I had requested the exact opposite here in this thread:
<https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/questions/1042/biomes-ecoregions-
vegetation-sdk-limitations.html> After SU5, I can no long swap in/out my
Seasonal files (biomes.xml, species.xml) to match user flight date selection
(aka Month) so they get corresponding vegetation (i.e. winter vegetation when
december in Northern hemisphere or summer vegetation when July, etc.). Prior
to SU5, I could update these .xml files in my company community folder and
they would be loaded prior to flight start (user at the main menu). With SU5,
this no longer works and the user has to exit MSFS and then restart MSFS
rendering my automatic seasonal detection and application of correct
Biomes/Species .xml files useless. So it appears you took my request and went
in the opposite direction and locked out my product functionality aimed at
making life easier for users to get seasonal vegetation. I know MSFS must be
reading the community folder while “in sim” since content can be added and
removed via MarketPlace. But, for some odd reason you no longer do this during
flight start? Why was this changed? The XML vegetation files are tiny and
don’t have a significant processing overhead. Going back to my original
request was: 1. Could we get “live” vegetation reloads while in Sim, nothing
was added to the SDK to support this If this is not possible, then go back to
the way it used to work prior to SU5 where community data for vegetation is
loaded on flight start. Rob.
FYI, if this doesn’t revert back to how it worked before SU5, then MS/Asobo
have essentially killed my project. Rob.
It’s an issue across the board. Liveries take forever to create now because
they stopped reloading textures when you change liveries. So I can’t just sit
i the hangar and change liveries back and forth to see changes immediately. I
have to exit the sim and get back in, which, of course, takes an interminable
amount of time. Unless somebody can tell me what the reload textures command
in Dev Mode is?
A dev-mode option to “reload aircraft” would be a great addition, saving hours
during livery-creating and/or gltf/xml model modification. Just switching
using the dev aircraft selector doesn’t do the trick.
So I guess the question is … was this “by design” or just a “mistake”? Per
my thread link listed above from July 5th, I had requested ability to do a
“live” reload of the vegetation files via SimConnect command would be ideal
… OR if a change is detected in file date/time stamps automatically reload
vegetation files would be even more ideal. OR add a package option for us to
have automatic reloading if desired. Rob.
The 1.18.15.0 did not resolve this issue. Has Asobo indicated they are going
to address this problem? Rob.
This should usually work by doing resync aircraft in devmode. Just create a
dummy project so you can access Tools → Aircraft Editor in DevMode
Hello SimHorizon, The biomes being now used in the world map menu, the files
are loaded on start up rather than when you start a flight. If I understand
correctly, your package is relying on the fact we used to load these files
when a flight was started, using a SimConnect app to swap files directly in
your package? If so, you are conscious this is kind of a hack and we never
officially supported modifying the content of a package on the fly, right ?
There are a lot of things that could go wrong here. What if we wanted to check
package integrity on the fly? Your package would fail the test. What if we
wanted to cache some packages in RAM on startup? Your package would no be
behaving correctly either. We obviously can’t plan our development and tests
based on all the possible workarounds you can use in a package. We have no
issues with people trying to play and be creative with what they can do with
the SDK but you can’t expect us to guarantee that features we never supported
will work after an update. That said, I’ve created a task about this so we can
evaluate how we can implement that properly and maybe allow people to override
biomes through SimConnect. Regards, Sylvain
Hi Silvain, As the title suggests, we’re also wondering why the change was
made in the first place? His is only one example of issues caused. As another
example, as a livery designer, I used to be able to bring up the plane I was
working on in the hangar, view my livery, make a change to a texture, switch
to another livery of the same plane, and then switch back, and the files would
be reloaded and I could view my changes. Now I need to exit the sim and
restart to see any changes to textures. Unless there’s another way to reload
files within the sim, either while in the hangar, in-game, or in developer
mode. In FSX, there used to be a “Reload Airplane Textures” command. If there
is a way now, I haven’t been able to figure it out, and I don’t know where to
look in the SDK to find the answer on how to do this. Again, this is just
another example. Thanks, Tom
Hi Tom. What you’re describing is a different issue. Instead of the hangar,
have you tried doing these modifications in a flight with the aircraft
selected and openend in the AircraftEditor? Resource reloading during
edition is something we definitely want to improve. For now this is
inconsistent and it requires big engine architecture modifications to have a
better handling of live resource reloading. The issue of SimHorizon seems a
bit different to me as he relied on resource modifications and reloading
outside the edition mode, which is not something we support at the moment.
Regards, Sylvain