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Gizmo64 Version 23+

Update: The plugins described in the post below turned out to be a dead end and were not adopted by X-Aviation. I have back-ported various bug fixes and performance improvements to an "LTS" plugin, you can find it here: https://benrussell.gumroad.com/l/gizmo64-lts Change Summary: As a global plugin Gizmo has been the subject of frustration for some users wanting their simulator to run as lean as possible.  To address this Gizmo has been split into two products.  X-Aviation.plugin - the new, lean, global plugin. You will need this for any X-Aviation licensed products that require DRM activation.   Gizmo64-Avionics.plugin - a new aircraft systems plugin that retains all the required API products to keep some of your favourite products working into the future.  You will need this for Gizmo-powered aircraft products. You can find a list at the bottom of this page. X-Aviation.plugin Summary: The main focus of this new plugin is to provide licence management for your colle...
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projectFLY Bridge Plugin Rewrite.

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This post is for users of the projectFLY X-Plane bridge plugin. Recently we've been seeing a lot of bug reports involving the projectFLY bridge plugin. Users with this plugin installed have been reporting simulator crashes or Log.txt files with mentions of Gizmo throwing a lot of errors. Clearly we have a clash between Gizmo64 and projectFLY's bridge plugin. After downloading the projectFLY client app I installed their plugin and can replicate an X-Plane crash or glitch with 100% certainty when using our X-Aviation Saab 340A product. Further investigation showed that if you start the projectFLY client App after you start X-Plane the simulator usually loads without error. This gave me reasonable confidence that the problem was somewhere on the projectFLY side of things so I started to investigate what their plugin was doing. Using a HexEditor to open the win.xpl shows that they're using a Windows Named Pipe to pass data to their client App. The hex edi...
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A reflection on the state of simming...

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No, really; Simulated radar reflection: Here's a GPU shader powered radar back scatter image dynamically generated  from the normal map provided by the new API detailed in the posts below... The original normal map used to calculate back scatter. Another test image, this time with the radar located at 0.5, 0.0 This version is much simpler, displaying a wider backscatter area for easier debug. It also lacks color and height mapping. New mapping API: This is the major news for this release, it brings a whole new level of power to Gizmo64 with regards to mapping the DSF files for use with synthetic vision systems, TAWS, moving maps and more.. Here's some sample images;  Heat mapped to show height, normal mapped to show definition. Composite Normal map made by joining two adjacent sample tiles. Composite Height map made by joining two adjacent sample tiles. This set of images is a composite of two dif...
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