Make Your Own Bush Trips - A Quick Video Guide

Now that the awesome @f99mlu has created the great BushMissionGen program, it’s easier than ever to make your own bush trips.

I’ve made a quick tutorial video showing how easy it is now that we have the program available.

BushMissionGen download links:
BushMissionGen • Flight Simulator 2020
or
BushMissionGen at Microsoft Flight Simulator Nexus - Mods and community

Little Navmap download link:
Alex Projects - Little Navmap (albar965.github.io)

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Thanks for sharing. Interesting idea and will check it out.

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Cool, thanks!

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Thanks! Is it really necessary to run MSFS2020 in administrator mode? I’m not keen on running apps in admin mode, especially when they are modded.

You’ll need to run the game in administrator mode in order to build (compile) the bush trip.
The game needs admin permissions to make files and folders inside the project folder.
The problem is that the SDK won’t inform you if the build succeeds or fails, as it doesn’t show any pop-up notifications either way.

Of course, once the bush trip is built, you can disable administrator mode again.

Ok, I understand. Isn’t it possible to choose a different project folder? That would be a bit easier.

I think once the project has been generated it can be moved anywhere, I haven’t tried it myself though.

Or you execute the compiler on the command line (DOS) :slight_smile:.

The generated mission files can be moved wherever you want of course.

Thank you for doing this!! The tutorial is great!! I hope it is easy to generate a new tutorial when the tool gets important updates to reflect the new changes. Already now in V1.6 it is starting to look a bit different… well, at least some new dialogs appear. Already working on V1.7 which hopefully makes use of even more sophisticated localization of strings for multi-language projects.

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Thanks! Yeah I’ve saved all the video files so it’s easy to edit/update it in the future if needed.
It’s great that you’re continuing to provide updates for the program, on that note I do have a suggestion for a potential improvement to it.

The .pln files that Little Navmap creates contains the following departure airport information:

    <ATCWaypoint id="SPJC">
        <ATCWaypointType>Airport</ATCWaypointType>
        <WorldPosition>S12° 1' 18.89",W77° 6' 51.44",+000070.00</WorldPosition>
        <RunwayNumberFP>15</RunwayNumberFP>

Which includes the runway number, is it possible for BushMissionGen to automatically read that runway number and output it (with an extra zero at the end) to the heading line in the converted .txt file?

@FlavorFlav365, Excellent idea!! I am disappointed that I didn´t see that myself hehe. Will be in V1.8!

I was thinking about the generation of a new weather file… Maybe it could be included in your video?

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V1.8 has been released. See Nexusmods or Flightsim.to.

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is there a limit on how many Stops you can plan between start and finish destinations?

I would say 25 stops between start and finish (totally 27 waypoints excluding POIs). I have added support for 26 POI regions (!A, !B, !C, …, !Z) and right now they are limiting the number of stops. I have not found any info about how to proceed after !Z.

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Hi, is there some posibility to have in myself created bush trip the live weather? Many THX for your advice

How do you execute the compiler from the command line?

This is the contents of my “build_scania.bat” file I use to build one of my bush trips (Scania Bush Trip):

c:
cd "C:\MSFS SDK\Tools\bin"
fspackagetool.exe c:\Users\mlund\Documents\MyFSProjects\scaniabush\scaniabushproject.xml -outputdir c:\temp
rmdir /s /q c:\Users\mlund\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\MISSIONS\ACTIVITIES\SCANIABUSH_SAVE
rmdir /s /q c:\Users\mlund\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Packages\Community\scaniabush
xcopy /E /I c:\Temp\Packages\scaniabush c:\Users\mlund\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Packages\Community\scaniabush

Exactly what does it do? Well. Row 1 sets the current drive to C:. Row 2 set the currect directory to where the SDK bin files are. Row 3 compiles the bush mission source project and puts the generated mission in C:\Temp. Row 4 deleted the SAVE folder of the mission, if it has been started before for a testrun. Row 5 deletes the old files from the Community folder. Row 6 copies the newly generated files from C:\Temp to the Community folder. Voila! Now you can start the sim and the mission should appear in the game.

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I haven´t tried using Live weather in a bush mission. Feel free to try it out by manually editing the generated FLT file. BR, f99mlu

Thanks for the explanation! Using the command line seems like an efficient workflow.

Yeah no problem at all. I’ve had a few more potential improvement ideas too, some of which, I admit, are very ambitious, so feel free to ignore those. :rofl:

Have you thought about adding some extra steps/options to the conversion function? For example, asking the user which aircraft they want to use? (feel free to use my aircraft list forum post for the Sim= names) and having BMG fill in the plane= line automatically. You could also do the same for the weather presets and the time of year too.

I think having the “ugly image generator” stamp the recommended image dimensions to the images would also be helpful, as I had to keep reminding myself of the dimensions by opening the image properties page. Something like the below examples.


Speaking of images, I think it would also be great if there was a sort of online resource of airport screenshots which people could contribute their screenshots to, which BMG could automatically pull images from if a match is found when generating the bush trip images.

I suppose long term BMG could develop into a sort of wizard-based program which could walk the user through some options before generating the bush trip entirely by itself. And now that we know the compiler can be successfully triggered from the command line, maybe that could be triggered from BMG too? So it could become a sort of all in one, start to finish bush mission generator.

How’s that for ambitious thinking? lol

Wow!! You have VERY excellent ideas! I will definitely investigate the possibility to incorporate all of these in the near future. Thanks a lot! :slight_smile:. Regarding the idea of having an online resource, I guess one would need to have a server. And that is something I don´t have… Let us think more about it thought. BR, f99mlu

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