answered True Earth Canarian Airport unavailable

[Michel Alpha]

Good morning. I bought yesterday the last sceney pack about Canarian Islands. Great job ! But La Palma Airport is invisible as you can see in attachment picture.

It has been correctly installed in the Orbx MainLibrary - like all of my other Orbx sceneries - without any issue during download. I monitor all my seneries with xToolbox and xOrganiser and generally don' get any troubles.

Do have an idea ? 

Thank you ! 

Regards, Michel

 

[Jon Clarke]

This is probably an installation/scenery_packs.ini layering issue and not a Bug. Orbx addons do not play well with any other "organiser" tool other than the Orbx Central app.

@Nick Cooper please move this to the Support forum

@Michel Alpha Please attach your scenery_packs.ini

[Michel Alpha]

Hello Jon and thank you for your reply : I'm glad for your help to solve my issue. You were right : it was a question of order in scenery_packs.ini.

 

I just renamed Orbx_A_GCLA_LaPalma in 0_Orbx_A_GCLA_LaPalma so ih has been placed at the upper place from my other spanish sceneries and now it is ok as you can see in the picture in attachment :  

very very very beautifull scenery ! ;)))

 

Regards, Michel

 

 

 

 

 

[hartson]

‘Orbx addons do not play well with any other "organiser" tool other than the Orbx Central app’

 

Orbx Central is not an organizer tool, it merely manages Orbx products. As Xplane scenery add ons become more complex organizer tools are extremely useful. The issue is really only with Orbx products as the third party sceneries Orbx sells via Central work well with the Organizer tools. Orbx products aren’t even standard between themselves. For example TE Southern California has an airports file yet Northern California doesn’t. Orbx is the outlier, not the other way around. 

Perhaps its time for Orbx to put more thought into making their file structures more consistent with other third party scenery vendors or perhaps reaching out to the people like xOrganizer. Orbx deservedly has a loyal following but we do buy other third party software. Its frustrating that there are good tools out there but only Orbx doesn’t work with them.

xToolbox isn’t per se an organizer. Instead it can build and check links between libraries together with other features. It is a considerably more powerful piece of software in that regard than Orbx Central.

[Tony Wroblewski]

24 minutes ago, hartson said:

The issue is really only with Orbx products as the third party sceneries Orbx sells via Central work well with the Organizer tools. Orbx products aren’t even standard between themselves

Airports are easier to organise than regions, with layering being pretty simple (done alphabetically). Whichever product comes first in the list will show up...  When meshes and multiple packages come in to play, xorganiser can't possibly know where things are supposed to go, e.g. Would it know that a certain folder should go above Global Airports, and how it should work with Ortho4XP scenery.

 

There is no standard everyone follows, I wish there was, but there simply isn't. It's a free for all, with everyone using their own naming schemes. The only standard that is somewhat used by X-Plane is alphabetical, which would mean someone like Aerosoft who prefix their product names with their Aerosoft (as we do), would automatically always be placed about Orbx and anyone else who comes lower down in the alphabet.. I've seen developers prefixing their airports with "aaa" to try to get higher up in the list etc... It's unfortunately a mess, and will remain so until LR provide a better solution.

 

[hartson]

6 minutes ago, Tony Wroblewski said:

Airports are easier to organise than regions, with layering being pretty simple (done alphabetically).

True, but XOrganizer does segregate airports and regions and incidentally does seem to manage with meshes with other products. While the automatic sorting features of the product is its major strength it does also allow the manual ordering (and locking) of files and file structures. Rather than repeating the ongoing refrain that ‘organizer products don’t play well with Orbx’  which ignores the issue it seems to me that Orbx could be working with xOrganizer on the issue. His forum on xplane org does have a sticky on the subject including that he does have a programmed rule for TE GB. Were you aware of that ?

[Tony Wroblewski]

6 minutes ago, hartson said:

His forum on xplane org does have a sticky on the subject including that he does have a programmed rule for TE GB. Were you aware of that ?

No, and it's not a product I usedpersonally so I'm not watching their forums etc... The only rule I can think of between TE GB that would be needed is the placement of the airports should be above "Global Airports"... but since it's prefixed with "Orbx" it won't happen automatically.

 

All our packages include a "orbx_xp_config.json" file that can easily be read and dealt with by scripts/tool and actually describes what each package is. Any developer is welcome to read that file format and would know which parts of a scenery are the mesh, airports, and the ordering, e.g.

 

{
    "airport": ["Orbx_A_US_Oregon_TE_Custom"],
    "overlay": ["Orbx_B_US_Oregon_TE_Overlay"],
    "mesh": ["Orbx_C_US_Oregon_TE_Orthos"],
    "library": [],
    "trueearth": true
}

 

Which describes the order these 3 packages from Oregon should be placed. However, if you also drop in the three folders, they would sort alphabetically and work as well.

 

Anyway, this isn't the thread/place to discuss this. Third parties are always welcome to contact us if they need help or want to make tools/sceneries compatible etc..

 

[hartson]

But I guess developers have to buy each and every product in order to have that information.

[Tony Wroblewski]

4 minutes ago, hartson said:

But I guess developers have to buy each and every product in order to have that information.

 

No not at all. The tool would just look for the presence of that file (it's called the same in every package), and if present could read it and know more about the package than by guessing alone. The file format is consistent across all our X-Plane products, so if it can read one file, it can read them all. Again, it's only a suggestion, however we look at it, ordering of scenery is still going to require a user to choose which products they want in which order when they cover the same area.

[Jon Clarke]

5 hours ago, hartson said:

‘Orbx addons do not play well with any other "organiser" tool other than the Orbx Central app’

 

Orbx Central is not an organizer tool, it merely manages Orbx products. As Xplane scenery add ons become more complex organizer tools are extremely useful. The issue is really only with Orbx products as the third party sceneries Orbx sells via Central work well with the Organizer tools. Orbx products aren’t even standard between themselves. For example TE Southern California has an airports file yet Northern California doesn’t. Orbx is the outlier, not the other way around. 

Perhaps its time for Orbx to put more thought into making their file structures more consistent with other third party scenery vendors or perhaps reaching out to the people like xOrganizer. Orbx deservedly has a loyal following but we do buy other third party software. Its frustrating that there are good tools out there but only Orbx doesn’t work with them.

xToolbox isn’t per se an organizer. Instead it can build and check links between libraries together with other features. It is a considerably more powerful piece of software in that regard than Orbx Central.

Orbx Central organises Orbx addons into the scenery_packs. I know nothing about other developers file structures nor about X-Organiser, other than the X-Organiser places Orbx  files  not in the correct sequence for Orbx TE type addons to perform correctly.

You are also talking about other developers. None that I know of produce True Earth type scenery.  Spain UHD is also just like ortho4xp.The alternative for True Earth is ortho4xp and X-Organiser handles that just fine. X-Organiser also handles Airports from every developer very well. The only aspect that doesn't fit with it's logic is the True Earth addons. 

@Nick Cooper The original topic was resolved. Further comments are superfluous to the original topic. You may now close this topic for further comment. Thanks