P-12C

I wish I knew what you are seeing, but I don't actually know. Being the feable minded non-technical non-developer that I am, I would guess this is a video driver issue or a shader issue. Do you have an older video card?I never saw this particular problem during the course of development. It is especially strange if you are getting this on one particular proximity area used in defining the mission because there are dozens of them in those missions (or all of the missions for that matter) and you aren't seeing that problem on the other area definitions.What about other missions, are you having similar problems in them?BTW, I can't check forums daily, so I may not see your responses immediately.

Here is a snip of some XML from Flour Power (sorry if the format gets messed up a bit). I would expect you would use this action from a timer trigger at the beginning of your mission or when the user taxis to the ammo depot or something.Be sure that the PayloadName is spelled exactly correct. The object reference being the player is important too. Add_10 Flour_BombsFlour_bomb10

I'll take some credit for most of the concept and forcing it into the product, but the missions team did a great job iterating on the script and making it all come together. It certainly could have been done better, but as one of our more fringe "out there" missions I am pretty happy with it.

Practice makes perfect... I assume you did the previous helicopter tutorials? If not, I recommend doing them. Then maybe fly some of the helicopter missions and then come back to Tutorial 12.

Once you get success at the island, that's it... There has been some call for a sequel to this one, so maybe we will do one. Or maybe one of you will do one.

Are you interested in what internal team members can do on this course? :)

175 rewards total. I won't tell how many easter eggs just yet, but there are many.

Excellent time Doug!

Many of our misions have multiple branches and different rewards you can earn for different outcomes (not all missions, but several). In the Oil Rig mission, there are about 5 distinctly different experiences or outcomes you could experience (some more rare than others).I think the best missions have great replayability and will be different everytime you fly them.I posted a teaser on my blog about the rewards and easter eggs. I'm very curious how long it will take for people to find all the stuff we put in.

Thanks for noticing, we are trying to stay engaged and up to date. It will be harder to stay caught up as the number of users increases, but we will do our best! :)If we are absent for awhile, it's probably because we got behind on our scheduled work...

What did the Challenger jet do? Did you keep it in sight?

The dialog text stays on as long as the audio is present. If there is no audio, it only stays on screen for 3 seconds. In the future we may change this to be a time you can set, but for now it's 3.You can set a property trigger that can fire an action (or actions) based on engine combustion. We did that in a couple of the tutorial missions where we skipped sections of the tutorial if the user already had the engine started. You can also use it to fire actions when the engine quits which we also used several times.You can set fuel in the flight file or you can create a fuel leak and then heal the fuel leak, but we don't have an action to set the fuel quantity. That could be done using a custom action and SimConnect, but I'm not an expert on how to do that.

Just follow the challenger all the way and you will be fine. One strange thing about the save games though... If you save after an animation in the scenery, when the save game is loaded the animations reset. It's a nasty bug that slipped through the cracks. If you save really near the end and don't see a runway, that's probably why.Did you see the special Russian vehicle (don't want to spoil it for others)?

These are excellent pointers and are exactly what you need to do. Also you might want to save often as the landing at the rescue site isn't easy. There's no way I would do it in real life...You also find that in the Civil Air Patrol mission the Maule has a tendency to ice up the air intake, so beware of that.

I'm glad you are liking it. I'll be interested to hear what you think when you've completed the optional path.This is one of my personal favorites and was also one of the favorites of many beta testers.

I just asked one of our artists and he said the images are 8 bit BMP's. That's probably why 24 bit won't work.As for troubles with triggers and such, with more details one of us or someone in the community can probably answer your questions.If you are using a landing trigger, you can do what I think you are are specify the airport without a runway specified, in which case any runway should trigger it, specify the runway in which case landing in either direction should work, or use an area landing trigger associated with an area definition (volume) and place that around the runway or airport (or wherever).We found that if you specify the airport and the runway, there was a bug where you couldn't go back to just the airport by removing the runway filter. To get around it we had to delete the trigger completely and re-create it. That might still be going on.Also, the airport landing trigger will not fire if you taxi off the runway before slowing down to a threshold speed that is different for different aircraft.Lastly, it is useful to know that if you want a general landing trigger that will work no matter where you land, the area landing trigger without an area definition will do that.Hope all this helps.

We had that problem internally at one point so I will ask what the fix was. In the mean time have you tried looking at the images we shipped to see what format they are in (if you can tell)?

>If I set the two lines to zero how does it differ or work>better than the below line which is in mycfg because I set the>slider all the way left?>>AUTOGEN_DENSITY=0I just found out that setting the values for the two lines can/will cause problems, so be sure to set them to something greater than 0.

>Do you have any secrets for AI traffic? That's my biggest>single FPS killer now.You're not going to like my secret... I turn it off (the cars). I'd really like to turn it on, but my system can't handle the load. I'll run a few aircraft and the active airport objects, a bunch of ships and a some small boats, but not the cars.

Now that's a great response :)

Whether I like it or not when I post to my blog or on these forums I am representing the team to some degree, but I can't speak for all members of the team as there are many different opinions and levels of urgency felt by each one. For some people the level of urgency is extreme, and for others, especially those that may not be as close to the metal, it isn't as high. What is important is that we are talking about it and working through how to deal with the issues at hand. However we aren't the sort that are likely to fly off the handle and run screaming down the halls.As for the beta team, we had the best beta effort ever in the history of the franchise this time around. I found the beta process and what we got out of it to be great! Unfortunately we didn't have the time or resources to address all concerns and issues as well as we would have liked to, but that doesn't mean we won't as we move forward.

Touch

Maybe this will help a little when tuning perf...http://blogs.technet.com/p-12c_pilot/archi...might-help.aspx

>Truly, this man must work for MS in a marketing capacity.I'm not the "spin master" I would have to be to work in marketing. Nice spin on your part though ;)

It's important to note that we have a FSX.CFG entry for wide aspect ratio monitors which defaults to "false" assuming the user has a 4:3 monitor. Change this setting to "true" for what I think is a better view when using a 16:9 or wider display. We didn't have time to get this control in the UI, so you will have to modify the cfg to get it done.This is the entry in the cfg:"WideViewAspect=True"