General Category > General Discussion
Question for Umberto about Scenery.CFG and FSDT sceneries
altstiff:
I recently discovered the benefits of SCE (Scenery Config Editor) and deactivating sceneries from the my scenery.cfg that are not needed for a particular flight.
This makes a big difference in Virtual Address Space usage for me. It saves me almost 1GB VAS using this technique, not to mention quicker loading times due to slimming down my ultra FAT scenery library.
For example, if I fly from FSDT CYVR to FT CYUL I would only activate those two particular sceneries in the scenery.cfg library
(as well as the default MS FSX stuff that is, of course, needed in the scenery.cfg).
My question is this:
Say I choose my next flight as FSDT KLAX to FSDT KDFW will they have issues with COUALT or do anything to my activation license? Will I see potential problems from having them omitted from the library in one session and then active again in another session?
virtuali:
--- Quote from: altstiff on January 30, 2014, 07:25:27 pm ---Say I choose my next flight as FSDT KLAX to FSDT KDFW will they have issues with COUALT or do anything to my activation license?
--- End quote ---
The activation is entirely unrelated to what happens inside FSX, you can even remove the scenery, delete all its files and even uninstall the whole FSX, it won't affect activation in any way. The only way to lose an activation is to change hardware or reformat Windows from scratch.
The only "limitation" you have when turning on/off stuff from the scenery.cfg, is that you must restart FSX to apply changes.
altstiff:
Thank You Umberto.
I just wanted to confirm this as a poster over at Aerosoft said deactivating and then reactivating FSDT sceneries from the scenery.cfg could lead to issues with the sceneries not showing up once they are reactivated in the scenery.cfg.
http://forum.aerosoft.com/index.php?/topic/78173-thessaloniki-x-city-configurator-v30-if-you-have-oom-issues/page-6
See post #203 onward...
virtuali:
--- Quote ---See post #203 onward...
--- End quote ---
Well, that's the typical uninformed comment based on unfunded urban legends.
Couatl, for start, doesn't have anything to do with it, it would be the Addon Manager, because that's the one that reads the scenery.cfg to know if a scenery is installed, in order not to annoy you with a bogus "Trial is started" message, if you fly over an area that covers an airport, that you don't have installed or you just disabled momentarily. That reading is done only once when FSX starts, it won't continuously check your scenery.cfg for changes that happens while FSX is running and THAT'S also a good thing, because it won't try to constantly monitor that file for any changes, eventually triggering a rescan *while* FSX is running.
That's why, the only "limitation" is that you must restart FSX to apply changes but, I really HOPE you don't try to use an external editor to act on the scenery.cfg, while FSX is running! THAT would mean asking for trouble AND it won't make any difference to VAS usage, because even if you disable an area while FSX is running, lots of memory allocation has already been made, it's not just the things you "see" that takes memory but, for example, the caching of file names and the index of .BGL *boundaries* (Lat/Lon coverage) which ARE cached in RAM, for fast access so, you MUST restart FSX, in order to save THAT memory, which is a different one than the actual objects. If you have LOTS of scenery and many files, the VAS usage just for the directory name cache and .BGL boundaries might be significant.
So, assuming you do the right thing, and close FSX, use that utility to reconfigure the scenery.cfg and THEN start FSX again, it won't make ANY difference or cause any problems with our products, let alone with activation which, as I've said, is NOT stored anywhere in any of the FSX files. It's not even stored on a file, it's in your registry so, you can play in the foulest way with files and FSX reinstalls, it won't affect the activation in ANY way.
I really don't know how I could explain it any more clearer than this...
virtuali:
As an addition to that, I'd say that, of all sceneries you have, the FSDT ones are probably the ones that you might keep always enabled.
This because, due to the fact that we have about 80% of the scenery NOT in .BGL format, but created programmatically on the fly ONLY when you fly in the airport range AND explicitly destroyed when you fly outside the range, it's guaranteed that their VAS consumption happens only if you use them and the memory is reclaimed if you go away from their range.
You don't risk having KLAX loaded while you are at KLAS, which CAN happen, instead, for every other scenery that uses .BGL entirely, so they are in the hands of FSX memory management and bugs.
On top of that, having so few .BGL files (we have some .BGLs, for things like mesh, AFCAD, etc.), we contribute very little to the growth of the overall .BGL directory and boundaries caches, while another scenery with many .BGLs in its scenery folder, has a larger footprint on it, so it would make more sense to disable it when not in use.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
Go to full version