We’re in the middle of the X-Plane developer conference here in South Carolina; I’ve had a chance to improve and revise some of the presentations since Mallorca; my voice is totally shot but once it comes back Austin and I can turn some of the talks into YouTube videos.

As always seems to happen, we’ve put a few features into the sim during the conference…why talk about a problem when we can just fix it?

So for the next patch, you can put a shortcut or alias or simlink to a scenery pack into the Custom Scenery Folder, rather than the custom scenery pack itself and that means…

…that the scenery pack can be on another hard drive.  This may take the sting out of an orthophoto pack if you run X-Plane off of an SSD.

Edit: to answer a few commonly asked questions:

  1. This is new if you are on Mac/Win and want to use the file-browser-level alias mechanism.  Yes, Linux nerds can use simlinks (I was actually surprised that this path works, but apparently it does.)
  2. We are only doing this for scenery packs.  Scenery packs are the biggest single thing you can install, so to relieve hard disk pressure we will start with scenery packs.  We might allow linking some other pack later, but for now we are not doing aircraft – our goal is to keep X-Plane maintenance simple, predictable, and supportable.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

40 comments on “Shortcuts/Aliases For Scenery Packs”

  3. I’m doing this all the time already on linux. So please tell me what’s so different now?

    I would really like to be able to place scenery packs within subfolders. That would make the custom scenery folder with ortho-packs that consist of dozens of folders look much cleaner and I could group sceneries into folders.

  4. Hello Ben,

    We can already done this with Linux (yes, only 2% of user…) and we already have good tools to manage scenery.
    But we still lack the posibility to have sub-folder to order a little the custom scenery folder, which is a mess if you have too many scenery for now.

    Dsf system is quite powerfull and flexible but a little messy too 😉

    Kindly
    Olivier

  6. Hurray! This will finally make scenery de-duplication between several X-Plane versions, and scenery management in general, [i]way[/i] easier.

    Will this also work for airplane packs, where (as far as I can see) the only stumbling block up until now is that the file selector dialog doesn’t show symlinks/aliases to folders? If not, would you consider adding this too while you’re at it? Pretty please?

    Judith

  7. I don’t understand… I use to put links to my scenery packs (in other folders, discs, etc.) since X-Plane 9 and works fine. What is new?
    (I use linux)

  8. I am sorry if I am off subject here but I do not know where else I could ask that question.

    Ben, I am truly aware of the improvements and efforts whole LR team is doing to make the X-Plane simulator even better than it is but there is one thing that really bothers me and I assume it might be a concern to others as well.

    Automatic scenery generation works fantastic from close, little houses are populated nicely around the airports etc. but there are two major things that need a big improvement in my opinion.

    1. When I fly locally, roads seem to be fine but when I approach the small town ( yellow area on Skyvector or populated area in Google Maps) there is almost no buildings like the auto generation engine did not “see” the area where many small houses should be.

    2. Big cities like Philadelphia or Atlantic City are totally unreal, there are no tall buildings to be seen from far.

    When I take off in real life from Hammonton Municipal N81 and head toward the shore, I can see Atlantic City tall buildings from very far away, weather permitting.
    In X-Plane this area is simply empty.

    Are there any chances that those two problems would be addressed in the future if this is possible at all….

    Thank you for a great simulator and I hope I did not hijack the tread. 🙂

    Cheers, Andrzej

  15. A very smart solution … it would be great if you also release a patch for X-Plane 9 including that 😉

  16. What a great News!

    And is this good for performance(special FPS) or for what is worth ?

    I love X-Plane. Thank you for effort!

  17. Hello. Also very useful if you have multiple X-Plane versions installed in parallel for testing or try outs. Hope it will work the same way as described here. I would have needed it in V9, but I am glad it will be implemented in V10.

    Looking forward for more improvments.
    My most demanding need: Planemaker – Generic Instruments / Possibility to define two datarefs for one indicator. This is needed for Artificial Horizon (Pitch + Roll) and Gyro Compass with Heading-Bug (Bug Setting and actual course).

  18. Glad to see that symlinks are now being followed. I never attempted to do this, however it makes plenty of sense. It makes me want to head to Motor Supply and knock a few back.

    Is this something that works anywhere from inside the X-Plane root folder, or is this limited to the contents of Custom Scenery?

  19. Great, but please have a look at…

    Multiple Monitors, single PC using Linux Links

    It would be great if you could add Shortcut/Aliases for the whole x-Plane installation as well. All x-plane users that can not afford three separate PC can run three x-Plane instances on one PC 🙂

    Since all three x-Plane instances access the very same files the OS file caching reduces drastically start up and scene change time.

    (My setup: 3 Monitors, 2x Nvidia 560Ti, Intel i5 2400)

  21. Hi Ben
    great feature! how about doing the same for the “Aircraft” folder? it can be HUGE sometime and it could save a lot of time reinstalling them every time you install xplane from scratch.
    thank you
    Nik

    1. … which begs the queston, why are you repeatedly installing X-Plane from scratch? That sounds like the real issue if you are just a normal home user.

      1. Cormac,
        i’ve never said i repeatedly used to reinstall xplane from scratch. it can happen sometime (if i change the computer or and internal HD or even if i have to reinstall the OS), but putting ALL (acfs+scenery) my addons on a second HD can save:
        -space on the internal HD
        -time reinstalling addons (as written above if i change the computer or and internal HD or even if i have to reinstall the OS).
        for me it’s logical to have this feature for ALL the addons. why not?

  22. in Windows (on NTFS volume):

    mklink /d “default data” “X:\avia\_shared_data_xplane\default data”
    mklink /d “default apt dat” “X:\avia\_shared_data_xplane\default apt dat”
    mklink /d “Custom Scenery” “X:\avia\_shared_data_xplane\Custom Scenery”

    In this case X is a SSD drive, which contains “Custom Scenerey” folder and all navigation/apt.dat. As result my X-Plane 9/X-plane 10 copies on HDD use same Customer Scenery/navigation database from drive X.

  23. Wow great… how adding maybe 3 lines of code, can make people burst in hurrahs.
    It is funnier that maybe one of ten of them might use that change.

    Guys you can also use a shared drive for the whole install did you know?
    X-Plane doesn’t care as long as the folder structure is intact.

    Also for Windows (OS of which I am fan), it doesn’t use the registry (OS “feature” of which I am not a fan) for anything!

    Seriously, I welcome any addition that makes a project better.

  24. The sim would surely launch faster with an SSD. While you’re at it, I second that subfolder request. I’d arrange my Custom Scenery folder by continents. And consider separating default stuff from add-ons. That would make maintenance of multiple beta versions a breeze.

  25. Two questions:
    1) Will custom scenery package priority be determined by the alias’s target folder name or the alias name? (I hope and presume its the latter).
    2) Posts above by Linux users seems to imply they have not been able to organise scenery in subfolders (e.g., ../my_packs/[continent]/[country]/[package] and then use symlinks in the Custom Scenery foder to link to these. It looks like this should be possible on all platforms now or have I missed something?

    1. Alias name, but it’s a little moot – there’ll be an ini file managing priority and enable/disable, so if you want to really get creative with how you organize your folder, you can edit the order in the ini file.

  26. In windows you can already use the “mklink” command for Vista/7 (or Sysinternals Junction, if on XP). This would work on anything, not just scenery packs…

  28. Ben,

    I posted a comment, it was sitting there for few days waiting for moderation and then it just got erased…..

    I would expect either see it either answered or at least posted instead of just deleting it.

    If was commented on something that was not nice to hear, it should be still posted instead of just dumped.

    I feel offended by that, I would not expect such an action from you.

    Andrzej

    1. hi Andrzej,

      Your comment has been in moderation until now. There is no guarantee about how fast your comments will be approved; there is no guarantee that they will be approved, and there is no guarantee that they will be approved in order.

      I have been busy with the South Carolina X-Plane developer’s conference, and in the face of this and 28 posts on folders (previously followed by over 60 posts on scroll wheels), moderation has been pretty far behind.

      Moderating this blog is lower priority for me than developing X-Plane itself, so if you are going to be offended if your comments are not rapidly approved, you should not post here.

      /Ben

  29. Thank you for answering, Ben.

    I posted my disappointment NOT because of the time needed for moderation but because my post simply disappeared which I took as an offense.

    If this is normal procedure ( disappearing) while moderation process, than I apologize.

    Andrzej

    1. I do not know what WP shows you when a post is deleted or in moderation. Posts pending moderation do not appear to other readers, of course.

  30. Oh wow, I didn’t think I’d stumble across the makers of X plane. Sounds like your still hard at work. Keep it up, you make an excellent product. God knows how many hours I’ve spent on X plane 9/10.

    1. Shawn, I wasn’t sure what to make of your post – you appear to be stumping for Pro Flight Simulator; I cannot allow links to that from this blog.

      (For those of you who are, like, “huh”? Read here:

      http://www.flightgear.org/flightprosim.html

      The issue is not Shawn’s blog linking to other flight sims, it’s that the PFS folks intentionally create a web of fake web pages to game Google into bringing up their content to make PFS seem legit and not just an expensive rip of a FG binary build.)

  31. “I do not know what WP shows you when a post is deleted or in moderation. ”

    Ben, it is not important , just FYI, when the post is in moderation, I see the status of it.

    When it is deleted, it probably does not appear to anybody because it is deleted.:-)

    I will be patient next time for ether waiting for reply or seeing my post.

    Thank you for responding.

    Andrzej

Comments are closed.