Steve Dra

If you have a significant "library" of addons and your sim takes forever to load, Addon Linker will change your life if you don't particularly like waiting for MSFS to load. In the example below, you can see that I've organized my scenery into geographical sections of the world. If for example, I'm doing flights in the EU and I'm lazy (or doing many of them at a time and just want to load all of them), I just check the box by "EU" and all my EU sceneries are going to load in MSFS. Since I'm not flying anywhere else in the world today, I just turn off all the other sceneries and I save minutes of wasted loading time and memory loading all the scenery I'm NOT flying to or near. But today I'm ONLY flying from Boston to Miami. So, you can see that I only have those 2 airports checked (and further see how I've sub-divided the USA scenery)...so no other scenery is loading, saving so much loading time and memory! And this just scratches the surface of what Addon Linker can do. You can create sets of scenery to preload with a click, and pretty much revolutionize how you "manage" your Addon loads. And its not JUST for scenery....you can manage ANY Addon that loads into MSFS. Here you can see that I have my aircraft... and lets say I'm flying the Fenix Delta A320 on my KBOS-KMIA trip. Yep....ALL other aircraft will not be loading...saving again tons of time and memory. And at the bottom I have a "3Utilities" section for...well...you know. The 1,2,3 in the front of the folders allow the 1Scenery to flow to the top (because I alter it the most), the 2Aircraft, and finally 3Utilities. That is how I organize my addons...of course there are a thousand ways to do it, this just works for me. I agree with others that this is by far the BEST freeware-should be payware application out there, hands down.

I had been a painter for SGA, FFG and a few other freeware groups "Back in the day". The LevelD 767 was my 1st commercial paint project. Still to this day...I show these screens to demonstrate how good the models were back then (and were very easy to paint compared to today's complex models). (I played with the Dreamfleet 727 textures as well...but it had a "challenging" texture map layout) 🤔 She was a joy to fly and paint, and the 767 is my favorite airliner, so I'm anxiously waiting for BlueBird @sherv_BBS to get theirs' to market! 🙂

Fantastic pics Ryan! Substance is an absolute game-changer in the painting community. I'm still learning it, but see the incredible possibilities with 3d painting. Regarding the TBM paint....glad I could help you bring it to the community...the TBM is by far the best looking propeller driven aircraft IMO....an your livery is one of the finest. 🙂

It's been my experience that you don't have to shut down MSFS when this happens....just kill the iFly plugin in task manager, then restart the plugin, and it's worked for me. I know it would be annoying to restart MSFS each time. They are working to resolve the issue.

Hehe....and when I told you guys sometimes beta testers are the last to know things...I just found this out a minute ago. 🤔

Thanks Dave. Between me and Jviation, Canada is very well represented. The only ones we didn't make are Sunwing (although I did the TUI seasonal), and Lynx...otherwise... In addition to ACA Swoop....

Here is a closeup of the subtle dirt...

Just a few preview pics of my latest paint and a few others to break up all the text. Won't be long now guys.

I "develop" liveries...and yes....development at the level we're at these days is a massive undertaking. I've been working non-stop trying to finalize and upload all my liveries. This is an older spreadsheet I kept track of items completed and new things to get as the beta cycle progressed and changed things for the painters. The current version of this is much more complete...with new liveries I've done since I started the list. I don't want to even estimate how much time I've put into this project. 🤔 The big text were the things I was forgetting after a long day of putting a livery(s) together, and came late in the beta cycle, LOL. Some of the update versions we up to 0.1.5 because I'd miss little things, then had to repackage, upload and mark it ready for the livery manager. Add to that I had to evacuate to Atlanta right in the middle of my busiest time prepping for release because I live here: (Sad to see a hurricane in MSFS barreling down on your city. 😞

I've already painted Aerolineas Argentinas 🙂

I know there are videos and screenshots of her now everywhere...but not any of this livery (because it's not available just yet to the streamers or beta team) 🙂 She is going to be nice to fly to Cancun. I've really enjoyed painting her...and she is a blast to fly. There will be a bunch of liveries included in the livery manager on release * Steve does NOT know the release date, and couldn't say if he did. 😉

NDA lifted for screenshots....here are a "few" of the paints I've done. Streamers seem to be very impressed with the plane (I like it too).

"IFly could drop soon".... Says the title of this thread. With every tick of the second hand....it is technically sooner than the last time someone uttered this phrase, but let's say that its now "sooner'er"🤣 There has been a limited NDA lift where the beta team can now post screens only on their discord channel, so if you want to see what they are posting, head on over there. There are also streamers streaming it.

Another great plane by Raul! Not that he's ever not made a great plane 🙂

"The place to watch out, at least using other flight sims as examples, is the new photometric lighting. That caused no end of trouble for 3PDs in X-Plane v12, as well as in P3D v6." This is the area of concern that painters will have to watch for. I'm assuming they will keep the same basic structure on the composite (COMP) files as they have in MSFS....but as we painfully discovered when we got accustomed to painting these maps in P3d when they switched to PBR materializing...those where not compatible with the method MSFS adapted. As you can clearly see...in p3D, we customized PBR with maps that looked like this (this is specifically crucial when painting bare metal liveries...as these 2 examples are): Now in MSFS they look like this: It is my greatest hope that they don't alter the RGB channel assignments or start using the now-unused alpha channel (by most devs) that will render painter's thousands of liveries incompatible. 😐 I don't think it will happen....but then again that little sanfu in the transition from P3d to MSFS was an eye-opener. 🙂