Scenery.cfg trashed

I thought I'd post this in case someone has this problem.

About once per year, my scenery.cfg goes haywire, with many entries becoming scrambled. I don't know the cause. Many times, I have corrected this manually, which takes a lot of time. So now I back up this file on my computer or external hard drive.

Just to be sure, I also save it as a text file. So when things go wrong, I merely replace the scrambled text with my saved scenery.cfg file. Also be sure to do this every time you add scenery.

There are three places that include this file:

- Main fsx folder

- Program Data (the only necessary location)

- Users file.

I also back up my fsx.cfg and terrain.cfg files. I'm not sure if this is necessary. Also, I have a large external drive (5GB), and I save all the files in my FSX folder, having zipped them first.

Cheers

Maingear Shift, Core i7 5960X 8-core, 16 GB RAM, NVidia 290 Graphics, Windows 8

A handy little tool that can help resolve such issues and that also offers a way of backing up/maintaining your scenery.cfg listing in a good condition is the Scenery Config Editor tool found at:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/fs-sceditor/

You can activate scenery and place it where you want in the priority listing without even starting FSX - this can be achieved by simply dragging and dropping. It also has the ability to Reset Area and Layer numbering and Reorder the file with a single click - which may help with your problem of a 'scrambled' .cfg file. Other options the tool offers is the ability to import and activate multiple sceneries in a single action and the restoration of delete files/areas from a backup area. When you close the tool after making changes you are prompted to save the changes, which are written to the scenery.cfg file. When you next start FSX, the changes are loaded into the FSX list as normal. I have used the tool for several years and now never use the Scenery Library activation process within FSX any more.

Thanks a lot for this message. I have downloaded it, and installed it today.

One thing I realised, was that I can initiate this scrambling (i.e. the Title and Layer do not match, is using the scenery editor to re-locate the aircraft's layer)

Cheers

San Luis Obispo, CA, USA)

...I can initiate this scrambling (i.e. the Title and Layer do not match, is using the scenery editor to re-locate the aircraft's layer)

Not sure what you mean by "the Title and Layer do not match" and I suspect you meant "scenery layer", not "aircraft layer".

If you meant to type that the [Area.nnn] and the Layer= line do not match, there is no reason for them to match and FSX works just fine if they do not match.

If you think about it, that would be very poor programing to have two different lines that have to match, a much cleaner programming strategy would be to only use one line.

If you are having problems in the sim, I doubt that they are caused by not having the [Area.nnn] and the Layer= line match.

peace,

the Bean