SIRP (Stikine Icefield Research Program)

EZ File Troubleshooting

FS generally only needs ONE instance of a given EZ File to be in an "active" folder in FS for all sceneries requiring objects from the file to be available. Some scenery designers though have included third party EZ Files in thier sceneries, so sometimes there can be several instances of the same EZ file "active" in FS at the same time. With EZ-Files, grayed-out textures can sometimes occur when the textures required by FS for one of the models in an EZ File (BGL) Library are corrupt or missing, but may also happen if two or more identical EZ File BGL's are active in FS at the same time and are conflicting for some reason.

For instance, If one of the duplicate EZ BGL's respective "Texture" folder doesn't contain ALL the textures for ALL the models contained in the EZ BGL itself, and FS happens to load that BGL but doesn't find the required texture needed for the model it wants to display...you'll have a grayed out item. If you know which EZ BGL the offending model is from, you can conduct a search in your "Flight Simulator 9" root folder and remove or rename duplicate copies of the BGL, leaving only one instance of it active. However, the one you leave active should have ALL it's default textures present in it's respective "Texture" folder! (You can check the author's original zip, if you know what it is, to make sure of this).

In theory, you could also supply the duplicate BGL with a full set of textures (if they weren't present in it's "Texture" folder), but this would be redundant because any sceneries requiring a given EZ FILE will usually find it's location in FS, wherever it resides, so long as the scenery folder it resides in is active. This kind of "registers" the file with FS for general use. So you see, FS doesn't usually need more than one active instance of a given EZ Library set (i.e. the EZ BGL and all it's textures) to supply all sceneries in FS that might use models from that file to be displayed.

It's also important to remember, duplicate copies don't always conflict if their respective texture libraries are intact, but if you do have a problem with an EZ File, reducing your duplicates to one active instance of a given EZ Library with it's full set of textures often remedies the problem by keeping things simple and reducing the chance of FS becoming "confused" about which files to load. Naturally, this problem varies widely from user to user depending on a myriad of installs and uninstalls over the years, and the integrity of the EZ libraries that 3rd party scenery designers have included in their releases, etc.

This is the reason why we included ALL the authors textures in our SIRP EZ Bulk download, even though SIRP only requires a fraction of them. This way, in case you had already installed a few of these libraries previously, (or they had come "pre-installed" in another scenery without your knowledge), if FS ever loaded a BGL from the "bulk group" for one of your other sceneries, it would find all the textures for that library are available and display them accordingly.

If you need help identifying a culprit or finding a remedy you can either e-mail Amigo Ed Truthan with specific inquiries and he will assist in identifying the problem for you, or post your issue at SimFlight Network's Tongass Fjords Support Forum and we'll respond as soon as we can.

E-Mail for Ed Truthan
edtruthan@frontiernet.net