X-Aviation and Gizmo

[ColinM9991]

Hi there,

I've owned several products from the X-Aviation store for a few years and have recently installed some again since Gizmo is now on the way out. I have some observations and feedback regarding the user experience of the newer plugin.

With the IXEG having not received an update in a number of years, it's understandable that it still depends on Gizmo. However, the installer of the CitationJet 525 (downloaded the latest installer as of 27th Feb 2026) automatically removes Gizmo which isn't a great user experience as any updates that run through the installer will knock out Gizmo, requiring manual intervention every time.

Process:

1. Install IXEG 737
2. Verify that Gizmo64.plugin exists under Resources\plugins
3. Install C525
4. Observe that Resources\plugins\Gizmo64.plugin is automatically removed (no prompt or confirmation)

Can this behaviour be removed from the installer or at least have the user prompted as to whether they wish to remove Gizmo64?

The second point around the X-Aviation plugin is that it comes with a massive performance hit when the activation window is opened. Here's a screenshot from X-Plane's microprofiler which shows that an overwhelming majority of the frame time is spent on XPDDrawSingleWindowHook. This reduces my FPS from 120FPS to a whopping ~25FPS

The obvious solution is to close the activation window once all is activated. However, as Gizmo64 was quite a problematic plugin in that it would cause problems for many SASL and XLua based aircraft, I thought it best to raise this too in case there's any downstream impact later into the flight. I've never seen a plugin cause such a reduction in FPS by drawing a UI.

[Cameron]

On 2/28/2026 at 8:50 AM, ColinM9991 said:

Can this behaviour be removed from the installer or at least have the user prompted as to whether they wish to remove Gizmo64?

This has always been the case since day one of the transition.

 

[ColinM9991]

7 hours ago, Cameron said:

This has always been the case since day one of the transition.

 

Hi Cameron, thanks for getting back to me.

Somebody in the HotStart Discord mentioned this, but this isn't the case on Windows - at least not for the installer that I downloaded for the TorqueSim CitationJet 525. That explicitly removes Gizmo without any prompt.

I double and triple checked to make sure I wasn't haphazardly clicking "Next".

Is there another installer that I should be using?

[Cameron]

On 3/2/2026 at 6:34 AM, ColinM9991 said:

but this isn't the case on Windows

I have just had several people on Windows test this. All of these people confirm the dialog appears. You are also the first person I have ever had mention this doesn't work in over a year of this being implemented, so I'm not really sure what's unique to your system to prevent it. Perhaps some kind of unique casing paths, or anything else I'm not considering. It would not shock me considering you're in tune enough to fixate on the profiler in X-Plane.

[ColinM9991]

26 minutes ago, Cameron said:

I have just had several people on Windows test this. All of these people confirm the dialog appears. You are also the first person I have ever had mention this doesn't work in over a year of this being implemented, so I'm not really sure what's unique to your system to prevent it. Perhaps some kind of unique casing paths, or anything else I'm not considering. It would not shock me considering you're in tune enough to fixate on the profiler in X-Plane.

It's a fair observation as I am a software engineer. I am equally as stumped with this one.

The installer is able to see Gizmo to the extent of being able to delete it but without the prompt.

I've recorded a video of the installation process. The part I don't show is the license check for obvious security reasons. GIzmo is deleted almost immediately. The rest of the video is largely boring as it shows the rest of the install but I wanted to leave it there to show that no additional steps were being performed.

This video was recorded with the TorqueSim CitationJet 525 1.1.0 Windows installer.

Does this installer retain configuration files or registry keys that might bypass the option or are there possibly some edge cases baked into the code that would short-circuit the logic around displaying the prompt?