The current KLAS pack is a mash-up of a gateway airport and custom elements…we’ll someday restructure it into a gateway airport and a landmarks pack.

Copy that. If I may ask, why is KLAS treated differently than every other Laminar airport in the game? Did you guys add custom buildings or something?

“Don’t remove scenery not found, just disable it with a tag like SCENERY_PACK_MISSING”
^^ This !
Pascal

Don’t include an overly complex UI for scenery stuff. Moving things up and down, and disabling/enabling is fine, but other functionality can be done by 3rd party tools.

And always retain the basic scenery_packs.ini functionality, including automatic alphabetic recreation when deleted. I still order my scenery based on folder names and try to avoid the ini file whenever possible.

Well, the problem is simply that otherwise developers still do their DRM techniques and simply write globally active DRM plug-ins that do weird thing inside the sim, that cause havoc for other plug-ins.
For planes DRM is already more or less standard.
So I think that it is much better if we have standard hooks where DRM systems can be asked and activated at the start or if needed, than the alternative if some hardly known developers with one scenery is always active, even if I am on the other side of the planet.

One of the coolest things X-Plane allows is to have a 1:1 full backup on my NAS.
If something goes wrong I simply copy that backup to my SSD and X-Plane runs like a charme.

Remembering my FSX days with all those different DRM solutions, a re-install took days of work – total crap!

I understand that software piracy is an issue but all those people purchasing their software have to pay the price by loosing the really superb backup option.

Also none of the DRM solutions finally work. Tons of cracked FSX scenery versions are available on the internet. The music industrie has learned that DRM makes people dislike such mp3 downloads. Since DRM was removed from most mp3 files, most people accepted to purchase for music legally and sales went up. I think there are good reasons to learn from that and to not follow the failed path.

As more and more really stunning freeware sceneries show up, people may prefer to use the freeware sceneries instead of purchasing payware scenery that potentially comes with trouble. Just imagine you do a longhaul flight and inflight and/or when arriving destination, the user gets some of those “The scenery may not look correct” or “scenery cannot be loaded” errors. Click on “understood” and you are back on the dsktop – just because the scenery developer decided to ask for a password every 3 months and I cannot remember it during flight… Scary scenario!

Just my 2 cents…

Regards,
Marc

“How often will they remove or uninstall scenery packs?”

Answer is very. Very often.

I’m guessing you don’t use Ortho4XP.

It’s been on our radar for a while to provide decryption “hooks” in the SDK – third parties could do their own DRM and basically only hand the decrypted content to X-plane once they were satisfied. That way we (LR) aren’t responsible for building a strong enough lock for third parties.

The reason we haven’t “just done it” is that the sim’s engine requires multi-threaded access to the file system, and plugins don’t have threading primitives, so we have to sort that out before we can make an API.

+1

Very nice idea, although I have no idea if LR will change this standard until next major build.

If I may add to Philou67 idea, to address the missing custom scenery:
Maybe instead of immediately remoe the scenery line from file, you can add a “flag + counter” to the line, something like: SCENERY_PACK_LOST_{n}, “n” represent number of tries. It will be modified every x-plane start, and once it will try three times, for example, it will be removed from file.
This will allow the user to fix any “mount” or “symbolic link” issues and , in my humble opinion, should be simple to implement until a more complex options will be introduced.

cheers
Saar