ANSWERED FTX Central: scenery library re-ordering & activation

[mcair]

Here's a request for FTX development. Please modify FTX Central such that it doesn't re-order the scenery library, insisting that ORBX libraries occur at the top. My UK2000 libraries are constantly pushed down when flying in Europe. I'd like to not have to remember to manually readjust library order (using the one-at-a-time god-awful FSX UI) everytime I run FTX Central.

 

In addition, it appears that ORBX libraries are also re-activated. PMDG now recommends (for their 777) that scenery libraries that will not be used on a particular flight be deactivated to prevent OOM's, and this has solved that issue for me. Again, FTX Central re-activates all ORBX libraries.

 

If there's something I'm overlooking, glad to be corrected.

 

thanks

[mopperle]

Reading the manual would have pointed you to the functionality "FTX Scenery Library Insertion Points" of FTXCentral which allows you to configure where the Orbx entries are inserted in the scenery.cfg. In your case somewhere below your UK2000 entries.

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi there,

 

also, we do have a FAQ section at the top of the payware support forum and it includes a visual guide to implementing an insertion point: http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/28291-adding-a-scenery-library-insertion-point-ftxcentral-step-by-step/

 

First time I've heard of that PMDG recommendation, which seems rather odd to me. The Orbx libraries need to be active if you're using any of our products otherwise FSX will start hunting for all those objects that are centrally stored in our libraries and those endless search loops would surely cause microstutters not to mention display issues.

 

Cheers, Holger

[mcair]

Holger, thanks for the tip. PMDG 777 users, including myself, were experiencing OOM's especially when flying around addon scenery. PMDG's position boils down to minimizing the impact of unnecessary scenery libraries being loaded - their developers insist that *any enabled* scenery is loaded into memory regardless of the region's proximity to the flight path. I was out of options and followed their advice - and now see far fewer OOM's with their 777 and 737NGX. 

 

I've tried the Tools option within FTX Central, and get an unhandled exception, which is no surprise, because I see that behavior with FTXC all the time. FTX Central needs to be revisited. In addition to the re-ordering and re-enabling scenery layers, it is a very buggy application. Scan the forum for FTXC issues, and witness the numerous "unhandled exception", "object reference", "file not found errors" that are quite common. I write .Net code for a living; these types of exception are typically the result of developers' assumptions that simply don't hold up in the real world, when the add-on application is deployed within as complex an environment as FSX.

 

I love the ORBX scenery experience, but these niggling issues really let it down.