A few FSX problems (otherwise terribly impressed!)

[Staiduk]

'Lo all!

OK. personal life seems to be on the up at last; enough to buy a) a new computer and b) FSX. I must say I'm terribly impressed; though the first day was kind of frustrating. (Isn't that always the way with a new MFS?)
Scenery and graphics are quite nice; and once gone through Nick's excellent guide (Thanks, Nick!) surprisingly frame-rate friendly, even on my entry-level machine.
I've identified a few issues with FSX I'd like help with though.
I've finished almost every mission; save 'Keys Kayakers' and a couple others. 'KK' can't finish for me - there seems to be no trigger upon return to Key West to signal the end of the mission. I land and roll around happily; visiting the minivan, helicopter, other planes etc. - no ending. Frustrating, since the rest of the op goes flawlessly. Does anyone know of a fix, or what the final trigger is?

Second - I screwed up. I managed to mangle my

[Daube]

Hi Staiduk, welcome to the FSX world

I can't help you for the first too problems unfortunately, however I might help with the gliders if you provide me some explanation: What do you mean with "Yawstring" ? Do you man this little string that was sticked onto the canopy to help you undertand the lateral movements of the glider ?

If this is really what you meant, then have you taken a look to the gliders available on http://www.fsglider.de ? It seems to me that several ones have this yawstring.

[Staiduk]

Exactly. Probably the single most accurate flight instrument ever created: a piece of yarn and an inch of tape. (BTW - for the record, not only gliders. Fighter pilots stick 'em on their canopies too!)

Edit: many do; but they're all older .gau files, as far as I know. (And I mass-downloaded the whole site! ) I didn't find an .xml string there.

[Daube]

Staiduk you were too fast to answer

FSX will accept some .GAU files nevertheless. Only the GAU from FS98 will be refused, but some GAU can be somehow in a more recent, FSX-compatible format. Might be worth a try ?

[Staiduk]

Already did, Daube - they don't work, at least on my copy.

Edit - actually, I just thought of something - FSX seems to have a slightly different protocol for its gauge layout than FS9 did. It's possible I just didn't have the yawstring in the right place. I'll look into it and check back.

[Daube]

Hmmm... concerning the protocol, I'm not so sure.
The only thing that really changed is that the negative numbers in the gauge coordinates are no more tolerated. If one of the numbers is negative, then the gauge is not shown ! You just have to remove the '-' normally.

[Staiduk]

OK - if that's the case, the .gau files fsglider don't work. I'll still check into it though; just in case I simply screwed up.

[Staiduk]

Whoops - figured it out: FSUIPC.

That oughta fix things...I really should read the Readme once in a while.