ORBX and SODE

[jpreou]

Morning Rob, trust this morning find's you well.
I missed this announcement from ORBX re: SODE
https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/167187-introducing-animated-sode-jetways-a-service-pack-bonanza/

Since you also install and use SODE at some of your airports, are there any anticipated issues or things we as end-users need to think about? Conflicting installs or settings, anything like that?

Cheers

[toprob]

First of all, a quick intro to SODE... S(im) O(bject) D(isplay) E(ngine). A simobject can be any type of model, such as an aircraft, vehicle, scenery object etc. Plenty of simobjects are used by the default sim, all your aircraft, for instance. Simobjects as scenery objects are a lot more powerful than normal scenery objects, in that you can control when and how they are displayed. including conditional-based display, so they can react to wind speed and direction, for example, like windsocks, or animate on command, like jetways. However by default simobjects are not easily accessible, so you need some sort of external tool to inject them into the sim. Developers can create their own tools, but that's tricky, and would mean a lot of different tools running on your system, so something which can do all we need in one tool is a great idea.

SODE seems a lot more complicated to use than it really is, but you do need to understand the fundamentals of what it does. There are a few things which can catch people out, so understanding how it works can help -- for example, lots of users report a 'sode is already running' when they start their sim, not understanding that it is an external process, so even though you've just shut down your sim, you need to give it some time to settle down before you restart it. Also, as an external process it can just crash, which probably means restarting your system to clear out the junk.

There are a lot of issues reported which I think are caused by people over-thinking things. Just install it as recommended, rather than based on some complex method recommended by a 'guru'. Keep your setup simple, there are plenty of addons which are considered a requirement, like the Lorby scenery library thing, but these don't always take into account continuing development etc. Personally I've never had the need or want for something like that.

RTFM -- SODE does some brilliant things, such as integrate with GSX, but depending on what you use your controls may differ from the norm -- get to know how to activate and use it with your setup. (I'm a big fan of GSX, by the way.)

Take a look at XML at some stage. Much of the complexity these days can be overcome from just knowing how to tweak XML code rather than having to install another tool to tweak stuff. For example, I had one user wanting to replace my Dunedin jetways with GSX L2 jetways, which isn't really covered in the GSX manual. To disable an existing SODE jetway you simply need to comment out the XML placement code.

Don't worry too much about keeping your SODE up to date. Plenty of addons which use it will update it for you if required, so you should at least have a 'working' version for your particular addons.

I am aware that my XML code for Dunedin needs to be tweaked a bit, after a SODE update which made it a bit flighty. Hopefully that shouldn't happen often, now that SODE is more mature. The installer is clever enough to know if you have a later version, I think... I hope....

SODE has one quirk which has caught me out before, if you have more than one supported sim installed. Since there's only one location for SODE XML placement files, if you have one sim with a flash addon airport with SODE, and another sim with a default or different airport, you will always see the SODE models if you have SODE activated in both sims. SODE placement XML files are location-based, rather than addon- or sim-based by default. You can tweak the XML code to make it work only with the sims you want, which is another reason to get comfortable with XML tweaking. This is only an issue if you have FSX and Prepar3d both installed, or in my case FSX and two versions of Prepar3d... doesn't everyone?

One more quirk -- although SODE uses add-on.xml in Prepar3d, it doesn't automatically activate if you update or reinstall your sim. It will be installed, but not activated, so you'll need to run the Platform Manager to activate it. I've been caught out by that before as well.... The platform manager will be on your Start menu, if you ever need it. It isn't something which you'll use a lot, so you can easily forget about it.

I know that some people shy away from SODE, maybe they had an issue early on, or heard about an issue, but this is one of those tools which is becoming mainstream, like FSUIPC, so more and more developers will use it.

[jpreou]

Great info, thanks Rob. I need to check again what I already have installed from you that might use SODE (like Dunedin, for example); I did a "Client Update" and "Scenery Update" for P3Dv4.4 recently, so perhaps I do need to reactivate SODE as you suggest.
I'll probably do that when you release ChCh and I 're-activate' my enthusiasm for the sim!
Cheers