by toprob » Thu Nov 17, 2016 10:40 am
Good question, Michael, glad you asked...
This merger tool is designed BECAUSE of Orbx, and others who simply replace your autogen configurations with no regard to any other developer's descriptions. So here's just a quick look at how it works:
Your simulator has one set of autogen descriptions, and it is possible for developers to add their own autogen descriptions. In New Zealand, the main developer who does this is Orbx, and they do a great job. However they don't add their descriptions to yours, they just replace the lot. So their way, only one developer can do this at once, and if you have two developers with their own descriptions, then it depends on who managed to get the last switch in. I think that FTX Central replaces these every time it runs.
When Arno, who runs FSDeveloper.com, was working on his own autogen for his latest scenery project, he put his considerable skills to coming up with a tool which would merge descriptions, rather than just replace them. So this is what he came up with. To cut a long story short:
When the merger tool (I'll call it ACMT...) installs, it looks for custom autogen descriptions in any of the active scenery folders, and merges these with the appropriate descriptions file. It also hooks into exe.xml, so that it runs every time you run the simulator, and checks that nothing has been overwritten, if it has, then it puts them back.
So the merger tool won't -- and can't -- affect Orbx definitions, it'll just add any others, and put them back when Orbx wipes them out.
I have heard that the FTX Central developer was evaluating whether it would make sense to call ACMT from FTX Central, to make sure that the definitions remained intact. This would be a great thing, but ACMT would still work without it.
The only download to ACMT is that if it does find missing descriptions when it run the simulator, and adds them, the simulator can't use them until the next time it runs, as it has already loaded the autogen for the wrong files. So you see a warning pop up which says this, and recommends that you restart the sim. But this shouldn't happen often, once or twice in the lifetime of an average simulator, but quite often for those who run FTX Central often.
. I set out with my (complete) ORBX collection as a backgound and will add all other sceneries bit by bit.
