Hello,
Although this has been brought up multiple times, I think further clarification might be helpful.
In the initial forum release announcement of this product it was said that one could use the live update or "full installer" to update the product. This seems to me ambiguous. Buried in the forum posts, however, is the statement that uninstalling the product before running the full installer is not necessary, I think in part because the overview post was ambiguous on this issue, many people seem to be uninstalling and then re-installing with the full installer. And if an uninstall were necessary, there seems to be a lot of folks who are doing all sorts of folder deletions besides just using the Control Panel Add/ Remove to delete GSX which further confuses me given that I do not see any instructions published on how to uninstall GSX in terms of additional folder deletions.
Personally I have had significant problems when doing an update for other software programs, by reinstalling an updated product over an existing product. For example, with another developer's product reinstalling an "update" with the full installer did not update it but added a brand new version, and wiped out the ability to uninstall the old version from the Windows Add/Remove panel, leaving me with a ton of wasted disc space unclaimable. So for me, I would not go down the path of updating by running a full installer unless the developer up front specifically instructed me to do so, and stated that uninstalling first is unnecessary and I think more explicit instructions on this issue would have been helpful in the PBR release overview.
Although this is a PBR update, it appears there are some updates for the FSX version embedded in it. That leads to further ambiguities on how to do the update. I assume that running the updater alone will update both FSX and P3d versions if they are present on the same computer.
But if one chooses the "full installer" route how does that work? First, on the product pages, where I would go to look for the "full installer" there is a product page for GSX level 2 expansion and two separate installers: one for FSX/P3d3 and there is also another one for Pd3d 4.4+, and these two installers are similarly listed under the GSX product page.
OK choose whichever version GSX or GSX level 2 you have and choose that "full installer". But what if you have the FSX version and P3d 4.5 versions on the same computer? Do you download and run both full installers? To me this is unclear. I hope running just the full P3D 4.5 installer won't screw up future ability of the live updater to update FSX it I ever decide to want to go back to using it.
I am curious if the full installer checks that the appropriate version of the program it is trying to overwrite is on the computer given separate versions for P3d3 and P3dv.4+, before reinstalling itself.
I hope some instance of PBR objects being invisible or black are not related to not updating P3d4 with both client and content to get PBR to work which I learned to do from PMDG.
So for me I think more detailed information on how to do the update depending on previously existing program version of installed simulators would be more helpful. Every developer seems to be different in how to do updates and installs, where the update files are located etc, and that is also part of the problem in doing program specific updates correctly, at least for me.
Thanks,
Greg
