Gizmo 23 / "Activation Required" engine shutdowns - how to confirm I'm activated preflight?

Altimutater · February 11

I occasionally get an "Activation Required" notice, along with engine shutdown, usually just when I'm reaching top of climb. It's happened three times since I switched to Gizmo version 23 as described here: https://blog.x-plugins.com/2023/02/gizmo64-version-23.html

How do I check if the aircraft is activated, before I start the flight?

Having the flight end abruptly because Gizmo has decided it's not activated today, with no warning, while flying on Vatsim, is extremely frustrating. I wouldn't mind (well, I would mind, but not as much) if Gizmo still randomly deactivates the aircraft from time to time, but I can check this and reload the aircraft until it's happy, before I've invested 20-30 minutes into a flight.

This was the first flight of the day. Started XP12, set up a flight out of LOWI. Load MU-2. Since switching to Gizmo 23 the console comes up with a warning that a URL for a Sportys competition has 404'd, I don't know what that's about. The silver lining here is the SID involves flying up the valley, turning around, and overflying the airfield in the other direction, so when the alert came up and my fuel dropped to zero, I was able to deadstick back into LOWI, which was pretty satisfying.

I've now changed the X-Activation Preferences. It had "Automatically Update License", strict TLS, and a 10-second timeout. I've now enabled the licence update notification, deselected strict TLS, and set a 60-second timeout to accommodate any server network issues.

Obviously I really enjoy flying the MU-2 - there's nothing really like it for X-Plane - and I'm hoping to keep flying it for a good while yet!