toprob

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.

Yes, here's Microsoft's early announcement of ESP 1.0, back in 2007. It gives a good insight into what they were planning at the time. I also think it gives a clue to what they've done since then, licensing ESP to Lockheed Martin, and shutting down the FSX team. It could simply be that they saw what this could become, but first needed to wait for technology to catch up, which involved building some of this technology themselves. Now, with tech such as Bing Imagery and Azure AI etc, they have a better framework to reach the goals outlined in that initial announcement. So it wouldn't surprise me if the future of MSFS followed a similar pattern -- using their experience in flight sim to build a world, then iron out a lot of bugs, to arrive at a platform which could be used as they outlined with ESP 1.0: One day they might announce the new ESP platform, that will "help government, commercial and academic organizations apply immersive games-based technology and interactive learning experiences to improve work-force readiness and increase operational excellence." In the meantime, flight simmers are reaping the benefits.

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.

Cheers, Adam. The SODE jetways should work, they do for me, I'm not sure why they don't work for you. Most of the battle is actually getting the jetways to show up, but since you already have them, then I'm stumped. Can you get the SODE menu to appear onscreen? Does the SODE log file give any clues? Here's a shot of one of the jetways. Sorry about the aircraft, I didn't have anything appropriate in v6 to test this out, so I borrowed the default FSX 737:)

Although I've retired now, while my scenery will remain at SimMarket for a month or two I am looking at how Real New Zealand NZCH and Real New Zealand NZDN perform in v6. There's some info on how to get an existing P3D installation working on the Godzone forum at NZFF.org.

-- some random guy yelling on the train.

My online Store will close sometime on Monday 3rd July, New Zealand time. Until then, everything* in the Store is NZ$5, which is about US$3. *The current scenery products are NZCH Christchurch Intl Airport, NZDN Dunedin Airport, for FSX and P3D up to v5, and NZTI Taieri Airport for MSFS. As downloads will remain available till the end of the year, I hope to extend support to Prepar3d V6 if possible. The site will remain at least until the end of the year for support and redownloads. SimMarket will continue to carry my scenery until I work out a plan to finish there as well. However this sale is my own store only. There are a lot of reasons why I'm shutting up shop, I have been making New Zealand scenery for over 20 years now, and there's been a few things which have made it more and more difficult to complete projects. I'm now 67 years old and it's been 14 years since I got my mechanical heart valve, which means 14 years of heart medication. Covid took a big hit on my ability to visit airports for photos etc, and this hasn't really changed any now. MSFS was the sim which I always wanted to see, but the market has changed enough that it means that without access to the MS Marketplace it is difficult to reach the new users. It's now been three years since I applied for access to the Marketplace, but it seems that smaller developers like me are not getting in. I know that Microsoft have a great sim which will continue to flourish, but I do hope at some point that they open up the Marketplace to smaller developers. Too late for me, probably, (if they rang next week, I'd be more than happy to complete a few projects over the next few years) but there are a lot of one-man-band developers who have plenty to offer. My first support forum was here years ago, and Avsim has always been the community which offered the most, along with NZFF, the New Zealand flightsim forum, which has been my second home for 15 years. I'd sum up the last 20 years as 'mostly fabulous', I never thought I'd end up doing flightsim scenery full-time, but I've loved being able to show my New Zealand to the world's simmers. Cheers! Robin Godzone Virtual Flight

Rather than just leave this here as an unanswered support issue, if anyone has a similar issue here's a link to the continuation of this particular issue on New Zealand Flightsim Forum. I'm pleased that this was resolved relatively quickly, although it did raise the issue of obsolete links in some of my older manuals. I did in fact have a redirect in place, but this had stopped working when I installed the HTTPS server. As I haven't quite figured out a fix, I've had the 404 page redirect to my home page, which gives a more obvious link to support.

Sorry, I don't know your name, Hamilton_ Yes, my support page has moved since the manual was written (3 years ago now), sorry about that, I'll see if I can arrange a redirect for anyone else who follows the link in the manual. In the meantime every page (except, ironically, the 404 page) on my website has a link to Contact/Support. I'm also aware that the NZFF forum is tricky to access these days, and I now recommend support via my website, or Facebook page. I see that you have managed to access the forum, and I did reply to your query, please let me know if you still have a problem with Orbx compatibility. The most common issue is that Orbx Central resets the priority of Orbx scenery every time you run the tool, which means that normal methods of over-riding this priority don't work. However Orbx Central does include the ability to set the Insertion Point for all Orbx scenery, and this is really a requirement for anyone who wants to use third party scenery with Orbx scenery. I have previously petitioned Orbx to make it clearer that this needs to be set, although it's been a while since I used Orbx Central and I don't know if they ever did this. Let me know if this helps, if not I'm sure we can come up with a solution. Note that priority issues with NZCH and other Godzone scenery have always been solved by either setting the Orbx Insertion Point, or by ensuring that Orbx is installed before Godzone scenery, so my installer can make any relevant changes to ensure it works with Orbx NZ installed.

I don't think that Asobo have ever recommended this, they do say that if you have problems after the installation then this should be the first step to see if there was a conflict with one of your addons. A few people missed the conditional and it then became an update mantra.

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:)

I've had to cheat a bit, and read the manual, as it is probably a decade since I had this installed.... The manual states that the installer will rename the default FL994450.bgl (with a GVF extension) to disable it, and install the new one. This is photo scenery only, it doesn't include much which affects elevation, so the water riding is probably just a mismatch between your mesh and the photoscenery. 'Supercity', the FSX version, includes a rooftop helipad in the CBD, plus on top of the new hospital model, and Mechanics Bay. But I forget what FS2004 Auckland had... sorry about that.