I'm out of ideas here, folks...

[Rami]

Reply...

Chris,

Then this leads me to a wild thought, but one which would make sense of this. I think we done broke the game. With everything installed for the Pacific, (stock coastlines) I have 573 entries in my airbase.dat file, which includes...

Xavierb's Japan & Mount Fuji
Xavierb EAWWII (Bali-Timor, Java, Sumatra, Malaya, Celebes, Borneo, and the Moluccas)

MaskRider Japan No1
MR Solomons
MR Micronesia
AF Papua New Guinea
MR Papua New Guinea
MR Australia (With Darwin enhancement)
MR Marianas
MR Formosa
MR Dutch East Indies

Pearl Harbor & Oahu

UncleTgt's New Britain
UncleTgt's Carolines
UncleTgt's New Ireland

Dog1's New Caledonia airfields

Devildog73's Niigata airfield

Arndt's Aru islands scenery
Arndt's Merauke scenery

You don't suppose there's a hard cap of how many scenery.bgl files can be loaded by the sim at one time, do you?

 

[MaskRider]

I think we done broke the game.....You don't suppose there's a hard cap of how many scenery.bgl files can be loaded by the sim at one time, do you?

Heh-heh!

It wouldn't surprise me!

I take it there was no discernible issue with PI2?

MR

 

[Rami]

Reply...

MaskRider,

Nope. I've been experimenting for a few minutes this morning, and it's the same issue regardless of which base it is. At a certain point, the sim says...no more!

 

[Rami]

Reply...

MaskRider,

So in this case, it might be a good idea to have a Southwest Pacific install...(Solomons, Dutch East Indies, Papua New Guinea, Micronesia, New Britain, New Ireland, New Caledonia, Australia)

...and a Central/Northern Pacific install (Formosa, Japan, Philippines, Marianas, Iwo Jima, Aleutians, Midway, Hawaii)

 

[MaskRider]

MaskRider,

So in this case, it might be a good idea to have a Southwest Pacific install...(Solomons, Dutch East Indies, Papua New Guinea, Micronesia, New Britain, New Ireland, New Caledonia, Australia)

...and a Central/Northern Pacific install (Formosa, Japan, Philippines, Marianas, Iwo Jima, Aleutians, Midway, Hawaii)

Good morning Rami,

Or perhaps something a bit closer to the official PTO Area of operations?

MR

 

[bearcat241]

The biggest contributor to this problem isn't a nebulous scenery layer hard cap, but more like a total scenery bgl hard cap. I've seen this occurrence a few time myself. Here's an experiment to verify what i'm saying:

(1) clean up all scenery installations from the scenery.cfg, making it essentially a virgin file.

(2) delete the usual suspects like you did before (index files, *.cdp's and filelist.dat files)

(3) boot the sim and allow it to establish a clean database.

(3) Use the same incremental re-installation process, but instead of whole packages in sequence like MaskRider Japan No1, MR Solomons, MR Micronesia, AF Papua New Guinea, etc., just install each with only one or two bgls. Keep going until you get the red light. I can guarantee a higher threshold in scenery layers.

 

[Shadow Wolf 07]

Good morning Rami,

Or perhaps something a bit closer to the official PTO Area of operations?

MR

I suggested this last night Rami. Divide the theatre into different opaeras and reduce the number of scenery bgls as Bearcat241 hints and reduce the number of entries on the airbases.dat to more like 250. I think your install is too "heavy."

 

[UncleTgt]

Bit late to this thread. BC241 & SW07 are on the right track IMHO. I had the same thing happen to a PTO install several years ago. I was creating airbases for the Carolines area in FSSC & the new bases just wouldn't show in the airfield list no matter what I did. Then I noticed the randomly named files turning up in the CFS2 root folder just like Rami described.

I could not get rid of them, & get new airbases to show in the QC or Freeflight selection lists until I deactivated scenery areas to get my total number of airbases down below c.200. So SW07's idea of separate installs for the "larger" op areas is the way to go...

 

[bearcat241]

Just checking back on this thread.

I noticed that i forgot to mention that deleting the weird, randomly named files, like 87C6, 37A, and 96F2 is also an essential part of the cleanup before re-installing anything. They are generated to "compliment" the refreshed, corrupted index files on each boot.

 

[Rami]

Reply...

I suggested this last night Rami. Divide the theatre into different opaeras and reduce the number of scenery bgls as Bearcat241 hints and reduce the number of entries on the airbases.dat to more like 250. I think your install is too "heavy."

Shadow Wolf,

I know you did. But part of the purpose in documenting this with a thread is to allow other users to be able to reference problems like this if/when they occur, and what to do about them. Knowledge is power.

 

[Shadow Wolf 07]

Shadow Wolf,

I know you did. But part of the purpose in documenting this with a thread is to allow other users to be able to reference problems like this if/when they occur, and what to do about them. Knowledge is power.

...and Bearcat241's post above is a good example of that.

 

[kdriver]

I think the problem is the number of BGL files with AFD entries, not the overall number of BGLs. The limit is around the 200 mark. The civil flight sims have multiple AFD entries in the one BGL file. I copied all the AFD BGLs from FS2000 to CFS2, and sure enough, all ten thousand FS2000 airfields showed up in CFS2 Free Flight.

Rather than deactivating whole scenery layers, I got around this problem by separating the AFD BGLs and putting them in their own layers. I could then keep all scenery active and just activate/deactivate the AFD entries as required. MR's BGLs were a problem as the AFD section is combined with the scenery and flatten sections. I had to decompile them and create separate AFD BGLs.

It's a bit late now, but the ideal solution would have been for each author to combine the AFD entries for a particular country into one BGL file. Steve McClelland did this with his CFS2 airfields a long time ago.

Kevin

 

[MaskRider]

I think the problem is the number of BGL files with AFD entries, not the overall number of BGLs. The limit is around the 200 mark. The civil flight sims have multiple AFD entries in the one BGL file. I copied all the AFD BGLs from FS2000 to CFS2, and sure enough, all ten thousand FS2000 airfields showed up in CFS2 Free Flight.

Rather than deactivating whole scenery layers, I got around this problem by separating the AFD BGLs and putting them in their own layers. I could then keep all scenery active and just activate/deactivate the AFD entries as required. MR's BGLs were a problem as the AFD section is combined with the scenery and flatten sections. I had to decompile them and create separate AFD BGLs.

It's a bit late now, but the ideal solution would have been for each author to combine the AFD entries for a particular country into one BGL file. Steve McClelland did this with his CFS2 airfields a long time ago.

Kevin

Interesting post, Kevin.

MR