Lowflyer

As long as the planes are small and the runways soft I'm up for it. Work permitting...

Fair enough. I will agree with you that CD-based copy protection was a bloody pain when it was still a big thing. That was a clear case of paying customers getting the short end of the stick, IMO mainly for having to listen to a computer that sounded like a dying vacuum cleaner every time you wanted to play a game. Today, with online activation being the norm I don't mind so much. Sure it's annoying when you try to reinstall FSX for the nth time and you have to make a call to Microsoft to unlock it, but it only takes 15 minutes or so and mercifully it has only happened to me 2-3 times in 10 years.

Either way no-one's forcing you to use a particular piece of software. If you can't accept what it does, don't use it.

They have if you let them, which you do when you accept the licensing agreement. First of all I think you need to read my post again. I never said I liked DRM, I was just disagreeing with your claim that it doesn't work and that it cause a lot of problems for paying customers. Secondly, don't compare books with software. If books were as cheap and easy to duplicate on a grand scale then you bet they would try to come up with a way to prevent it. Copy protection of all kinds exist because people are greedy buggers, not because creators/publishers are...

It's hardly futile and also not nearly such a massive problem for paying customers as the vocal minority makes it out to be.. Would it be nice to see it go forever? Heck yeah, but as long as people can't find another reason for paying for stuff that costs money we're stuck with it.

I'm still interested as well but personally I'm all for simplifying the rules. Ditch the damned time bank and let teams serve their penalties on the ground, and also cut the crash penalty to at most 15 minutes. It's no fun sitting there. Of course without a time bank there will be no point in having formation flights or team flights as you can't really reward them in a sensible way but I honestly feel it's a sacrifice worth making. As for StoneCold's idea about moving the race, that would help me too as I'm generally on a skiing holiday the week before the race so I'll probably be missing most of the weekend. It has to do with when the kids are on break from school so it's nothing I can really do anything about. However moving the race would probably cause trouble for someone else instead so I don't think it would be a popular idea.

After all the swedish chef jokes I've had to listen to not likely, mate

Good to hear, Ron. Maybe next time you don't have to fly so bloody high then?

The Sabre is fun for sure. Gets really lively when you push it at bit. However the L-39 is only €19.50 at flightsimstore.com and it might be more fun with more people flying the same.

How many of us will fly the L-39? I was initially going to resist the temptation of buying it and instead use the Milviz F-86, but I guess it would be nice to not get overtaken by badly textured Cessnas all the time...

Nice that you got it to work. Could you do just me a favour and try version in the last link I posted? As for the hide aircraft/variation function, yeah I guess it could be done better. I just never put enough thought into it and since there wasn't much interest in v1.2 I more or less forgot about it and moved on.

Thanks! Let's hope it works out Here's one more version I'd like you to try: https://db.tt/WHKuUiB7 It's the same as the last one but using .NET 4.0 so the functions in interop.shell32.dll is compiled into the .exe file and shouldn't be needed anymore

Most visual add-ons don't have much impact on the framerate on modern computers, and most non-airliner add-on planes don't either. With airliners I agree that 30 FPS is ok.

Updated it again. Same link as before. I removed the functions that required .NET 4.5 and went back to 3.5. This requires the file interop.shell32.dll to be present in the same folder as FSXPM. I've included it in the zip file.

I did some searching and found a bunch of threads about this error and they all seem to indicate that it's a problem with .NET that mainly occur on machines running Windows 7. Advice I've seen given in relation to this error includes restoring .NET to its original state and cleaning the registry using CCleaner or similar. You could also try running FSXPM as an administrator, if you haven't already. I'll do some more research on the subject after work. I'm afraid I can't test it on W7 myself as I recently upgraded all my PCs to W10.