Milviz free software

[Matt Sdeel 48]

Milviz did a great thing by getting rid of their P3D inventory and made them freeware.

Blackbird Simulations -Freebies (blackbirdsims.com)

A wise move from a tech support perspective which show their ability to change and focus on the future. Lots of goodwill earned from their consumers I bet. I wish other devs would do the same. 

I installed the Milviz freeware (General Product Support - MV_310R_Redux_v3.180904_wx.zip - All Documents (sharepoint.com)) in P3D v4.5. Installing it with the included weather radar always results in a crash to desktop. Is anyone else having this issue?

I 

[CW46 101]

Did you install the aircraft first and verify it works with no issues? I would try that before adding the radar. It has been some years but it worked with the radar when I was still on V4.5.

[Rogen 1,145]

9 hours ago, Matt Sdeel said:

Is anyone else having this issue?

Nope, all fine for myself with 4.5 HF3

I'd installed the 310 and then ran the weather radar update and all functioned fine.

Perhaps clearing out the shader temp files and the scenery index files would be a good first step towards troubleshooting.

Both the shader temp files and index files will be rebuilt on next start of P3D.

Cheers

Pic showing the WX radar working in P3D v4.5 HF3

Edited July 15, 2023 by Rogen

[CO2Neutral 283]

Wish Colin would have made the entire products (source) available so I could re-work them for P3D V6 ... doesn't take that much effort.  Milviz made some great aircraft.

 

[Matt Sdeel 48]

3 hours ago, Rogen said:

Nope, all fine for myself with 4.5 HF3

I'd installed the 310 and then ran the weather radar update and all functioned fine.

Perhaps clearing out the shader temp files and the scenery index files would be a good first step towards troubleshooting.

Both the shader temp files and index files will be rebuilt on next start of P3D.

Cheers

Pic showing the WX radar working in P3D v4.5 HF3

There's hope... yaay 🙂 I have both RXP 530 and 430 installed in the Milviz 310 also and they are both working fine. When I select the weather in the Milviz MVAMS management tool I get a CTD when I change the plane from a default P3D plane to the C310. 

How do I clear out the shader temp files and the scenery index files?  Might having a paid version of REX WX radar installed contribute to the problem too? I can't uninstalll the paid version because it is used by payware planes. 
 

Edited July 15, 2023 by Matt Sdeel

[Matt Sdeel 48]

12 hours ago, CW46 said:

Did you install the aircraft first and verify it works with no issues? I would try that before adding the radar. It has been some years but it worked with the radar when I was still on V4.5.

Yes, I did install the plane and it works with RXP's 750/650 with no issues.  I get a CTD only when I include the weather radar using Milviz's MVAMS. I did some research before posting here. From that research I tried installing the plane without using RealLight and TrueGlass. I also disabled the dll.xml file.  Those suggestions did not work also. I still had a CTD the moment I tried using the C310. 

EDIT:  Fixed!

Appreciate the feedback above and letting me know that there is nothing inherently wrong with the C310. I thought since it worked for someone else that it should work for me also.

I installed another freeware Milviz plane, the PC-6, and noted that the included weather radar worked in the PC-6. I compared the two MV_WX.DLL files in both aircraft's panel folder and noticed that the file size were different. Simply copying the MV_WX.DLL file from the PC-6 to the C-310 fixed the problem. The C-310 now works with RXP's 530/430 and also OpusFSI (OpusFSI Live Weather instant weather updates, Live Camera view control, management and docking, Live View multi-screen networked displays (opussoftware.co.uk)

Thank you both@Rogen and @CW46 for the feedback.

Edited July 15, 2023 by Matt Sdeel

[Rogen 1,145]

4 hours ago, Matt Sdeel said:

Simply copying the MV_WX.DLL file from the PC-6 to the C-310 fixed the problem

Yeah, the paid for wx dll version would be the issue, as you've discovered.

#Edit: The context for the wx dll was that I'd assumed you'd ran the updated wx dll installer post C310R installation, my mistake 😉

The C310R and PC6 both also include the bundled version of the wx radar dll (aircraft matched) contained within a "Milviz WX Radar v1.191023.exe" installer.

Where if you open the "Milviz WX Radar v1.191023.exe" in a tool like 7Zip and browse the folder listing you'll see the supported aircraft listed and panel folder with dlls.

And the wx installer itself does a pretty good job at finding and updating the wx dll for the aircraft listed within the installer exe.

Have fun with the plane, it's one of the nicer ones with just a couple of issues needing a resolution, unlike (for example), those from Carenado which typically contain a ton of errors (not that those cannot be resolved for the most part via modding).

 

From my original installation notes:

The archive includes a WX radar updater which will enumerate the default P3D Airplanes path to update all Milviz aircraft with their weather radar.

The WX updator copies the "MV_WX.dll" dated 01/06/2019 into the Panel folder overwriting the original, without this update a CTD will occur.
I manually copied the dll to the Panel folder.

In the Panel Folder I noted there is a C310_XMLGauges.CAB and a C310_XMLGauges folder which is an extrtact of the CAB. Renamed the C310_XMLGauges.CAB to C310_XMLGauges.CAB.orig to disable the conflict.

Another issue is the Fuel valves, the 2D gauge popup resets the values to off and they then cannot then be changed at all.

The Milviz forum advises this is a known issue that was broken by an update and never resolved.
I disabled the 2D throttles popup to avoid accidentally stopping the engines.

The installer runs the TrueGlass, RealLight and xml tools installers where I did not need to run them as I've already installed.

The MVAMS (configuration application) lives in C:\Users\<account name>\AppData\Local\MVAMS

 

Cheers

Edited July 15, 2023 by Rogen

[DonMuskopf 33]

deleted

Edited July 16, 2023 by DonMuskopf

[Rogen 1,145]

On 7/15/2023 at 5:07 PM, Matt Sdeel said:

How do I clear out the shader temp files and the scenery index files?

The shader generated files live in the Appdata\local directory e.g.

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4\Shaders

where they are all named along the lines of "v4514_sm110_Cloud.fx_GS_0220ad0023020000_0000000000000000_0000000000302180.cso"

and there can be many thousands that build up over time.

I reguarly delete them as P3D will regenerate them as needed.

 

The scenery index files live in the ProgramData directory e.g.

%ProgramData%\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v4\SceneryIndexes_x64

where they are all named along the lines of "Filelist00001.dat"

and for myself there are 504 .dat files.

Once deleted they will be regenerated by P3D.

You can also assign keyboard combos to trigger the rebuilding without needing to restart P3D, for example I have the Keypad's 0 and . assigned.

where I first delete the shader and index files then hit the 0 and . to trigger the rebuild from within P3D.

 

Typically I delete and rebuild as a first step of troubleshooting, and when updating to a new point release of P3D and when writing and testing customised shader and scenery code.

Cheers