FSX Tip of the Week:Reporting those pesky content errors

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Here is a set of tweaks for FSX.cfg that will enable a set of errors that can help pinpoint content loading errors. 

This is especially useful in dealing with content brought across from a previous version of Flight Sim, but can be useful even for new content.

First I show the section in brackets that this tweak must be placed in. Then I show the name of the tweak and its allowable values with an =[] to show what is allowable. And last I have a description for each tweak.

[DEBUG]

ReportLoadErrors=[1,0]

 

ReportLoadErrors will enable a message for mission designers to explain why a particular mission is failing to load. Support is a little spotty, so not all mission object failures will return really useful information, but in general it makes it easier for a mission designer to figure out what’s wrong. All errors are in English only.

This tweak is documented in the SDK.

[SCENERY]

MissingLibraryAlert=[1,0]

 

This will report when a scenery model failed to load from disk (i.e. the Space Needle). The failure could be from:

            1. An object visual model missing from the scenery

2. An object visual model is referenced outside of the associated BGL file's bounds. The object visuals are in a scenery file that has a bounds limitations and the object is attempting to be referenced outside of those bounds. An example is the Space Needle model being placed in Chicago, the Space Needle will fail to load in Chicago.

The BGLScan utility provided in the SDK can help identify these issues during scenery production.

[SCENERY]

ShowMissingTextureAlert=[1,0]

 

This will report when models have missing textures; scenery and aircraft, basically any model loaded from a .bgl or .mdl, but not terrain. We use this to detect loading issues and it can be quite useful.

This tweak is documented in the SDK, but wrongly states in one of the places this is referenced that missing terrain textures will trigger this alert.

Note - these tweaks do not detect all load errors, but can greatly help track down which part of a piece of content is missing. I hope you find them useful.