Jeff's X-Plane Scenery for SoCal and Beyond

[Geoff]

Yes, I too want to keep my legos. I've made one lego airport, and I'm rather proud of it!

Jeff, don't your exclusion zones override the legos anyway? If you define an exclusion zone, as I'm sure you did, that trumps anything "lower" in the hierarchy. I think. Maybe it helps to ensure that "Global Airports" is one of the first items in one's "Custom Scenery" folder?

[Steven Winslow]

Jeff thank you for your generosity and hard work in putting together a (free) "one-stop-shop" for SOCAL airports.

I have a question regarding your suggestion to disable all lego brick airports by removing the "Global Airports" folder from the "Custom Scenery" folder. I would like to use your fine airports when I'm using PE, but I would like to keep the lego brick airports that exist outside of the PE service area.

Is there anyway I can individually remove the lego brick airports that conflict with your airports while retaining the rest that exist outside of SOCAL? I am not very fluent in how X-Plane works behind the scenes but I would imagine that if it were possible to remove certain lego brick airports from Custom Scenery, that the unwanted lego brick airports would return upon updating X-Plane. If this is the case, then I imagine that every time I update X-Plane I will need to go and fiddle with the Global Airports folder, removing the lego brick airports that conflict and potentially having to rewrite your airports to the folder if they had been overwritten or somehow had their entry removed by the process of X-Plane updating.

I hope that all made sense. Thanks again for the work Jeff, and to Jeff or anyone else who can help me make this happen, I greatly appreciate it!

All you have to do to disable the default custom airports is open up your Custom Scenery folder and find the scenery_packs.ini file and open that in a text editor. Go to the line that says: SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/Global Airports/

Cut the line out and move it way down to the bottom or near to the bottom of the list. Then, add DISABLED to the title, like this: SCENERY_PACK_DISABLED Custom Scenery/Global Airports/

Leave it this way when you fly in SoCal, but you can delete the DISABLED label any time you want to fly outside the coverage area. When you update X-Plane, even if you have the global airports DISABLED, they will still update. You don't have to take the Global Airports folder out of the Custom Scenery folder.

Hope that all made sense. It's really quite simple.

[Steven Winslow]

….Maybe it helps to ensure that "Global Airports" is one of the first items in one's "Custom Scenery" folder?

If you want your custom scenery to be shown instead of the default global airports custom scenery, you need to make sure to move the Global Airports BELOW all your other scenery in the scenery_packs.ini file. All your custom scenery files should load BEFORE the global airports or they won't show up correctly, therefore they should be higher in the hierarchy of your scenery_packs.ini file.

[Mike133]

Thank you for taking the time Steven! It makes sense and is a relatively simple tweak.

[Nelson L.]

Some of you may be aware of the incredible KSAN/KMYF/KCRQ package released on the org by MisterX6. Fantastic, ground breaking work. But..some have asked me if there's a way to run his KSAN and KMYF while keeping my KCRQ.

My Palomar airport is a little more detailed (stock XP10 objects notwithstanding) but his photo scenery and buildings/trees around the vicinity of the field are a major plus.

If you know your way around WorldEditor (WED), you can simply open his KSAN package (download the optional add-on that contains the WED file) and in the top right window pane of WED, open the KCRQ folder and hide (click the eye next to) all the subfolders other than the area buildings, orthos and forests. Then save and export.

You'll get my airport layout, objects and corrected roads along with his high def ortho imagery and surrounding buildings and trees. Best of both worlds.

Now...I wonder if I can convince him to take over KPSP...

Could be completely wrong on this, but I believe that you can just download MisterX6's KSAN, and then place it lower on the scenery.ini file compared to Jeff's KCRQ/KMYF. If Jeff's airports have exclusion zones already, MisterX6's airports won't show through, and Jeff's airports would remain unchanged. However, since there are *hopefully* no other KSAN packs in your custom scenery folder, the KSAN would still show.

[Steven Winslow]

Regardless whether there are exclusion zones or not, you do not want duplicate or competing scenery files. When you have two different custom scenery files for the same airport it causes X-Plane to run inefficiently and generally causes your frame rates to drop in those areas. The best thing to do is to disable any competing scenery files or just don't install them. I really wish more scenery builders would make individual airports rather than airport packs. I'm still struggling to find the other scenery file that is messing with Rik Nilsson's S47 (KTMK) file. There are apparently two different WED layouts which causes two different runways laid on top of each other. I guess I'm saying that exclusion zones won't necessarily keep other custom sceneries from showing through. Disabling or uninstalling is really the best way to go to avoid conflicts.

[Nelson L.]

Argh! Life is never so simple is it..... In that case, I guess I'm going to have to go and download WED and start doing some editing later today.

[Geoff]

@Steven Winslow: Jeff's work is wonderful, and I have much of it installed. But there are still many SOCAL airports without custom scenery, aren't there? For those airports, I'd much rather have Legos than nothing. To that end, Zengei has been organizing an effort to make Legos for all the airports in the PE coverage area. He's developed a spreadsheet of ZLA airports without any lego scenery. Perhaps he might consider adding a column indicating which airfields have scenery by Jeff and other custom designers. See this thread: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=5066

As for the hierarchy in scenery_packs.ini: if we have base mesh and such in our scenery_packs.ini, we don't want to put Global Airports below that, do we? I have lines like this in my scenery_packs.ini: SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/zzz_hd_global_scenery3/ . That mesh should go below almost everything, I would think. I'm not as sure about the World2XP betas I have installed, things like: SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/w2xp_Australia-Oceania_beta6.0-hd/ , but the guidelines for that scenery suggest putting it just above the mesh and below everything else.

As for exclusion zones, hmm, they mostly work fine for me without any noticeable performance hit. I have had one or two issues, admittedly, but I'm not sure they are caused by underlying Legos. (I recently saw some trees growing on the runway at Heathrow, but I think it was caused by the trees-and-farms scenery, not Legos.)

I guess my bottom line is that I'm reluctant to disable my Global Airports, as I'm often pleasantly surprised to find Lego scenery at a small airfield, and I far prefer Legos to nothing at all.

[Steven Winslow]

You're right about the HD mesh. Those lines should be at the bottom, but your Global Airports line should be below all of your other custom scenery lines. I understand your desire to have something rather than nothing, but I prefer to have more credible scenery layout than some of the stuff I've seen from the Gateway scenery so I generally just fly to airports for which I have custom scenery. I used to build my own scenery in V9.7 when I needed custom scenery, but I haven't done anything in V10. I just don't have the time I used to have to play in WED and Overlay Editor. I'd much rather fly!

[Jeff N]

I apologize for going off the grid and not responding to this thread for a while, life has just gotten ridiculously busy for me. Haven't even started up my sim PC let alone flown or done any scenery work in some time.

After skimming the posts of late, it sounds like if I just update my airports with the appropriate exclusion zones they'll play nice/override the new lego airports in the stock scenery portal without having to disable all of them. Apparently the quality of the user-submitted airports has improved dramatically and I'd like people to be able to use them along with mine if they want to. Again, sorry for the delay guys!