Sorry if those instructions weren't helpful. Did you try it? It's actually really nice to be able to launch from wherever you want. There is another option, which is to edit the aircraft to add a propeller, launch the aircraft from the ground, climb to your desired height, and then start looking for your thermals. The choice is yours.
I have been fighting this software for 10 hours now and have to say it should be illegal to take money from people for this kind of crap...
I have a Radeon X800 graphics card (over $400 card) and it still doesn't play smoothly.
The software locks up constantly, and won't allow me to resave over airports that I've copied and edited previously.
Many planes will violently jump around on the ground with no engine running... to the point that they flip over on there back for no reason.
I'm constantly "running into" invisible items in the air that aren't really there... or are they? Destroys the plane
Resetting the pilot to high in the air (for gliders) is extremely difficult, you have to memorize a bunch of keystrokes and hit them all while your hands are on the sticks (takes three hands) then when/if you finally get your pilot back on the ground you can't find your plane in the air. If you find it, you'll find it sinking like a rock. Land it and you have to do all this all over again. You can't save that "high-in-the-air" starting position... you have to redo all the keystrokes for every launch.
I've tried adding motors, engines, etc. to get the gliders up in the air and that doesn't work for crap either. Went through dozens of motors and nothing would get them up over 20 feet altitude. Finally dropped the weight settings for the airplane to nearly zero and I could get it up there... even then it sinks as soon as you cut the motor.
If you add a motor to a glider, you have to give it zero throttle to shut the motor down... which also turns the flaps on! If you use the kill switch to shut down the motor, you can't restart it when you start sinking (and you will sink... fast) so the motor is of no use. Motor on = flaps off = not really "gliding" / Motor off = flaps on = stall and sink (still not gliding)
No thermals can be found even with the settings for thermals at max
The 3D planes fly nothing like they did in G2 and nothing like any real RC plane I've ever flown. They'll snap and/or stall if you look at them wrong. They are way too sensitive to throttle and are too twitchy. I hover fine in G3 and great with real planes but can't hold a hover for 2 seconds in G3
Funfly planes are fly horribly too.
Sloping is great but gets boring after a while. Can't slope with the Bird of Time... it just won't do it which makes the plane useless as there is no other way to fly it. No engine/motor I can find will get that BOT up in the air without making it so unstable that you can't fly it. Take it to the slope and it just blows backwards over the hill. Add ballast and it sinks like a rock... no win scenario.
Speaking of sloping... did you guys know you can take the giant scale Yak to the cliff and slope with it? Oh yeah... those are "realistic physics".... NOT!!!!! [:'(]
Most of the airstrips in G3 have way too much "crap" in the area of flight. It's neat to look at it, but hey... who puts a gas station on one side of their airstrip and telephone poles on the other? Every airstrip is a virtual obstacle course and your view is usually obstructed. Yes I can edit the airstrips, but why should I have to? Many people aren't that computer savvy.
It took me an hour to figure out what I had to do to get my add-ons to install. Then I find that the two gliders I bought the add-ons for were already installed with G3. So, I bought two add-on packages for nothing.
These are just a few of the "bugs" (understatement) that I've found in my first day with this software. I find another one about every 30-45 minutes. This is total crap and I strongly urge everyone to resist the temptation to buy this software for it's apparent high-end graphics. They aren't that great and are useless if you can't fly in 'em.
I feel like I've been taken advantage of, and this was supposed to be a gift from my siblings and I for my father. No way am I going to give a 78-year old man a pile of *** and problems like this for Christmas. I guess I'll give my siblings their money back and I'm out $250... until I get VISA to revoke the credit card payment! [:@]
Tom