Is A2A supported or might this be a P3D 2.0 issue?

[J van E]

I bought FSUIPC (4.972a) yesterday and right now I am using the Autosave option. My default plane is the A2A C172 and I fly in Prepar3D 2.0 on Windows 7 64 bit. Whenever I save a flight, the A2A addon also saves an additional file with the extension .Fa2a which contains relevant settings of the plane at that specific moment.

 

I noticed that the Autosave function doesn't seem to work with those files: the filenames are shortened and they don't have an extension. Here is an example of how the files look like when autosaved:

 

AutoSave Sat 120249.fxml

AutoSave Sat 120249.WX

AutoSave Sat 120a2a

 

That last one should have looked like this:

 

AutoSave Sat 120249.Fa2a

 

So everytime the last three characters from the filename itself are removed and also the dot plus the F from the extension. I hope you know what I mean. ;) This also is the case with the Previous Flight file.

 

Previous Flight.fxml

Previous Flight.WX

Previous Flia2a

 

Should this work okay or is the Autosave option not compatible somehow with the additional A2A files? Or is this maybe a P3D 2.0 problem?

 

A side effect of this is that when Autosaves removes old autosaves (I've set FSUIPC up to save 3 flights) those a2a files aren't removed so I end up with a lot of those files, specially since I have set Autosave to save every 3 minutes. ;)

 

It's not a huge problem or whatever but I was curious if something is wrong on my end or of this function of A2A simply isn't supported. (And if it isn't, maybe it may be something to add in the future?)

[Pete Dowson]

I bought FSUIPC (4.972a) yesterday and right now I am using the Autosave option. My default plane is the A2A C172 and I fly in Prepar3D 2.0 on Windows 7 64 bit. Whenever I save a flight, the A2A addon also saves an additional file with the extension .Fa2a which contains relevant settings of the plane at that specific moment.

 

I noticed that the Autosave function doesn't seem to work with those files:

 

I don't have any A2A aircraft and I don't know about these files so they are not automatically handled. You would have to edit the FSUIPC4.INI file to add them as "AlsoManaged". for deletion -- se the FSUIPC4 advanced user's guide, there's a section about it. These options were added for just such cases.

 

However there appears to a problem with A2A, because it is corrupting the filenames, so that even the "AlsoManaged" facility cannot work. It is not FSUIPC which saves the files (it has no idea about the add-on files) but the add-on package itself -- it does it when it sees a flight being saved.

 

AutoSave Sat 120a2a

 

That last one should have looked like this:

 

AutoSave Sat 120249.Fa2a

 

 

 

You need to report this to A2A so they can fix it. Seems they expect the filename supplied to SimConnect to  include the filetype (.flt) which it doesn't need to do at all -- the A2A code should check for the presence of the '.' before removing characters, not just remove them without checks. 

 

You can, temporarily, force FSUIPC to add the .flt part by setting "P3Dv2Fiddles=Yes" in the [General] section of the INI file as described in the "Changes" document for recent FSUIPC4 releases. However, this is only a temporary measure -- FSUIPC is only then adding the ".flt" part in order to make sure both a .FLT and .FXML file is being saved -- currently, in P3D v2.0, the FSUIPC option to reload flights doesn't work with FXML files because of a P3D bug, but when it is fixed (in 2.05 or 2.1) the "fiddles" will be removed.

 

Regards

Pete

[J van E]

Ok, thanks for the (as usual) very clear and detailed explanation! I will post about this on the A2A forum!