User Created Content Concern

HiFlyer · April 19, 2019 at 9:22 PM

First, before even getting started, I want to thank all those out there creating enhanced Cultivation for Aerofly and enriching immensely the world we fly in.

This post is not intended as a complaint, but to express a concern.

I find that as User created content proliferates, most especially scenery, The Aerofly documents/scenery and Documents/addons/scenery folder is becoming more and more indecipherable as each content creator lends their own contributions, with completely dissimilar naming conventions and locations.

Thus you end up with sceneries covering the same general areas residing in completely different folders with names that are not necessarily enlightening, which I believe will eventually end up in a complete mess unless some general rules are put in place.

My first thought was of having a seperate folder for each state, with sub-folders that are required to clearly lay out the intended coverage area, such as Documents/Aerofly FS 2/Addons/scenery/Usa/California/#

Or Documents/Aerofly FS 2/Europe/France/Paris/#

Essentially something that allows a user, months later to go into his scenery folder and have some idea of what the heck he or she is looking at, especially if they are looking to replace something.

Is it possible for Ipacs to state some guidelines, or what do the creators think would be good, if anything?

kenventions · April 19, 2019 at 10:51 PM

How do the other flight sims handle user-created content? Have any of them found/implemented a good solution?

I haven't used any of the others in a long, long time.

Jet-Pack (IPACS) · April 19, 2019 at 10:56 PM Official Post

At IPACS we follow the following conventions:

1. folder names and file names should be lower case and mustn't contain a space, use underscores instead. Only this way user scenery will work properly on all platforms

2. You should use a commonly accepted geological structure e.g. continent/state/name_city/name_city.tsc or continent/state/icao_airport_name/icao_airport_name .tsc with the state generally being shortened but doesn't have to be.

Example:

/scenery/places/europe/fr/paris_city/paris_city.tsc

/scenery/places/europe/fr/lfpg_charles_de_gaulle/lfpg_charles_de_gaulle.tsc

And for user scenery aerial images I would recommend a similar structure:
/scenery/images/europe/fr/paris_city/map_00_0000_0000.ttc

This also applies to repaints, especially the ones carrying the aircraft registration: use "n1234c" or "d_esel". Avoid any spaces, hyphens, capital letters or umlauts - all these can potentially cause problems on other operating systems.

HiFlyer · April 20, 2019 at 12:36 AM

@Jetpack

Could it be possible to pin this information? Perhaps nobody will make use of it, but at least there will be a guideline to reference!

papuld · April 5, 2020 at 3:04 PM

ayant crée ou chargé beaucoup de scènes. cela ralenti beaucoup le démarrage .

existe t il un programme qui permet de sélectionné les scènes sur lesquelles on va voler ?

merci

admin · April 5, 2020 at 5:57 PM Official Post

@HiFlyer: The problem is, we can publish guidelines of course, but our experience shows they are not followed consistently by all users. User created scenery is very nice, but it also has a huge impact on start up and runtime performance since lots of content doesn't follow our guidelines. We don't really know what to do against it, moderation would be one possibility, but we don't really want to control anybody here, Aerofly FS should be an open platform.

papuld · April 6, 2020 at 5:23 PM

merci de votre réponse mais je pensais a un logiciel gérant le scenery.cfg type sceneyprofiler par exemple

HiFlyer · April 8, 2020 at 12:14 AM

Quote from admin

@HiFlyer: The problem is, we can publish guidelines of course, but our experience shows they are not followed consistently by all users. User created scenery is very nice, but it also has a huge impact on start up and runtime performance since lots of content doesn't follow our guidelines. We don't really know what to do against it, moderation would be one possibility, but we don't really want to control anybody here, Aerofly FS should be an open platform.

It's a shame. After dealing with several authors doing it in completely different ways, almost defiantly so, I finally gave up and stopped downloading these extra sceneries at all.

I wonder how many others feel that way?

Oh, well.

ApfelFlieger · April 8, 2020 at 9:14 AM

I help a little bit with the support of Flight-Sim.org and had started to help to limit too much "uncontrolled growth". But it is a difficult task, because it is not always easy for people to follow certain - sensible - rules. Maybe I'll try another attempt in the next days.

It might also be helpful to give a kind of quality seal to the users to show how easy it is to integrate the addons.

Tschüss and stay health

Michael (III)

Hartman · April 8, 2020 at 11:38 AM

Quote from Jet-Pack (IPACS)

1. folder names and file names should be lower case and mustn't contain a space, use underscores instead. Only this way user scenery will work properly on all platforms

Yes, I follow that rule. Coincidentally, I was told that uppercase can cause errors for Mac users.

How about the airports from http://www.fscloudport.com?

ICAO airport code = capital letters.

Quote from Jet-Pack (IPACS)

Avoid any spaces, hyphens, capital letters or umlauts - all these can potentially cause problems on other operating systems.

Here's the challenge: How do I know all constraint in AFS2?

I prefer the simplest possible solution - which at the same time gives a good overview. This works for me:

no = Norway.

bardufoss-1, bardufoss-2, bardufoss-3, etc. = geographical area in Norway.

map-09_8c00_c400, map_09_8c80_c400,etc. = the technical identification of the tile.

But now - I am informed that errors can occur when I use hyphen (bardufoss-1).

Jet-Pack (IPACS) · April 8, 2020 at 1:27 PM Official Post

The folder should be entirely lower case.

e.g. "edds_stuttgart"

I would recommend sorting images by country, city/region:

scenery/images/no/bardufoss1/map09_0000_0000.ttc

...

scenery/images/no/bardufoss2/....

instead of "bardufoss-1" just do "bardufoss_1" or "bardufoss1"

Hartman · April 8, 2020 at 2:59 PM

Thanks for the clarification, Jan.

So you also recommend removing the "technical identification of the tile" (map-09_8c00_c400). Out of curiosity: Does it have any technical significance for AFS2 (shorter name)? Or do you think it gives a better overview for the user ("bardufoss1" instead of "bardufoss1_map_09_8c00_c40" ?

higgy · April 8, 2020 at 4:11 PM

The big question is .. which of our download-files are ok ...

and which have such errors/problems

( so that we can update this problem-files ) and how to check this for future ...