The root cause for the misorientation is, by default when you place it from the integrated editor, it automatically gets a -179.9° orientation that must be manually set back to 0 for the windsock to blow correctly. In other words, if there's a bug, it is rather in the integrated editor when placing a stock windsock, and a future fix is hence not expected to affect released products.
And, you think we don't know that ? As I've said, we already fixed all Windsock in our sceneries, just not on the MS Marketplace yet.
And no, it's not a bug in the editor, because each and every object in the editor is placed at -180 degrees by default, and this is correct because, moving from FSX/P3D to MSFS, the graphic engine has changed the orientation of the Y (north-south) axis which means:
- an object modeled in 3DS max like FSX, with its "north" side up when seen from the Top view, will show as such in FSX, but will point south in MSFS UNLESS is inserted rotated by 180 degrees.
- conversely, if you want to have an object that points north when inserted as 0 in MSFS, you must model it in 3DS Max to point south.
In order not to confuse modelers and ease the conversion of existing 3d content in MSFS, the integrated editor defaults to insert everything rotated 180 degrees, so objects exported from 3DS Max pointing "north", will still point "north" in the editor.
This is valid for ALL thousand+ default library objects and for all custom 3d object imported from any modeling program,
except the Windsock, that for some reason has been modeled already rotated.
Maybe it was made to ease coding, since it's a dynamic object that depends on the wind direction, so perhaps it was more straightforward to make it that way. In fact, we are using the same method for the new vehicles we are modeling for GSX, because it we model them rotated "south" ( opposite of FSX/P3D ), we won't have to change any custom code that moves/rotates them, since that way 0 degrees still means "north".
Anyway, I bitterly regret having purchased addons from the Marketplace, I initially thought it would be a convenient way of installing and keeping products uptodate (as per Steam) - the opposite is actually the case, and this distribution channel is apparently also unpleasant to editors.
Yes, the Marketplace has several limitations, like missing support for stand-alone executables, no way to decide to leave some files unencrypted for better interoperability between different add-ons, and the approval sometimes is slow. We expect this to be improved a lot in the future, but I wouldn't expect it would ever reach the same flexibility/speed as buying direct from the developer.