Prior to Flight Simulator, version 5.1, scenery and texture files for all of the scenery in Flight Simulator were stored in just one Scenery and one Texture subdirectory. The following example is a snapshot of the old directory structure.
FltSim5\Situation
Videos
Aircraft
Pilots
Panels
Textures
Scenery
Sound
In Flight Simulator, version 5.1, scenery libraries were introduced. The concept behind scenery libraries is as follows: each scenery area has its own Scenery and Texture directories, located in its own Scenery Area directory. Together, the many sets of Scenery directories make up a scenery library.
Note: For backward compatibility with earlier versions of scenery products that self-installed in the FltSim5\Scenery and Textures directories, these directories remained intact. BGL and .r8 files that were put into these directories worked as they did in earlier versions; this ensured that none of the earlier scenery disks failed.
Flight Simulator, versions 5.1 and later, include a World directory that contains its own Scenery and Texture directories. The World Scenery directory is located in the Scenery directory.
FltSim5\Situation
Videos
Aircraft
Pilots
Panels
Textures
Scenery
Sound
World\
Scenery
Texture
Note: The Texture directory is often omitted if no textures other than those used in the FltSim5\Textures directory are needed.
In Flight Simulator, version 5.1 and later, it's much easier to install add-on scenery, as shown in the following example of the current directory structure. The example uses (for the sake of illustration) Hawaiian scenery that's installed on the C drive.
C:\Hawaii\Scenery
hawaii10.bgl
hawaii11.bgl
hawaii12.bgl
\Texture
mshi10.haw
mshi11.haw
This scenery area in the preceding example is named Hawaii, making it easily identifiable on the disk, and it contains its own Scenery and Texture directories. Now, you can create any number of scenery sets on any number of hard disks, floppy disks, or other storage media—you're not limited to the disk that Flight Simulator is installed on. Flight Simulator has a dialog box that lists the available items from the scenery library; in this dialog box, the user can select the scenery that they want to display.