Ah, the joy...of reinstalling FSX

[Tarasdad]

A few months ago I upgraded my OS from XP Pro to Win 7 Home Premium. It was a pretty smooth upgrade all-in-all, only minor issues usually fixed by reinstalling software. I hadn't checked all of my flight sims until a couple of days ago when I discovered that FSX wasn't working, so a reinstall was in order. Being the smart person that I am I backed up all the important directories full of add-on aircraft, gauges, modules and such - except for one, teeny-tiny thing....

I forgot to back up my AI traffic files.

Yep, no traffic at my airports. Thought maybe it was the traffic density settings, sure enough they were all at minimum when I checked so I maxed them out and...no traffic at my airports. That's when I realized what I had done. So off to World of AI I go and spend the next 5 or 6 hours downloading AI packages. Installing was a bit of a pain as I kept getting errors and having to restart. I finally got them all in and now I have AI traffic at my airports, yay!

Unfortunately I also get about a zillion duplicate name errors when FSX starts. They weren't occurring prior to the reinstall of the AI files so that has to be what caused it. I'm going to try reinstalling them a few at a time to see if that fixes things. If not I get to go through every single AI aircraft.cfg file to look for duplicates. Unless someone has a better way to look for and eliminate duplicates?

[DaveB]

Hi Barry

Yup.. that's a bummer and no mistakin'

Can I ask a silly question? Are you using FS9 traffic files for FSX? I don't think you area as this didn't happen first around AI traffic and FSX remains a bit of a mystery to me.. I had enough trouble sorting it out in FS9
All I can say is that I feel your pain

ATB
DaveB

[Tarasdad]

I'm using the standard packages available from WoAI, installed via their installer. Only difference that I'm aware of is where it looks for the AI aircraft since FSX puts them in the SimObjects folder. The aircraft files are the standard ones from various sources.

Doing the reinstall didn't fix the duplication issue. Means I get to go through hundreds of entries in my AI aircraft config files to locate them and remove them. Oh frabjous joy....

[Tarasdad]

Of all the stupid....

The dang installer copied all the AI aircraft from my dedicated "SimObjects\AIAircraft" folder to "SimObjects\Airplanes" when I wasn't looking! No wonder I wasn't finding any duplicate entries in the .cfg files!

[TSR2]

WOAI files are FS9 format, if you have any FSX traffic files (including shipping) they wont show if the FS9 ones are there. If you want to convert the files to FSX format, or do anything with flight planning in FSX or FS9, this is what you need ...

http://stuff4fs.com/open.asp?Folder=AIFP&JS=TRUE

[DaveB]

That was my fear Ben. I have a lot of WOAI installed and I don't remember them being in FSX format or being given an FSX option. Unless Barry has converted them.. the problem is WOAI me thinks.
ATB
DaveB

[Tarasdad]

The problem was somehow the AI aircraft ended up in both 'SimObjects\Airplanes' and 'SimObjects\AIAircraft' (the latter being my dedicated AI sub-folder). I deleted the duplicates from the '\Airplanes' folder and all is well. I also went ahead and used the linked software to convert them to FSX format. All is well in FSX-land now! Well, except for the fact that I'm so rusty I can't remember half the functions any more, but that's a different software package at fault entirely!

[DaveB]

Well done for finding it Barry and thanks for letting us know
ATB
DaveB