Changes introduced in our upcoming update Version 2.5 and higher

Dear Aerofly FS scenery developers,

starting with our soon to be published update for Aerofly FS ( version 2.5.x.x or newer ) we will introduce some changes on how airports and places ( e.g. landmarks like bridges, cities or other non airport related buildings ) are organized.

With more and more airports showing up, especially due to your great work, the startup performance and loading performance has decreased over time. The main reason for this slowdown is the fact that Aerofly FS needs to open each TSC it sees to find out what it is and to know when it needs to be loaded. This is slow if the number of TSCs is many hundreds or more even on a SSD drive.

So starting with Aerofly FS version 2.5.x.x the new organization is as follows:

• All airports with a valid ICAO code should have their folder name start with the ICAO code itself and will be placed in the 'airports' folder of each 'scenery' folder. So for the airport KSFO San Francisco, the new folder will be 'ksfo_san_francisco_int'. The extra text after the ICAO is optional, e.g. 'ksfo' would also suffice.
• All airports with no valid ICAO code should either receive their official identifier with a maximum of 6 letters or if none is found, use the 2 letter ICAO code of the country followed by a 4 letter code you make up yourself. Do not use more than 6 letters per identifier.
• All landmarks, cities, cultivation files and so on should stay in the 'places' folder. To speed up loading here as well the new Aerofly FS content converter will add the approximate coordinates of the place in the front of the folder name. For example the Golden Gate bridge will now be in a folder called 'w12247n3781_golden_gate_bridge'. Where we encode longitude and latitude in the front of the folder name.
• Airports or places not following this convention will still work but will of course slow down startup performance. Please also keep in mind that in a future update we might drop support for those older airports and places. The main reason are again performance and if airports are added that do not have the correct ICAO code, we can't properly use it for navigational purposes that is included in our global database.

We strongly encourage to apply the changes to your own airports and places after we have published the update. One of the future updates might drop support for older places.

If you want to try out our new Aerofly FS Content Converter, please download it from here.

The folder name changed is done automatically when using our content converter. Doing it manually is tedious and not recommended. Again, the performance improvement comes when you renames hundreds of folders, not just a single one.

In this case the place simply won't work. Again only add the encoded longitude and latitude coordinates if the folder contains tsc files that at located around this location.

K9NSP: Please post more details and if possible tell us the folder where the scenery is installed and the TSC file as well.

@K9NSP: Could you please copy your airports to the 'places' folder instead of the 'airports' folder. The airports folder should be used for registered ICAO airports only. Also, copy the airport 'flat' into the places folder, e.g. C:\Users\order\OneDrive\Documents\Aerofly FS 2\addons\scenery\k9nsp_Idaho\airports\s78\s78.tsc.

We also strongly recommend to use no spaces in files and folders and to use lower case only, this way your airports will work properly on MacOS and Linux as well.