't a real issue but it could have been.

 

And no, I'm not just looking to trash something because I don't like change etc, but I sincerely feel that some of the concepts behind this new software have NOT been thought through properly. Personally, I'm reconciled to having to use it in future, and I shall even eventually figure out the arcane absurdities of the add-on system in P3D, but in the meantime, assuming I don't get banned from this forum, I will continue to comment and make suggestions wherever I genuinely think there is an issue that warrants attention.

 

Please don't think I'm having a go at you either. You have the patience of a coach party of saints, and a fine command of dealing with 'concerned users', but I couldn't let that first comment in particular pass unremarked. (well, yes, I know I COULD have <grin>)

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

 

comments are indeed welcome and despite references elsewhere to being banned from these forums

for no reason, (there always is one, though often not acknowledged by the person banned),

when expressed in the polite and eloquent way that you have used, a ban is out of the question.

 

I suppose that there had to be a default location and that it had to be on the C drive because that is the

one that everyone must have. It would also have to be outside an X Plane 11 installation and inside a

folder that everyone must have too. I suppose that limited the choice.

 

I am not an expert in the ways of X plane 11 but I do understand that if there is no difference between

the installed sceneries and those listed in the scenery_packs.ini file, then X Plane 11 does not rewrite it.

I understand though that only one difference can result in the whole file being reordered.

 

I understand also that the Orbx Central installer, like the previous FTX Central, does add the entry for the new

shortcut added to the Custom Scenery folder, so a rewrite should not take place.

I expect that is why there is no warning, because it is not expected to happen.

 

[cyberpilot]

12 hours ago, Nick Cooper said:

 

Hello,

how to choose your Orbx Library and where to place it is covered in great detail in the User Guide that I guess that you have not yet found.

C:USERS /ORBXLIBRARY/XP11 is the default location that probably every customer will want to change.

 

You can read the User Guide by opening Orbx Central, clicking on Help and then on Open under the User Guide text.

Thank you Nick - I read the user guide before trying to install LOWI and followed the instructions so I have no idea what's going wrong.

When I open Orbx Central now and select LOWI it says product installed but the problem is that it's installed in the Orbx library on my C Drive and not in XP11 on my E Drive..

So the question still remains - how do I get it from one to the other? 

 

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

this is on page 19.

 

Quote

 

Moving a library to another location

1. Moving a library is painless with Central and can be achieved in a few steps only:

2. Go to Settings > Libraries.

3. Note the directory of the library you’d like to move.

4. Remove the library that you would like to move (remember: this doesn’t delete the actual files).

5. Close Central by right-clicking on the tray and selecting “quit”.

6. Move the directory to the new location in your operating system. This step may take a while depending on your disk speed.

7. Start Central again

8. Open Settings, and then the Libraries page

9. Press ‘Create New Library’

10. Select the new library location, give it a name and then press ‘Save’.

 

Central will automatically scan the library for installed products, and then configure your simulators appropriately. 

 

 

[cyberpilot]

On 8/15/2019 at 8:58 AM, Nick Cooper said:

Well, I've followed all of those steps Nick and created a New Library in my E Drive and pressed Save.

Central has been scanning the library for installed products for 6 hours now and is showing no signs of finishing.

Short of uninstalling Central what am I supposed to do now?

Never had any problems with previous iterations of Central but this one seems really buggy.

 

 

 

 

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

I made this step by step guide for someone else.

It is also a demonstration that the method does work if done exactly as described.

If done in any other way, it does not.

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

When you create a "library", you have to first make an empty directory and then point Orbx Central to where it is.

 

I gave mine something easy to recognise.

 

 

In Orbx Central, it looks like this:

 

 

To move a library, first remove the library from Orbx Central:

 

 

Then move the entire directory to the desired new location.

 

 

You can change its name but you MUST NOT CHANGE ANYTHING INSIDE IT.

 

 

Add the new folder location back as your new library in the same way as you added

the original one, give it any Orbx Central name that you choose.

 

 

and all your installed products continue to work, just as before.

 

 

After the demonstration, here it is restored to where it was:

 

[cyberpilot]

I've managed to get LOWI installed but only by copying the files from the new library that I've created on my E drive and manually installing them into the XP11 custom scenery folder.

I really appreciate your assistance Nick but I wish I'd stuck with the old Central which was simplicity itself.

Is it possible to go back to that version and if so what is the procedure for uninstalling the new one? 

[Ben McClintock]

3 minutes ago, cyberpilot said:

I've managed to get LOWI installed but only by copying the files from the new library that I've created on my E drive and manually installing them into the XP11 custom scenery folder.

 

Hi Rod,

 

We have a new version of Orbx Central (v4.0.6) which is coming out within an hour or two. This will allow you to install scenery directly into X-Plane's Custom Scenery directory. This will function the same as FTX Central v3.

 

I'd encourage you to give Orbx Central another shot as most of the major issues have now been resolved. Please let me know if you'd still like instructions on going back to FTX Central v3.

[Ben McClintock]

On 8/14/2019 at 11:10 PM, andy1252 said:

My complaint was that there was no warning about this before it taking place, and more importantly no backup of the ini file was taken beforehand, something that would be so simple to do and is done in similar contexts by all sorts of software when amending user files. As I said in that post, I do have backups so it wasn't a real issue but it could have been.

Very sorry, I missed your post in my initial reply to this topic.

 

The ordering code in Orbx Central is almost identical to the code in FTX Central v3.

 

That said, we'll make the improvements that you suggested. Mainly:

• Automatically making a backup of the user's scenery_packs.ini before performing any changes to it.
• Adding an option to Orbx Central's settings which stops OC from touching your scenery_packs.ini at all (even when a new scenery is installed).

Ideally we'd like our scenery ordering in X-Plane to be perfect, but there are so many possible permutations of scenery_packs that it's quite a challenge. We will keep working on this too.

 

On 8/14/2019 at 11:10 PM, andy1252 said:

Given the apparent desire to avoid using \custom scenery, for which I still don't understand the reasons

Ultimately, this allows us to keep our scenery completely separate from scenery that you already have installed. However, we realise now that this is disliked by some. In the upcoming version of Orbx Central, you will be able to install your scenery into the root Custom Scenery again:

 

On 8/14/2019 at 11:10 PM, andy1252 said:

I will continue to comment and make suggestions wherever I genuinely think there is an issue that warrants attention

Please do continue. We read every post here (even though we may not always have the time to reply). Comments from users such as yourself are definitely taken on-board.

 

On 8/14/2019 at 11:10 PM, andy1252 said:

I shall even eventually figure out the arcane absurdities of the add-on system in P3D

As I mentioned earlier in this post, we will give you the ability to install into the P3D folder (ala FTXC3) with scenery.cfg in the new version.

[andy1252]

15 minutes ago, Ben McClintock said:

Ultimately, this allows us to keep our scenery completely separate from scenery that you already have installed.

Hi Ben, and thanks for your response. A quick note about your comment above. I wouldn't have thought this was actually possible, yet alone desirable. My understanding, and I'd love to get a definitive answer on this, is that X-Plane's Global Airports and London Landmarks (possibly other landmarks as well?) need to be above Orbx's TE products but below Orbx's own airport products. That was my reading of comments posted in the forums after TE GB came out and also seems to be how your own installers place things.

 

In any case, wouldn't you then have to have a complete set of individual symlinks for each Orbx folder placed into the Custom Scenery folder? And those links would still be subject to the same ordering requirements as the original folders had been and so still capable of being screwed up either manually by the user or via someone's (not even necessarily Orbx's) scenery installation process.

 

Surely the way X-plane is set out, with Custom Scenery supplied and separate from Global Scenery, is already designed to keep 3rd party scenery separate from the core scenery, and ultimately no vendor's scenery can truly be kept separate anyway because of scenery interactions like adding non-Orbx airports on top of the TE environments (for example)?

 

Anyway, just some more thoughts for you. And thanks for the changes coming in 4.0.6. I'm downloading TE Oregon as I write this and I guess once that's complete I'll be able to update Central.

[Ben McClintock]

12 minutes ago, andy1252 said:

My understanding, and I'd love to get a definitive answer on this, is that X-Plane's Global Airports and London Landmarks (possibly other landmarks as well?) need to be above Orbx's TE products but below Orbx's own airport products. That was my reading of comments posted in the forums after TE GB came out and also seems to be how your own installers place things.

That is correct. It needs to be below Global Airports because we don't ship with updates for airports covered by the gateway. It also needs to be below the London landmarks as we didn't re-create any landmarks that Laminar had already included in the base XP11 install.

 

Central should order those correctly (it just places all of the TE folders below those in alphabetical order). For non-TE scenery, it attempts to place the airport at the top, custom mesh above your highest mesh, and any overlay above your highest overlay. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work as we intend.

 

16 minutes ago, andy1252 said:

In any case, wouldn't you then have to have a complete set of individual symlinks for each Orbx folder placed into the Custom Scenery folder? And those links would still be subject to the same ordering requirements as the original folders had been and so still capable of being screwed up either manually by the user or via someone's (not even necessarily Orbx's) scenery installation process.

We try and make it as seamless as possible. The main motivations were really to have all Orbx scenery stored in one place and (we thought) easier for users to manage with it being symlinked into the simulator. Then, say if you need to uninstall something, you can just remove the "Orbx TrueEarth Oregon HD" folder instead of having to remove the 4 folders individually. This would also be the same for P3Dv4 and Aerofly. We were wrong to take this option away, so we are putting it back in the upcoming update.

[craigeaglefire]

On 8/14/2019 at 3:49 PM, craigeaglefire said:

i totally use XOrganizer as the 'go to' utility for all my XP11 scenery organization...

 

still waiting for an answer for how XOrganizer will work with the new Orbx Central v4 system/library/procedures...

 

16 minutes ago, Ben McClintock said:

We try and make it as seamless as possible

 

yes please - as xOrganizer (as suggested to me on these forums) is a totally brilliant utility - just works - & basically $10 - one of my very best flight sim $investments...

 

makes XP11 with Orbx & other addon sceneries management a breeze - how I see it...

[Ben McClintock]

1 minute ago, craigeaglefire said:

makes XP11 with Orbx & other addon sceneries management a breeze - how I see it...

We will do some research on our end into xOrganizer. It should recognise the scenery already, but we will investigate regardless.

[andy1252]

41 minutes ago, Ben McClintock said:

Central should order those correctly (it just places all of the TE folders below those in alphabetical order). For non-TE scenery, it attempts to place the airport at the top, custom mesh above your highest mesh, and any overlay above your highest overlay. Unfortunately, this doesn't always work as we intend.

 

Thanks for the information, Ben. Given the nature of the Custom Scenery environment and the various different naming "standards" chosen by different vendors it's not really surprising the Central ordering doesn't always work. Actually, given the massive complexity of all the systems and files involved it's a miracle any of the sims ever work at all.

[cyberpilot]

10 hours ago, Ben McClintock said:

Hi Rod,

 

We have a new version of Orbx Central (v4.0.6) which is coming out within an hour or two. This will allow you to install scenery directly into X-Plane's Custom Scenery directory. This will function the same as FTX Central v3.

 

I'd encourage you to give Orbx Central another shot as most of the major issues have now been resolved. Please let me know if you'd still like instructions on going back to FTX Central v3.

Thanks Ben, I will certainly give the updated version another shot.

I was under the misapprehension that you could install scenery directly in to the XP11 Custom Scenery directory with the current version.

From my reading of the User Guide it wasn't made clear that this was not possible but maybe I missed something.