Addon Manager not saving all settings/modifying my fsx.cfg without permission.

[viperxbr]

Greetings,

Not sure where to put this question because it's not specific to a scenery but rather the Addon Manager itself.

I'm having an issue with your Addon Manager and it changing settings in my fsx.cfg without my permission and not knowing it did so.

I typically have certain tweaks I do manually to my fsx.cfg file after I do a rebuild or just to test out.  One of those tweaks is the [BUFFERPOOLS] section. (I've always used 0 PoolSize and 0 UsePools).

Be that as it may, Addon Manager keeps changing those values every time I do either a scenery install, couatl update or an Addon Manager update.  It changes it back to whatever default settings it uses.  I then have to go in and set the two setting back to what I want, save it and restart FSX.  Quite the pain.

I happen to notice just by chance.  I noticed my frames were dipping lower than usual so I looked at the config file and noticed that the [BUFFERPOOLS] section was gone!  It took some trial and error and research to find the culprit that was modifying this file WITHOUT my permission.  Not very good at all!

Could someone take a look at this ASAP.  I do not want any application modifying my system settings without me knowing or without any confirmation/consent.

Thanks,
Todd.

[AirBorne]

Old behavior, and I hate this as well. When I had FSX the issue was with the shadows, that this program insisted in changing my personal setting. How I resolved? I created a batch file that upon every FSX startup deleted the current .CFG and copied a fresh "new" one (the one I trusted with my settings) to its place. Never again I had issues.

[virtuali]

I typically have certain tweaks I do manually to my fsx.cfg file after I do a rebuild or just to test out.  One of those tweaks is the [BUFFERPOOLS] section. (I've always used 0 PoolSize and 0 UsePools).

The Addon Manager doesn't change any settings without your permission ( which means you pressed the "Save" button).

But our installers do, and they change ONLY that specific tweak (Poolsize = 0), which has been proven to be dangerous, see here:

http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php/topic,14422.msg106159.html#msg106159

We just cannot afford to have users mistakenly believe some of our products "caused" a crash, when the problem was instead the usage of an undocumented tweak. If you are lucky enough that setting doesn't cause problems on your system, then you are in the minority, but then you will now what you do to place the setting back.

[virtuali]

When I had FSX the issue was with the shadows, that this program insisted in changing my personal setting.

No, it happened only on a very specific case:

You were flying over an FSDT scenery, which turn on/off shadows over a certain height, because you wouldn't see it anyway, but it would result in significant fps savings, especially if you have many AI planes. This is NOT happening when flying outside an FSDT scenery, of course.

The shadow setting is READ from YOUR existing setting when the sim starts and, it's turned Off/On (depending the eyepoint Altitude) if YOUR existing setting was On, and it's always Off if YOUR existing setting was Off. Again, only when flying over an FSDT scenery.

However, if you flew over an FSDT scenery, over the threshold altitude to turn shadows Off and you QUIT FSX in that moment (not crash, you must explicitly Quit), it will FSX ITSELF, which will save the current shadow setting it has in memory, so they will be Off at the next startup.

So, it was a very unusual case: you had to start an FSDT scenery, go to some altitude and then QUIT from FSX.

How I resolved? I created a batch file that upon every FSX startup deleted the current .CFG and copied a fresh "new" one (the one I trusted with my settings) to its place. Never again I had issues.

Totally unnecessary, if you wanted to have your airplane cast shadows setting unchanged, you simply had to turn it on once, and don't QUIT from FSX when you are flying OVER an FSDT scenery.

[AirBorne]

What makes you assume I proceed like that? Why the heck would I do this nonsense thing?
In any event it doesn't justify the intrusive behavior of the scenery, without the user's consent. One thing I love about P3D is that it will always keep a fresh copy of your settings and no matter how intrusiveness an addon might be you just click the dropdown list (you'll know it's changed to Custom) and, voi-là, it's back to what you want! :-)

[virtuali]

What makes you assume I proceed like that? Why the heck would I do this nonsense thing?

You might not have done it intentionally. For example, if sim crashed for any reason if your shadows were off, the setting might not match what you had in memory at the time.

In any event it doesn't justify the intrusive behavior of the scenery, without the user's consent.

The scenery is not changing your .CFG file. It's the sim itself which is changing it, because when the shadows are turned off/on automatically (correctly) by the scenery, depending on the altitude, for the obvious reason to save frame rate, the sim automatically updates the .CFG file on exit, based on the value it has in memory the moment you quit from it.

In any case, we can probably remove this feature altogether when running P3D, since its own shadowing method is completely different, we did it mainly to help frame rates in FSX, especially with too many AI, whose shadows might affect fps more than the whole airport.