Flommoxed by Flattens

[Mick]

Once again I find myself scratching my head over something that makes no sense. I'm rebuilding my two FS worlds after a hiatus from the hobby and a no longer new computer, and as I was putting in some scenery I found that a couple of flatten switches are required - a common enough situation when installing scenery over terrain mesh that the creator of the scenery probably didn't use. So I dug out the instructions, carefully wrote the required flatten switches and patched them into the scenery.cfg file.

They worked perfectly - yesterday. Today they don't work at all. Absolutely nothing has changed between yesterday and today, but the flatten switches I made yesterday, that worked perfectly then, no longer work.

WTF ?!?!?!?!

This makes no sense. How can something work, then not work, when nothing has changed?

Does anyone have any idea what could be going on here?

[ian elliot]

Sounds to me like the cfg didnt save when you closed it ( i guessing its in note pad format ). To be honest, i use a third party scenery program like Suillder or AED ( airport design editor ) for stuff like flattens, in all my years of playing with scenery, ive never hand edited the scenery cfg. Unless you really know what your doing, id stay well clear of it.
just my pennys worth, cheers ian

PS, im guessing the scenery is higher in your scenery list than the terrain mesh

[Mick]

Oh, the scenery.cfg saved all right. The first thing I checked was to make sure the switches were still there (there are two of them) and that I hadn't accidentally put my backup copy in the sim and held out the new version with the switches. The sim just decided to start ignoring the flatten switches.

I tried moving the switches to append to a lower level scenery area, in case it had something to do with priorities, but that made no difference so I put them back where they started. Anyway, if that was the issue, the switches wouldn't have worked in the original location to begin with.

The fact that they worked initially also rules out any syntax or other errors in the switches themselves.

I've been editing the scenery.cfg file manually for many years, ever since I discovered that once you've added enough scenery areas, FS is no longer capable of doing the job in the prescribed manner - it scrambles the entries into meaningless hash that prevents the sim from starting. I don't know how many entries is too many, though I suspect it might be when you get into triple digits. Or it might vary from system to system, depending on processing resources. Whatever the number, I just know that when you have enough add-on scenery, manual editing is the only possible way. And it's actually rather simple, though it can become tedious if you want to keep your areas listed in the order you prioritize them (a worthwhile effort because it helps avoid the kind of typos in area numbers or levels that can cause problems.)

Maybe I should install Sbuilder and try it. I've been trying to avoid loading up my present computer with big programs that I'll seldom use, but I recently found that Exclude Builder won't work in my present system, so I could use Sbuilder for excludes as well as flattens. Not that I might ever need to make more than a few excludes and flattens, and probably none after I get my FS installations completely installed and set up... But I guess I really should install Sbuilder - and see if it will work in my present W7pro64 rig, which a number of my old favorite FS utilities will not do... (sigh)

Meanwhile, I fiddled around a bit more this morning, and managed to solve half or the problem without gaining a glimmer of a clue about the nature of the mystery. Some clever editing of an AFCAD file eliminated the problem at one location. The same sort of fiddling at the other location had no effect at all, which only makes a new mystery: why it worked in one place and not in another. How very annoying!

[Tom Clayton]

It sounds like an operating system issue. I'm guessing your FS9 install is in the default location? If so, it's in an area highly protected by Windows. The following link has instructions on how to gain full permissions so that changes will stick:

http://www.sim-outhouse.com/sohforum...ues-in-Win7%29

[Mick]

Nope, it's nothing to do with permissions.

My FS installations are on a partition of their very own. And both FS.exe and myself have full administrator permissions for everything.

The big mystery - both big mysteries - have to do with inconsistency. Flatten switches work one day and not the next. Fiddling with the AFCAD fixes the problem in one place but not the other.

Every possible reason I (or anyone else, so far) can think of that might produce the problem seems to be ruled out by the fact that I did, in fact, get those areas flattened at first - even if the results didn't hold up. I can think of several reasons why I couldn't flatten a location. I can't think of one that explains why I could flatten it but then it wouldn't stay flattened.

I'm gonna do some more fiddling with the AFCAD file in the second location. If that worked in one place, I should be able to make it work in the other. Making the fix in one place gives me hope. We'll see if chasing that hope leads me down a rabbit hole...
No wonder I got burned out on this hobby.

[Mick]

Well, it took more than an hour, but fiddling with the AFCAD and the flatten switches finally produced the desired effect.

I'm still not at all clear on just how it all came together. And I'm still completely bamboozled by how it all worked yesterday but not today. What other hobby lets us fix a technical problem without actually learning how?

I shudder with apprehension wondering whether it will work tomorrow.