toprob

I have thought a lot about this, and while I agree with you completely, I'm not too sure that this applies to my own experience with scenery development. I've been doing this for 25 years, and for half that time it was my sole source of income. What I do is not art, in most senses, the only way it would qualify is that I have always had a vision* of what I wanted to represent, but I am really a technician. I follow a technical specification, built around taking my own photos and using these as the foundation of my textured models. I work around a few limitations, mainly aphantasia, the inability to visualise in my head, (so the *vision I mention earlier is not actually any image, more an idea of what makes good scenery), and autism, which gives me a specific goal which 'normal' folk may not have. When I did this for a living, I paid for most of the tools I used, but I don't recall paying anyone to produce something which could be considered art. In my case I'm not switching from paying a person to paying an AI, as I was the only 'artist' who ever got paid by my business. AI just speeds up some of the work, and allows me to look at things which I couldn't include through my own efforts. I've modelled a LOT of hangars in my lifetime, and I'll aways do these myself, as there's not a lot of artistic ability required -- they are all just a box with a photo stuck on it, after all. Some things, though, I wouldn't do justice to using my 'mid-level' skills. I've modelled cars before, for example, and I could build a fleet to populate carparks in MSFS 2024, but AI does it a lot quicker and more consistently than I could, so I'll use my time for something which makes better use of my skills. Sure, most AI tools have plundered someone's hard-won talent to the extent that some artists will lose out badly, but this is one part of AI, which will need to be dealt with at some point, although this may not be a quick and easy thing to fix. It doesn't take away from what AI does well within the bounds of ethics. AI is not in itself unethical, it's those who 'own' it who seem to want to proceed without limitations, but that goes for most technological development these days.

I think we are definitely at the point where it makes sense to keep an eye on AI development for sim development. I recently asked AI (probably Gemini) for help with making more localised vegetation for an area, and it gave pages and pages exploring different options, based on the SDK. The only problem was that it didn't seem to recognise the 'not yet implemented' tags. However it did have a real insight into what these features might do without them actually existing yet. Lately I've been looking at AI 3D models, and settled on Tripo as it specialises more in 'game-ready' low poly assets, whereas most of the others give a huge number of vertices, which don't suit the sim. Initially I wanted to model some carvings adjacent to an airport I'm working on, and remembered the old days where you could upload hundreds of photos and get back a 3D model. With Tripo, I can get a good result from a single photo, although front/back/left/right is better. It's great for things like vehicles to populate airports etc, I can upload a photo, or just give a text prompt with the make, model, year and colour. I still need to create LODs, but the starting point is a fully textured LOD0 model ready to use in the sim. I always imagined an app which let me visit an airfield, take photos with my phone, and using the inbuilt GPS coordinates it would build me an almost finished airport by the time I got home. Note that the Tripo link above may give me credits via an affiliate link, but I don't make any money from this, and only create freeware scenery these days.

Yes, there are plenty of reasons to build airports, for me it was always a way to create my own little world, and I never liked all those stinky planes cluttering up my nice clean airports. Back in my day it didn't make sense to model terminal interiors, unless you parked right in front of the window, but last week I modelled a digital printer in an aeroclub office.... well, I gave the type and model number to AI, and it built one for me. Ok, optimisation should be a major goal, but always beaten out by realism for me.

Yes, the advice to move the community folder has never made any sense, it just adds extra steps to the update process. If you move the community folder and update, then you will just need to put your content back eventually, which may or may not cause issues. Just leaving it there removes these unproductive move/put back steps. If you update and have issues, the next step would be to shift the community folder out, and see if that helps, which would pinpoint a problem with an addon. Probably still makes sense to backup your community folder, though.

I normally use FCR to record a bit before quitting the sim, then reload the recording and 'take control of plane'.

That's the Nvidia statistics, normally toggled by Alt-R.

Yes, it is common for freeware uploads to have some sort of license agreement, which may or may not exclude sharing of the file. I would be surprised if Ian included any such exclusion, and the 'readme' file in the download pointed to above didn't include any real conditions, except don't blame him if it damages something. I've spent a lot of energy over the years fighting for the rights of flightsim developers, freeware and payware, but nowadays I just want people to not steal stuff, and not put their name on something they didn't create. I would hate to see Ian's work disappear, it was his scenery which first got me interested in flightsim scenery design 25 years ago -- in particular his NZCH, my local. I'm not sure what is going on with Flightsim.com, but I do hope that his scenery isn't lost for good. Ian died in 2017, and the flightsim community lost a good one there. People throw around things like 'generous to a fault', but really, that was Ian. Rest in peace, my friend.

This happened to me for the first time this morning, and although I went through the setup process again, it did remember some things -- I needed to point it to the cache again, and choose my custom controller profiles, but it remembered where my Packages folder was. I will need to tweak the graphics a bit at some point, but it did remember my non-desktop resolution. i was amused when a screen popped up saying 'hey, we know you!'.

Just a cheeky question -- I have a MS account credit which I'd prefer to spend on this product, is it likely to appear in the Marketplace any time soon?

A few posts have mentioned the sim title, I won't single them out here, but I will point out that MS never called their sim 'MSFS 2020', it was always just 'Microsoft Flight Simulator'. The community added the year, for whatever reason. MS picked up on that and I guess decided that if the community wanted that, they'd go along. In the past, when they included the year in the title, it was normally the year following the release.

A NZFF member has tracked down a post from Mike, basically giving permission to share this scenery, so I'll upload it and let you know where. Note that I don't have the original installer, just the installed scenery, so I hope it doesn't have other dependencies.

I thought I'd replied to this earlier, but maybe not. TaupoX was originally payware, sold on Mike's own site, and then became freeware, but this file is no longer available. I haven't heard from Mike for years, and I don't think it'll be easy to contact him. I will ask over at NZFF (sorry you had trouble getting in there) but I'm not optimistic. I do have this installed, but it does include a license agreement which excludes sharing. I'm not sure if this changed when the scenery became freeware, but I suspect not.

They are talking about aircraft which are already in the Marketplace -- if you buy an aircraft direct from the developer, for instance, AND it is in the Marketplace, then it won't matter where you bought it.

When I retired, the cost of maintaining my site became an issue, as I am on a fixed income. There are a number of tools required to supply the downloads etc, which individually don't cost much, especially for a thriving business, but they do add up. By the way, the main reason why I retired at this time (I'm 67 now) was that I couldn't get access to the MSFS Marketplace. In the past, any scenery which I 'retired' from the store became freeware, from the Avsim library, but I understand that the file size for NZCH is larger than their limit. I've just put the MSFS Taieri airfield onto flightsim.to, but I've yet to find a host for the P3D/FSX NZCH. If anyone can offer a solution, let me know. The reason why support is tricky is that when the business was still active, I maintained 3 versions of Prepar3d with the developer's license -- a monthly subscription. Now I just own the new personal license for v6, which none of my scenery supports natively. EDIT: Before I closed my store, I had promised to check to see if it was possible (and easy enough) to add P3Dv6 support to the installer, and although the scenery mostly worked well, the SODE elements -- mostly jetways -- were misplaced. With a bit of a hack, it is possible to install this in v6, although the jetways don't quite join with the terminals.

I suspect this particular case is a 'perfect storm' combining a few different issues which have been suggested by some posters in this thread. Yes, some developers build installers using tools which they don't entirely understand; These tools make some assumptions which might not apply in 100% of installs; Sometimes the user causes these assumptions to be wrong -- for example, some users shift scenery folders after installation, without giving any thought to how this would affect the uninstaller. This isn't their fault, it's a reasonable thing to do in some circumstances, so developers need to deal with this; Installers get more complex as users expect them to do more, a simple example is multi-installers; I can see one way that this particular issue could happen. The installer-builder I use has a 'wizard' which builds a script for me, and this can include an uninstaller, and the ability to uninstall from 'add/remove programs' by adding it to the Registry. The registry location is hard-coded into the script -- that is, it knows the exact name of the registry key. This registry key is normally the name of my scenery addon. Let's say we call it 'My Wonderful Scenery'. The wizard inserts a line which says: DeleteRegKey ${PRODUCT_UNINST_ROOT_KEY} "${PRODUCT_UNINST_KEY}My Wonderful Scenery" This is a very powerful command, it deletes the uninstall registry key for the scenery at the end of the uninstall, to tidy everything up. Now let's say that I use this script for years, without issue. Then life gets complicated, one day I decide to build an installer -- and uninstaller -- which can install to any of the four main sims at the moment -- FSX, FSXse, Prepar3d v2, and v3. To differentiate these in the Registry, I add a suffix to the registry key name -- so 'My Wonderful Scenery' becomes 'My Wonderful Scenery FSX' etc. As I use just a single installer/uninstaller, the key name is no longer hard-coded, I have to have a way to work out which one of the four possibilities it is. So I have a script which 'builds' the key name from variables. Using variables, it is entirely possible that something will go wrong enough that the name just isn't defined at all, so my neat little code: DeleteRegKey ${PRODUCT_UNINST_ROOT_KEY} "${PRODUCT_UNINST_KEY}$AVariableRepresentingMyWonderfulSceneryPlusASuffix" ...becomes DeleteRegKey ${PRODUCT_UNINST_ROOT_KEY} "${PRODUCT_UNINST_KEY}" ...if the variable is blank, and this translates to 'delete the registry key for all entries in the uninstall part of the registry'. This is entirely down to the developer, he needs to foresee everything which can go wrong, and most importantly he needs to make sure that his variables are never blank, when they should contain something. I've also seen developers write uninstallers which delete using wildcards -- delete *.* -- which is dangerous, or worse still, use recursive wildcards -- delete ..\*.* which goes up one level. Let's say the the user shifts his scenery folder to the root of a nice new drive. A recursive delete could easily delete their entire drive contents. My installers will do their best to install my scenery, but my uninstallers tend to give up at the slightest sniff of trouble:)