• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

P3D v3

Messages
1,510
Country
unitedstates
I just installed v3 about 20 minutes ago and I see an autogen.cfg in the C:\ProgramData\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v3 folder. It looks like you can specify another location for your autogen descriptions but I haven't tested anything to see if there's any way to accommodate multiple descriptions from various 3rd parties. I'm thinking not but granted that's with merely 20 minutes experience. :) The autogen.cfg looks like this:

[Entry.0]
Title=Default Autogen
Path=Autogen
Required=True
Active=True

Here's a bit of practical testing with the texture.cfg, it appears to work like scenery layering in the scenery.cfg where the higher entries at the bottom of the list take priority. The autogen.cfg must work the same way.

http://www.avsim.com/topic/475752-v3-developer-updated-software-thread/page-5#entry3305919
 

arno

Administrator
Staff member
FSDevConf team
Resource contributor
Messages
32,858
Country
netherlands
That sounds really interesting, my tool might not be needed anymore :)
 
Messages
1,510
Country
unitedstates
It's still needed for FSX, P3D v1.4, P3D v2.5, those platforms aren't obsolete just yet. :) They do have this "Solution Deployment" thing now where you can apparently specify a non default -cfgdir which could contain an autogen.cfg pointing to a folder full of custom descriptions. I suppose in that case it's conceivable a user could have multiple shortcuts on the desktop ie. "P3Dv3 - Orbx", "P3Dv3 - FVFR", etc where starting the sim with one or the other would load the sim using the appropriate descriptions. (Yuk)

http://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv3/LearningCenter/general/sdk_overview.html#Solution Deployment

Huge !WOW! on a new -Configure switch that can be run against Prepar3D.exe though - all the special tools we've needed to add things to the scenery.cfg, dll.xml, exe.xml, etc. seem to have been obsoleted since an installer script could call Prepar3D.exe to do it directly.

http://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv3/LearningCenter/add-ons/add-on_configuration.html


Just wanted to show you what I found, feel free to remove my off-topic posts from your release candidate thread Arno.
 
Last edited:
Messages
1,095
The new Addon Management list doesn't include autogen, by the looks of it, and neither is the terrain.cfg there yet. However there must be a very good chance of seeing them shortly.
 

arno

Administrator
Staff member
FSDevConf team
Resource contributor
Messages
32,858
Country
netherlands
I have moved this in a new thread. But it's interesting to discuss this.

If it really requires a separate startup of P3D I'm not sure if it's useful, that would not work if you want to fly between sceneries with a different autogen configuration.

If the autogen.cfg works like the scenery.cfg and you can specify multiple entries, then it would probably work well.

I'll try to do some reading in the SDK as well.
 
Messages
1,510
Country
unitedstates
Hmmm, the autogen.cfg doesn't seem to work like I expected it to, it seems to honor only [Entry.0] unless there's something missing and in that case it apparently falls back to [Entry.1]. If I put some custom descriptions in a folder and define that as [Entry.0] then it will use the custom descriptions but it appears they must be a complete set, the abbreviated ones we use with ACM don't work I guess probably because the model/roof definitions are missing and the sim apparently doesn't fetch that data from the default descriptions when they're defined as [Entry.1]. Nothing shows up at all.

I copied a fresh set of default FSX descriptions into my FSX\Autogen folder then let ACM append just my custom entries. I made a test photoreal and annotated it with a few of my custom buildings and tree groups. This works fine in FSX. I then set the FSX\Autogen folder as [Entry.0] in P3D's autogen.cfg. That works, I can see my custom annotations in P3Dv3 as well as all the default autogen but that really gives us no more flexibility than we've had since FSX where we can definine alternate autogen under [Terrain] in the FSX.cfg, does it?

If I leave [Enty.0] pointing to the Prepar3D v3\Autogen folder and define the FSX\Autogen folder as [Entry.1] I can remove AutogenDescriptions.spb and RoofDescriptions.spb from the Prepar3D v3\Autogen folder and my custom objects show up which must mean it's doing a fallback thing to [Entry.1], the FSX\Autogen folder. However when I put AutogenDescriptions.spb and RoofDescriptions.spb back into the Prepar3D v3\Autogen folder then my custom objects don't show up.

There's really not a word about the autogen.cfg in the SDK that I can see so maybe this is something they haven't completely ironed out yet.

Also, should I expect ACM to run in P3Dv3? I tried that too but nothing happened. I wasn't really expecting it to work of course but I thought I'd see.

Jim
 

arno

Administrator
Staff member
FSDevConf team
Resource contributor
Messages
32,858
Country
netherlands
Hi Jim,

Thanks for checking. ACM is not aware of P3D v3 yet, that's something I still need to add.
 
Messages
152
Country
france
Arno,

I have installed P3D V3 (the latest version of v3.x) and I can confirm that ACM works like a charm.

I have installed all the add on outside the main directory as recommended by LM. So I just re-installed the .exe and .dll files I had saved and run the sim. No prob to report.

Philippe
 
Messages
1,518
Country
unitedstates
"ACM is not aware of P3D v3 yet, that's something I still need to add."

Could that be why my tests with ACM was not working? I am using P3Dv3.2.
 

arno

Administrator
Staff member
FSDevConf team
Resource contributor
Messages
32,858
Country
netherlands
Hi,

That was an old statement from October, since then P3D v3 support has been added as well. Good to hear it is working fine.
 
Messages
1,518
Country
unitedstates
Actually, no, I have not been able to get it to work as of yet. Oh, Arno, I see you were answering another poster's statement. Will try again today.
 
Messages
123
so what is the latest on autogen.cfg, can we have multiple autogen folders/configs working at the same time?
 

arno

Administrator
Staff member
FSDevConf team
Resource contributor
Messages
32,858
Country
netherlands
Autogen Configuration Merger can merge them for you, so that you can have a local folder with only your custom autogen configuration. I have just posted the version that will be the official release in a few days last weekend.
 
Messages
123
I presume you mean editing the stock autogen files like in p3d v2/fsx. Then how may I utilize the ability to have multiple autogen folders in p3d v3, or is it still in a broken state?
 
Last edited:

arno

Administrator
Staff member
FSDevConf team
Resource contributor
Messages
32,858
Country
netherlands
Not sure I understand you. P3D v3 works like the previous versions. With this tool I made each scenery can have a local autogen folder and they will be automatically combined into the global one.
 
Messages
123
I am referring to the ability to define additional autogen folders in autogen.cfg file present in programdata\LM folder similar to additional effects, textures, simobjects etc folders as explored in post #6 above. If it work correctly P3d would merge the files when it detects multiple defined autogen folders without needing to modify global/stock folder?
 

arno

Administrator
Staff member
FSDevConf team
Resource contributor
Messages
32,858
Country
netherlands
I checked that feature shortly a while ago, but I don't think P3D actually merges. It more looks like a way to select which configuration should be loaded when the sim is started in a certain configuration.
 
Top