Repeated Textures

Hi there,

guess this has been raised before but possibly not in this forum where I fail to find it.

When one installs new scenery (hopefully manually), often quite a few of the "new" \Texture files are IDENTICAL (I mean same name and date and content byte by byte) to files you already have in either A) another scenery or B) in the general \Texture folder of FS2004.

Solutions (none of them fully satisfactory IMHO) and their results:

1. Do nothing. You will have lots of space wasted in your hard disks and even unnecessary disk reads as FS reads repeatedly files that could be automatically kept in the PC's disk cache.

2. Use an advanced file manager such as Total Commander, compare the general \Texture folder with a folder with the scenery textures. Delete from the latter the ones you already have, before moving them to their destination in FS. Total Commander "Folder compare" is not to be trusted for this though, and you need to click an icon for binary comparison of each file pair: this is largely automatic under Total Commander, but you must manually select EACH file, then, if identical, manually delete the duplicate. Tedious and error prone (the Balear Island freeware I just downloaded as kindly mentioned in the last PC FLIGHT, has originally 679 texture files!).

3. Run a utility such as freeware "Textures Find Duplicate" fnddup23.zip (Nov'03) by Gerard Dunand. It scans your Add-on Scenery folder and keeps only one active copy of your texture files: if it finds a file repeated more than once, it leaves a file in the general \Texture folder and deletes the identical files in any scenery folder. It also makes a backup of deleted files. This is neat and I run it in the past, but it is fully automatic and it seems to run OK only the first time, later when you install new sceneries and run it again it loses track and leaves some files unprocessed. [And when you uninstall sceneries and the common files, now in the general Texture folder, are not so identified thus not deleted.]

Any better utility known - and tried - by anybody?

Thanks!

Cloudy from Bray

binary content bit by bit)s it contains may already be