toprob

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.

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.

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.

The gates use old tweaked asm code, which doesn't work in Prepar3d. Hence the freeware status at the moment, pending a new Real NZ Wellington at some stage.

I've been using SimPlugin's Panel Builder with P3D, I just have a cheap HP Stream8 tablet, which runs Win 8.1 I see that most products on offer are for Ipad/Android (some amazing stuff for the Ipads, which I suppose is where the money is), but with Windows 10 coming, I'd expect to see a lot more interest in Windows tablets, which probably makes a bit more sense for FSX/Prepar3D users.

I have a very similar system, although a 650ti. I love Prepar3D, although sometimes I'd love a faster system too... Here's a video recorded on this, for an idea of how it performs. Edit: forgot to say, I prefer high visuals to fast framerates.

The photoscenery is actually Godzone Takitimu. Freeware here.

I have no problem using Java, I just don't let it near my browser.

Spot on, Ryan -- it'll be for P3D2 and FSX, with either FTX NZNI or Vector Land Class, the local landclass addon. Or even default FSX/P3D if that's what you have for NZ. I'm a big fan of P3Dv2, which is the gist of the blog you pointed out. There's a bit more info over at the NZFF forum, including a video glimpse of the new Wellington in P3D. I have a dual installer ready to go for my previous release (Nelson), I'm just waiting on a patch from LM which should fix a couple of issues. 2014 is shaping up to be a great sim year, that's for sure. -Robin

Cheers, Tim, I figured as much, I can wait until I can safely use my credit card again:)

Just as an aside, as I have no problem with paying for P3D integration, $5 is well-worth it, but I did notice that although I can purchase REX using Paypal, I seem to require a credit card for the license fee?

Mine has a 'tuning guide' just before the glossary. I'm beginning to think that the cfg edits might not have done the job, it was just a matter of not maxing out the GPU. It was just that with the improvement once I fixed the scrambled autogen. I spent a few days just marveling at the performance. But the problem came back when I pushed the settings a bit much -- the setting which pushed it over the edge was terrain shadows, which I'd left on after a bit of experimentation with the look of P3D. I do tend to play with the settings a lot. A resource monitor has been a very useful tool here -- you can learn a lot from watching the GPU usage as you change settings. Without the new shadows (terrain and buildings) I don't have problems. I can even max out the autogen if I want, which is amazing on my limited system. (I did do a quick video showing full autogen in a scenery I'm developing at the moment -- details here.) However I have lowered other settings, such as water. My GPU is a 650ti Boost, 2GB. I would imagine that a 1GB GPU would be a bit more limiting.

The Learning Center? This is installed with P3D2, it should be on your Start menu or screen. However, tonight I did have the autogen problem come back for a while, so I loaded up a performance monitor and watched what happened -- if the GPU maxed out, the autogen mixup would get worse. I must admit that I'd been exploring one particular scenery with full autogen, and started to have problems when I switched to another area. Pulling the settings back until the GPU was comfortable (under 80%) fixed it. I have a suspicion about why a particular scenery overloads the GPU -- I'll have a look at this tomorrow.