RAF Coningsby 121 Expeditionary Air Wing package by MAIW

[campbeme]

Saturday is a non fly day correct? Also have you looked around the HAS sites as this is were the Jags are parked, there not out in the open.

Mark

[Firebird]

OK, thanks for that run down.
That all seemed OK, except for the "clicked scenery and other files in Addon and World folders" section. There is only one folder that you needed to add, as you didn't add the optional scenery mentioned in the readme, "MAIW RAF Coningsby".

Can you confirm that this is the only file folder that you added, not others and not sub-folders of the Coningsby one?

To see whether something was flawed with your installation, I removed the package and re-installed it, manually, and then rechecked the Jaguars. They all appeared there, they all took of and they all flew by later in the day.

Now the most common causes of them not appearing is that the Coningsby scenery folder is not active, if you have a full range of HAS on the south side then it is active, or the aircraft folder is not present, although you have said that you have copied it.

The next obvious causes are that the Jaguar titles have been renamed by yourself, you don't state this so I assume that you haven't done this, or that you are looking at the wrong time. The times are all Z, or GMT, not local.

Can you confirm that you are looking at GMT times?

[ninelives]

Hi Firebird thanks for the reply.

Re the time. As you know, there are 2 clocks that appear side by side.

I changed the left hand one and the summary confirmed the time as 9am. And remember it certainly did work that one time.

Re the files. I clicked add area for Conningsby and also other scenery areas where files had been added. I will do it again and only click the Conningsby one to be sure.

If that doesn't work then I have one idea which came to me when I was lying in bed last night !! (It must have got to me this one LOL)

Remember I said I have the British Airport scenery which I disabled for Conningsby.... would it be worth trying the Conningsby folder in the Brtairport North folder as technically they are both addon scenery files for the same place?

Anyway, I will do it again just clicking the Conningsby folder only first off and see what happens.

[Firebird]

I don't quite understand about what you mean about trying the Coningsby folder in the BritAir North folder.
Do you mean adding it or deleting it or archiving?
I don't know if there is a Coningsby folder there. If there is then no it should not be active at all.

As for the times the left hand one is local time and the right hand one is GMT or Zulu. ALL AI traffic is in GMT/ZULU time. It has to be, therefore setting the left hand clock to the time is no good.

[ninelives]

Ah right. To be honest I had no idea what z meant in the readme! I have always used the left hand clock so that's just force of habit.

Well before we go any further let me try again setting the right hand clock to 9 and see what happens....

....just thought.....no Jags though Well let me have another go anyway....

[ninelives]

Right we are making some progress.

Everything installed as per the readme with proper files activated etc and as before......no Jags and no take offs.

So I did what I tred before and I copied over the Traffic Jag and Flypast BGLs from addon/conningsby/scenery to Scenery/BrtArpt/north1AFCAD/scenery and set the time to 9.00 z as you mentioned and I had all the Jags and 12 lining up to take off. Great!

But now the next problem. I don't get the flypasts and landings. I have checked and re-checked the timings and I have look all over the sky and waited etc and nothing.

They have probably defected to another flight sim....

Anyway, I am half way there. With British Airports instaled even though the scenery and AFCAD are switched off the only way I can get the Jags to appear and take off is by doing the above.

Now all I need to fix is why they are not coming back !

[ninelives]

I tried copying (not replacing) the Flypast bgl into the Scenery/world/scenery folder and this had the interesting side effect of making 24 Jaguars take off lining up from both sides of the runway. All in order with no conflicts! Looked good but still no flypasts! Leaving it now for another day!

[Firebird]

Yep, it would do. You have doubled the traffic. I would remove it from your BA folder it shouldn't be there.
Not because it won't work but because it doesn't make logical sense. Most installs put the traffic files in Scenery/world/scenery folder, logical place to look for it, it was designed as part of the Coningsby scenery and so if you remove that you will remove the flypast traffic as well, also a logical place.
You obviously know it works there but leaving the file there means that you are likely to forget about it.

Now about the flypast, what time were you looking for it? If they appear at CGY and take off at CGY then the only reason that they wouldn't appear, that I can think of at the moment, is that you have a time issue. I used the Jaguar Flyby & TNG ReadMe for the times and they showed up.

[ninelives]

Yeah you wrote about this before.....see your posts 4th February.

This is where there is great confusion. As Plumber says, the traffic files are in the addon scenery folders. But you say they shouldn't be there but should be in the world/scenery folder. Except auto install doesn't put them there and there is nothing in the readme to move them.

This is why I am very surprised by the number of people who said it worked 'out of the box'. I can't see how it can as files have to be moved and previous posts in this section appear to confirm this.

It was pure coincidence that I found that the traffic files also worked in my airports scenery folder.

So now I guess what I have to do is remove the traffic files from the Conningsby folder in addon and from the airports where I put them and ONLY have them in scenery/world?

If so, then what about other files in the Conningsby folder in addon? Do those get touched?

Re the times. Yep I followed your advice of the right hand clock and checked the timings against the readme you use. But this could be down to the folders issue above.

I really want to get this solved because there is clearly something very wrong with the method of install or a conflict somewhere and maybe it will help others who are having a similar issue. Thanks for your help.

[nickblack423]

Yeah you wrote about this before.....see your posts 4th February.

This is where there is great confusion. As Plumber says, the traffic files are in the addon scenery folders. But you say they shouldn't be there but should be in the world/scenery folder. Except auto install doesn't put them there and there is nothing in the readme to move them.

This is why I am very surprised by the number of people who said it worked 'out of the box'. I can't see how it can as files have to be moved and previous posts in this section appear to confirm this.

It was pure coincidence that I found that the traffic files also worked in my airports scenery folder.

So now I guess what I have to do is remove the traffic files from the Conningsby folder in addon and from the airports where I put them and ONLY have them in scenery/world?

If so, then what about other files in the Conningsby folder in addon? Do those get touched?

Re the times. Yep I followed your advice of the right hand clock and checked the timings against the readme you use. But this could be down to the folders issue above.

I really want to get this solved because there is clearly something very wrong with the method of install or a conflict somewhere and maybe it will help others who are having a similar issue. Thanks for your help.

If the Coningsby Scenery folder is installed in the Addon Scenery folder and is activated in FS9 then any traffic files in it will be activated. There is no reason why it wouldn't. The only thing that would throw off them doing so would be conflicting scenery such as British Airports scenery etc.

Nick

[ninelives]

Well they don't work for me there and previous posts suggest they should be in the world scenery not addon so I will wait and see what Firebird says. The readme also says about de-activating the airport scenery and AFCAD but not about any other conflicts?

[Firebird]

Nick is absolutely right it should work straight of the box, mine did. It also worked first time when I de-installed and downloaded and re-installed manually.
There are only two reasons that I can think of for this behaviour. The first one I have said before, so I won't go over it again. The second one is that somehow your FS9 setup has got mangled so that it won't work in that folder.
Although, I will be completely honest here and say that I have absolutely no idea how, as it works in your BA folder. So the only thing that comes close to being the cause is that either that app is somehow stamping over things or has messed something up. As i know nothing about the app i am loathed to suggest that it is anything more than a hypothetical, as this time.

The only other thing is that you have another CGY scenery, such as John Young's installed. Have you checked your scenery.cfg to see if there is more than one 'Coningsby' entry in there?

[ninelives]

No other scenery I can assure you of that. In all my years of flight simming I have never had problems installing stuff like this. This is the first one that has given me these problems.

That's not a crticism just a fact. One thing that continues to baffle me is why the traffic bgls are in the conningsby folder if I am being told that they should be in the world scenery folder? The take offs work when I do that. But I still get no flaypasts and landings. I have checked the times and have no air traffic at all.

And another thing I have just found out...... the conningsby folder goes into the addon folder together with a scenery folder both from the package. Now inside the conningsby folder is another folder called scenery. I always left them like that before.

But for the sake of trying anything I copied over the contents of the conningsby scenery folder into the other scenery folder that it came with and lo and behold all the lovely buildings and hangars have suddenly appeared. I didn't miss them because I didn't know they were there.

Now I know you are going to say this is all down to activating scenery but I have already done that so can only assume that either the 2 scenery folders in the conningsby folder have to be combined OR mt FS9 is not activating the scenery properly.

But if it's the latter would this explain why I am not getting the flypasts etc when those files are in the separate world folder?

You can understand why I am finding this deeply frustrating !!

[Firebird]

I can assure you that the two scenery folders do not have to be combined. They are completely separate entities.

Under the package 'Addon scenery' there are two folders 'MAIW RAF Coningsby' and 'Scenery'. If you copy the entire 'Addon scenery' folder to your '\Flight Simulator 9' folder then it will merge the contents of the 'Scenery' folder with the one that exist in your '\Flight Simulator 9\Addon Scenery' folder, default FS9 setup.
It will also create add a new 'MAIW RAF Coningsby' folder in there. Your '\Flight Simulator 9\Addon Scenery\MAIW RAF Coningsby' folder will contain two sub folders 'Scenery' and 'Texture' which is standard in almost all scenery folders.

This is why only one folder has to be activated. The fact that you copied the CGY stuff into the '\Addon Scenery\scenery' folder and scenery appears tells me that your scenery folder was not activated. This is why the traffic bgl didn't work.

Now in my scenery cfg this is my Coningsby entry :-

[Area.488]
Title=RAF Coningsby (EGXC)
Active=TRUE
Layer=527
Local=Addon Scenery\MAIW RAF Coningsby
Remote=
Required=FALSE

What does your entry say? As the CGY scenery files are fairly generic in their names, i.e. 1.bgl, 2.bgl etc, it's not a good idea to leave them where they are, in '\Addon Scenery\scenery'.

Now as you say that you are familiar with FS9, can I ask what OS you are using?

Finally, you are not being told that the traffic files should be in the world scenery folder. I am saying that they are normally in that folder. The person that designed the flypast part of the package wanted them in there. He has done this before with his own personally released packages. Part of the reason he does this is so if you remove his package scenery you automatically remove his traffic files as well.

[ninelives]

Thanks for your continuing help. I do appreciate it. It certainly looks as if it is a problem activating the folder although it's never happened before. Can I just ask, once properly activated should conningsby show up in the scenery list or as 'addon' or not at all?

I am running Vista 32bit.

I will look at this again tomorrow as it's now late here.

[delbydoo]

Sorry to butt in here, but is there any way you could show us a folder tree diagram, either screenshot or drawn diagram, to show us exactly where you have placed the required files? Like Steve, I have not had a problem getting the Jags to show up and to watch their fly-bys, and I use the UKMIL scenery of Coningsby, so maybe if we could look at the way your files are structured then we may be able to help further

Cheers

[Firebird]

Thanks for your continuing help. I do appreciate it. It certainly looks as if it is a problem activating the folder although it's never happened before. Can I just ask, once properly activated should conningsby show up in the scenery list or as 'addon' or not at all?

I am running Vista 32bit.

I will look at this again tomorrow as it's now late here.

OK, we maybe getting somewhere here.
To answer your first question. Coningsby should show up in the scenery list with a title of 'MAIW RAF Coningsby' unless, like I did, you give it a new personalised name. I would use whatever text editor you like to search for 'Coningsby' in your scenery.cfg. It should find it in at least in the 'Local=' field and probably in the 'Title=' field as well. There should be only one entry in there.

Now the reason I think we may have some progress is that I remember when Vista came out we had quite a few people having trouble activating folders as Vista would seemingly stop you adding adding things manually due to its security.
I am not sure here but I seem to remember that it didn't like manual changes to .cfg files in the C: drive 'Program Files' folder. I think that it was resolved by either altering the UAC for the FS9 folder structure or by switching it off all together. I can't be sure here as I refused to move to Vista so we would need somebody who experienced this personally to help here.

The check of your scenery.cfg file will reveal if this is the case.

[ninelives]

Daryl.....no problem. Will do.

Steve.... yes that could be true but I never use UAC anyway. I run 4 computers with Vista and make a point of turning Indexing and UAC off as they were always problem makers (although things have improved a lot since it's release and it is much maligned in my opinion but that's another subject...)

But I take what you say about altering files etc so best thing is let me do the file tree so you can have a lok at it then I wil do another new manual install and another scenery activation just to totally eliminate finger trouble my end.

[sr01]

Just got around to FINALLY installing this amazing package earlier in the week.Worked right outta the box"
Many thanks Mike for putting this together .
Great fun !!! and enjoyed "touring and sightseeing" around the base while waiting for the stunning flyby
Cheers
Brian

[Firebird]

It's always nice to hear when something works as we planned. Much appreciated.