Best way to install FT for a newbie

[StarBlue1967]

So I am new to FlyTampa and your most excellent works of art. Not that I haven’t known who FT was, just was too busy finishing a master’s degree. So generally I have seen there are three kinds of scenery installs within FSX/P3D flavors; however not talking about the XML version for now. Ok to make this simple, I have FSX-MS/FSX-SE/P3Dv3/P3Dv4; I beta test and do my own sceneries on the side so I keep these four for now. Yes it will be awesome in a year when I can dump all but P3Dv4. Here are my assumptions, please correct me if I am wrong.

1) Install to each and every scenery under the root of each sim. I call this old school method; that one lazy-ass prick of a scenery developer insists on this method. Probably best if you want the configurator to configure each and every installed FT per sim.

- OR -

2) Install an x32 bit into one of the sims, in my case FSX-MS, then link them through the scenery.cfg. Do the same for the x64 where I install it into P3Dv4’s root; done as FT has patches for most all of the v4 versions that changes/deletes files FSX might need. PacSim does this for KSLC. I realize this means the Configurator is going to affect all if it is linked. I called it linked method.

- OR -

3) Install into external directory, including x32 and x64 into separate sub directories and link to each either by .cfg or .xml. Turbulent Design and FSDT do it this way now and I call it the Universal method.

So my question is what way is best for FT as I know I am going to be adding a lot more FT sceneries in the future; Vegas Baby!!! Also I am getting a lot of erratic behavior with the installers, mostly leaving an entry like the _LC or library out of the .cfg or getting a default.xml error. Oh and what is dummy.bgl? I keep hearing about it wondering.

Thanks,
Jhan

[martin[flytampa]]

At the moment, you can share a single installation between FSX, FSX-SE and P3D<4. If you need it to work perfectly in each Sim, I suggest you create a dummy FSX folder with a dummy FSX.EXE inside and install all our sceneries to this folder. During installation uncheck the "add to library" option, or if you leave it on, just ignore the error and add the entries by hand. After installing, look at the dummy FSX folder and copy /effects/, scenery/world/ and possibly /simobjects/ to each Sim. As long as you keep the FSX dummy folder /FlyTampa/ directory intact (you can move that /FlyTampa/ folder around as a whole tho) the Configurator should remain working.

For P3D v4 with patches I suggest a separate installation. Our future V4 installers will be completely separate downloads from the current FSX/P3D joint installers.

Not sure what you mean with dummy.bgl.