Wee bit angry with FS9

[EHM-0654 Murray]

Those of you that follow the forum will know that I have decided to go through the FS9 flight school "for real".

Well, last night I finally completed the first important goal, I passed the FS9 PPL checkride. Only problem is, FS crashed at the point where it should have been making the certificate, so I have nothing to show.

Now, funnily enough, I've known for quite some time that the certificates are just BMP files, and so I knew I could get the PPL certificate easily enough, even though I had forgotten where it lives, so I started up a search of my FS installation and went Googling for the specifics, only to discover that (a) this is quite a common problem, and (b) I should have gotten a certificate when I passed the solo "checkride" as well. I deliberately flew the solo three times in a row last night just to check that I completed it successfully and still no certificate!

Anyhow, the search of my installation has turned up all the certificate BMPs which makes me building one manually feasible, but I'd like it to look close to the ones FS9 builds for you. Does anyone out there in EHM pilot land have an electronic copy of any of their FS completed certificates that I can have for reference? PDF would be nice, but any picture format would be acceptable.

[EHM-1365 Benjamin]

Have a paper copy somewhere - will try and find it if no one else comes up with anything. If it helps I seem to remember it was a courier font.

[EHM-0654 Murray]

Cheers Ben. By any chance, do you have access to a reasonably high-res digital camera? Photo of the pilots name on the certificate would suffice.

[EHM-1465 Dominic]

Murray,

For what it's worth I remember printing out the certificates from FS2002 (and the bmps look almost identical for FS2004) and I was severely unimpressed as my name was printed in the most basic typewriter font and placed with the line that should underline the name straight through the middle of my name  :@

So I ended up adding my name to the bmp in paintshop pro in a decent font in colour - it looks much better!

Dom

[EHM-1617 Iain]

I had none of the problems you mention Murray... as you can see here

[IMG=800x600]http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c377/iainfs/P2281753.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG=800x600]http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c377/iainfs/P2281754.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG=800x600]http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c377/iainfs/P2281755.jpg[/IMG]

Sorry for the very poor quality but the have been resized by both photobucket and the forum script... hopefully you can see what it looks like though.

[EHM-0654 Murray]

Cheers Iain, just what I wanted to know - that's Arial, will just need to play with the size to get it right...

EDIT: Right, I've made my solo and PPL certificates, just need to print them at work tomorrow. Haven't gone too far away from what FS should have given me - used a slightly different font (Bitstream Vera Sans) but at a bigger size (18pt) - we produce certificates at work for people that do our training courses, so I know that the font of the certificate should really be smaller than the font of the persons name, not the other way round (hint, Microsoft!).

[EHM-1671 Ben]

Hi,

I believe I read something about an FS9 update being available from the Microsoft Flight Simulator website.... it said that it fixed the 'problem with flight certificates' being available upon completion of their respective goals.... but I'm not entirely sure (you still might want to check it out anyway!!)

Hope that helps!

[EHM-0654 Murray]

The 9.1 update; already got it and it's not made things work for me...