A problem with building the X-Plane database

[mike57]

Hello,

I recently moved over to a new PC, and after installing Windows 11 on one of it's hard drives I took the SSD drives from my old PC (which are only a couple of years old and still have plenty of life left in them) and fitted them into the new PC.

The SSD that had my X-Plane installation on it was labeled "G:\" on the old PC but was initially labeled "E:\" by the new system when I first booted up after attaching the SSDs.

X-Plane is platform independent and isn't depentent on registry entries to run as far as I know, so to see how it worked on my new set up I ran it straight away from the now "E:\Program Files\" etc. folder and as I expected, it ran perfectly straight away.

After this, because I have such a lot of references to "G:\Program Files (x86)\X-Plane 11" elsewhere in projects etc., I moved the whole X-Plane directory to a new "G:\" location on an NVMe SSD (much faster) on the new system that I had already labeled "G:\" especially for my X-Plane folder.

X-Plane ran perfectly again as I expected, and there was no problem at all with it. The problem occurred when I came to install the latest version of Plan-G on the new system, which I downloaded after deleting the old Plan-G folder on the relevant old SSD. So I am using a new Plan-G installation after moving X-Plane to a new location in Windows 11 after having run X-Plane initially though, from another drive "E:\".

The problem is that I can't get Plan-G to look anywhere except the initial "E:\Program Files (x86)\X-Plane 11" folder when it tries to build theX-Plane database (the folder X-Plane was in when I first ran it).

Apparently, there are path registry entries created for software by Windows 11 (eg "Software\Microsoft\Windows\Shell\MuiCache") when you first run a program from a new location, which remain if you happen to re-locate the program, the new paths will be stored there as well but the old ones remain. After reading up on the MUICache I deleted the obsolete entries but unfortunately Plan-G is still stuck with X-Plane's initial location no matter what I do.

I have also tried deleting the Plan-G folder and starting with a fresh Plan-G installation but to no avail. I have searched for references to the old location in the Plan-G folder and also in Progam Data, but can't discover where Plan-G must be getting the initial X-Plane location from.

There is no way to change it manually in Plan-G either, it just fails to build the database with it if I try. And if I restart Plan-G after changing the location manually, the old location has always come back.

Can anyone please help me with this peculiar problem? Thank you.

[Tim]

The location for X-Plane (in Windows) is stored in AppData\Local\x-plane_install_11.txt and that's where Plan-G looks.

Unfortunately in the current version it doesn't cater for multiple install locations in that file, so it'll pick the first one it comes across. The solution right now, until I come out with a fix, is to edit the x-plane_install[_n].txt file so it only contains the current location.

[pilot4g]

Hi
I just installed this new version Plan-Gv4.1.4.270 and now it will not detect x-plane 12 (previous version 4 worked)

My Windows 10 PC has both x-plane 11 and x-plane 12 full versions installed as well as MFFS2020.

Now Plan G Plan-Gv4.1.4.270 database will only recognize with prefilled settings in x-plane 11 and button to change grayed out. So the x-plane 12 database is able to be created.

Both x-plane 11 & 12 are in separate folders on Drive "D"

Is there a workaround for this? I do use both versions of x-pane 11/12 and so would not want to remove 11 as some legacy addons only work on V11 but also use V12 most often now that it is fully released with better gaphics.

Thanks
John

[Tim]

Please install build 272. Build 270 has some problems with the X-Plane data builder.

[pilot4g]

Hi
updated to build 272 but the same issues persist building the xplane data for xp v12
the old version (Plan-Gv4.1.2.265) works fine for building all my installed flight sim programs MSFS, P3DV5, XP11,XP12

I did find a work around in latest build 272 to get the XP12 dataset built but it disables XP11 from visibility to the database in Plan G. It required going to C: users / appdata / local and renaming the "x-plane_install_11.txt" to
"x-plane_install_11.txt.bak" after doing this XP11 becomes hidden to Plan G but XP12 is recognized and the database setup runs and configures the XP12 data set correctly.

Hope this info helps you for a temp working solution and helps for a final program fix for Plan G V4

John