Yeah what happened was an ID10T error on my side on the original compile, the sceneryplacement.xml wasn't saving properly at times. As soon as I located the old samples I had it up in about 10 mins. The house and cars looked way better in Blender so even at 1 million polys, but it looks a bit rough in MSFS. I'll have to see if I can get the full scale 7 million poly house into the sim without breaking anything

Gray house is my sister's house that I captured with a DJI Mini 2, Map Pilot and used Metashape to generate the 3D model and brought into Blender for clean up work. I should have flown along the fenceline, and these old queenslander houses are quite the challenge compared with modern homes. Was a mini test project to see how far I can take photogrammetry for scenery development.
The SDK downloads, they only have an active link to the most recent version via the sim and assume people have had the SDK since the start of the sim which is a problem I'll raise on the forums, as I've had to rebuild a couple of new rigs over the last couple of years so I need to see if they have the previous SDK versions available via the website.
Thanks for the leads on compiling outside of the sim, wish I had known that two years ago, can't wait to make some new scenery over time. Thankfully for Australia I have long dreamed of high resolution elevation data and maps, and I started my first FS project back in Flight Sim 4.0 back when there was only a USA map, but someone created a blank Australia map that was available on CompuServe. Over the years we eventually got 90m SRTM derived DEM data, but I was shocked after the MSFS Australia update to discover that Asobo has implemented at least 5m DTM data for a lot of Queensland and Australia where the data exists, so now the Glasshouse Mountains look like real and the beaches have sand dunes that are hyper accurate, however due to aerial imagery draping I may go out and shoot one of the peaks at the Glasshouse Mountains and generate a 3D model for the rock faces.
Funny thing is while I was doing contract work for Dovetail Games on FSFS and FSW I wrote up a lot of game design documents (GDD's) pointing in the direction I and many others saw the sim needed to go in. Thankfully I'm no longer under an NDA (It expired in 2018), but almost everything I wrote in the GDD's have been implemented by Asobo, there's basically no enhancements I need to make for my local area other than the 3 airports I learned to fly at and some local scenery objects that are an important part of procedures at YBAF, YAMB and YBOK. There's a few local fixes for the Gold Coast Broadwater and Moreton Island as well, there seems to be a big roll off from the shoreline when it comes to vegetation and a lot of vegetation along the coast in Australia is missing, I'm certain it's there in the datasets (Tangalooma Airport is proof of that when you go to generate a vegetation poly to fill it in, as the vegetation pops up once you open up the SDK tools).
One freeware enhancement I want to do is adding water to the everglades in Florida (most of it is currently appearing as land), I can convert the data to XML from a SHP file but when I tried to compile in sim it didn't work, but I may have forgotten to cut the polgons to remove holes. I'm curious if anyone has found a limitation on the size of a vector polygon.
Gary, I did install that SDK core but it doesn't give anything other than these folders:
* Licenses
* Schemas
* SimConnect SDK
* Tools
* WASM
* version.txt
the whole rest of the SDK's are missing, and all the other SDK links in sim don't provide the ability to download
Mamu, I apologize for the brevity of the first post, I had written a lot more originally but then found the solution and wiped out what I wrote and gave that short version. In short I discovered trying to build a project via the in sim dev mode without first using a template is a nightmare, it creates strings of folders that are several layers deep. Best to manually develop off a template and text edit.
What had happened after many years was the latest SDK download link only had the most recent download and as above was missing the rest of the SDK. Generating the scenery project inside the sim was a mess, and the project.xml got blown out by the scenerysource.xml coding. I'll have to do up a video tutorial for others because if you step away from the SDK for a couple of years and have to generate a project from scratch it's not fun.
Thanks everyone so much for your support and help, I've been away from dev work for a couple of years since MSFS launched in 2020. Super stoked at the state of the sim now. Asobo has really done an excellent job.
Now if only I could gather a team and re-launch ProjectAI to recreate what we had back in the days of FS2004 but utilizing live traffic it'd be awesome. Kinda bummed AI has taken a back seat and even though a few groups and devs have tried to tackle AI it's not like it was in the days of Ultimate Traffic and ProjectAI.