John Hinson

Yes, usually a missing texture will produce a light grey aircraft. Just a shot in the dark, but try saving the textures in DXTBMP to a different, but appropriate, format. John

Ha ha - no, this is in real life! Officially called an IATA code, it is what appears on your airline ticket. In the USA, it is typically the last three letters of the ICAO code but rarely so in other countries - e.g. EGLL Heathrow is LHR. Best regards, John

PS - out of inquisitousness I just downloaded the file that is probably being referred to and I can see there are two LWM2 files present which I think are indeed Landclass although I am no expert on that. Take them out temporarily and see if that improves things. John

PDX is the ticket code for Portland. "Blurries" are most commonly caused by Landclass files in a scenery directory that also has a texture directory. It can also apparently be caused by excess work demanded from the CPU (which may be one and the same thing!). There may be some residue from the original scenery installed that is causing this, but it is worth checking there are no LC files in the scenery in question. That issue doesn't seem to affect all users and I have seen many sceneries distributed with LC files in the wrong place. John

Chris - in technical terms you may well be correct but in layman's terms AFCAD does indeed destroy features that it doesn't understand. I mentioned the matter of placing a file at a higher level earlier. Best regards, John

The actual file name isn't critical (although it is snesible to follow a convention for your own ease of identification) - as long as the file has a .bgl suffix and is in a valid scenery directory, Flight Simulator will recognise it and act upon it. John

This is why I don't understand why anybody uses AFCAD any more. AFCAD goes back years and does not understand features that have been discovered since. In this instance, it is clearly exclude boxes that are getting destroyed during a save. ADE requires a bit of a mindset change to understand and use but does the job very well. If you want something that looks and feels more like AFCAD, get a few coins out from your wallet and buy AFX. The latter will also warn you if you try and save a file with unknown features (rare!) and instruct how to circumnavigate the issue. If there was a button I could press that would uninstall AFCAD from everybody in the world's PCs, the number of threads across a range of forums would be reduced! 🙂 Psssst! Don't tell anybody, but another way to resolve qballbandit's issue would be to save the modified file on a different scenery layer to load after the original. Any special features only in the original would still work. . . . and please don't now mention the urban myth about multiple A&FD files. John

A couple of thoughts from this end: Make sure FS9.exe is "Run as Administrator" Make sure the destination directory for the flights is not "Read Only" John

I repeat: Runways do not "harden" the surface, only taxiways and aprons do. Runways never have, and the software you use to create an AFD file makes no difference. Using taxiways and aprons is a bodge, what will make a big difference is that ADE will create an invisible flatten polygon - this will be a separate file. The reason I strongly recommend dropping the use of AFCAD2 (the latest version is 23 years old!) is because it will silently destroy features created by newer software such as AFX or ADE if you amend and save a file. There are a couple of very good alternatives to AFCAD - AFX is great for those used to AFCAD as it is very similar, but ADE has a few more features such as the flatten polygon mentioned. John

Runways do not "harden" the surface, there must be something else in your AFD file that does that - an apron area or taxiway perhaps. Are you using AFCAD? That is dark ages stuff, and will actually destroy features added by more modern editors. Use ADE, and create a flatten polygon for the area of the carrier. John

I'm afraid I really can't think of any good reason why they should want to post blatant lies. John

Where the heck did you get that idea from? If you read their home page explaining the reason for the temporary outage, you will see: Forums will remain the heart of the site John

The Flightsom.com temporary home page is very clear in explaining that the downloads will be available agan once the rebuild of the site is complete. Best regards, John

You are entitled to your opinion, of course. But I believe you are mistaken. It is worth reading-up about copyright law. Whilst products may be offered free of charge, they remain the property (and copyright) of the developer concerned, whose permission should be obtained before sharing. Sadly, as time passes, files do get lost. That's life. But the files on Flightsim.com are not lost, they will return. Fortunately on this occasion, another source seems to have been found to save you waiting for that. I cannot remember whether it was this forum or the one at Flightsim.com, but posts requesting the sharing of files used to regularly be removed. John

Be patient and await the return of Flightsim.com. It hasn't gone for ever. The legality of asking people to send you files is questionable. John