My issue was with the lack of a response a week after posting in the GotGravel Discord.
Very true. I did however post the question to the ‘Got-Support’ channel. The troubleshooting steps I detailed narrowed it down to an issue with the mod. I just didn’t know whther it was a feature or a bug.
I expected some response in a reasonable timeframe, and got none. Thanks for the link to the other support sites. Not sure I agree with you that support for freeware should be less important than support for payware. But we’re free to disagree on that point.
I got an explanation over on the SPAD Discord within hours. So if anyone else is experiencing the same kind of issue, I share that response with you.
It’s a feature.
This is because the landing lights are connected to the pulse lights and it needs to do tricks under the hood to make that work. The Landing Lights switch is based on an I VAR.
It appears the dev even put a disclaimer in the code. “Check to evaluate animation. Might have side effects.”
It’s not a matter of “less important”, it’s a matter of what is feasible to support to the same level as a paying product.
Unless you’ve actually put out a free product you might not realise how much effort supporting a free product can involve. It’s like open source, it might be free to you but there’s a hidden cost to the developers users often don’t see. Dead projects on github (or flightsim.to) tell many a tale there, as do the ones that manage to survive through whatever mechanism keeps it going.
Bugs obviously are treated as high priority in both cases (or should be, in the case of an active product), but beyond that it’s very case dependant as well, so it’s not black and white.
If I requested support for every little thing I was having difficulty understanding - be it in a payware or freeware aircraft - I’d be a fool. This particular thing looked like it might be a bug worth reporting and worth asking for help with. I wasn’t asking for an immediate solution. That’s why I waited a week before posting the issue here and on the SPAD Discord. All I wanted was a response of some kind. Maybe, “Thank you for your question. We’ll take a look at it.”
Had I seen that we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.
It could simply be they missed it in the noise. It happens. Life, as well. Or maybe your question was just in the “too hard” basket for whoever was around, which is fair enough.
A little bit of searching on the GF website shows a support link, so you can always try multiple channels in parallel.
