I have no beefs with this taking a day...the whole point to having a d/l manager,no?I have no troubles waiting a day. Trouble is-the download manager does not seem to be working for those with Vista.The fix posted above made it work-so that I now can wait a day for it. :(

On Speeds...REX has a lot of hype built up around it (*for better or worse) - it ALSO weighs in as one of the heaviest downloadable add on packages ever released for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Tie those in together, and you end up with this morning! It'd be one thing if this was a 50MB airplane and things were still crazy-slow, but given the sheer volume of the data needed to be transmitted, I'm not terribly surprised that the bandwidth is completely saturated coming out of their server. On the Product...Once you get it installed, send up a review - especially if you are a FEX customer as well. Although I am sure most FEX + REX customers will do their best to justify their new purchase, I'm hoping to see some honest comparisons that go beyond the classic "OMFGWTFBBQ" reviews. :) Why is it better (or the same, or worse?!) ... performance impacts... good clouds for all or just some scenarios... etc. etc. Good luck with your downloads!-Greg

1) Does REX JUST modify files in the Program Files/ FSX dir or also config files in the users AppData directory?2) Do you need to uninstall FSWC before installing REX?

Which ? Water was/is 2xHigh.

Thx!E.

I want to know if it sets your max texture load to 4096 everytime, no matter if you change settings. Otherwise you won't see those hi-res clouds, if the max load is set to 1024

I want to know if it sets your max texture load to 4096 everytime, no matter if you change settings. Otherwise you won't see those hi-res clouds, if the max load is set to 1024

Slightly-Educated guess here - FSX itself will automatically set the texture_max_load back to it's default max of 1024 whenever any display setting is tweaked inside of FSX. This is not something that REX (and FEX, which is where I draw this conclusion) can overcome automatically. Therefore, whenever you make an adjustment to display setting, it is probably recommended that you re-run the REX system to re-configure FSX for super-high resolution textures. Of course, REX may have some internal utility item which will do this at the touch of a button - any users can comment?

I can't even access the purchases page!!!!! I've tried from two locations.I just don't understand why companies keep making this mistake - does nobody learn anything from previous releases?

Something tells me I should wait a week or two. :(

I can't even access the purchases page!!!!! I've tried from two locations.I just don't understand why companies keep making this mistake - does nobody learn anything from previous releases?

It should settle down in a few weeks, LOL. I can barely load up the REX website with my DSL and the Store is a definite no go, and I was going to purchase it on CD/DVD, no way I'd consider a D/L for something this size and considering all the overload on the lines presently I'll sit tight for now. Plus it'll give an opportunity to hear some feedback from those able to get through to make the purchase, the "ealy adopters" as it were.

Definately pays to keep a close eye on releases like this pne since I got in ASAP last night and now have it installed.

Any other hosting that could handle the downloads?Does Yousendit have a commercial service.Got to be a better way?

Sure there are other alternatives, but they all cost money.I'm not sure that the downloader is the right approach - I have to restart the application every time a new dat file has downloaded. I'm on my 3'rd dat file now - but I'm downloading at a steady 1.3 MB/Sec - so hopefully I can get the rest fast.I'm looking forward to get those water textures.

Heads up. I don't know if I'm just damned unlucky, or there may be a major glitch with REX. I got it all downloaded and installed, then all hell broke loose with FSX. The first time I ran REX, I chose the option to use the Weather Engine to download real-world weather. It said it did, but from then on every time FSX starts I get the error message: "Microsoft.NET Framework Unhandled Exception Error Has Occurred in your application. If you click Continue, the application will ignore this error and attempt to continue. If you click Quit, the application will close immediately. Attempted to read or write protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt."If I click "Continue", FSX will continue to load, but after it finishes, I get the error message:"Real Environment Extreme has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience." BUT...REX DOESN'T CLOSE. It stays on screen, and I can minimize it to the taskbar, etc. I confirm it is still running as a process in Task Manager. And there are no clouds of ANY kind in FSX. If I try to use the Weather menu in FSX to add a cloud layer, etc, FSX then freezes solid and the only way to close it is by "End Task" in Task Manager. I've tried using REX several different ways (real-world engine, the "Use Theme Only" type option)...results are all the same.None of the above made sense to me. My memory in my computer is fine. In 25 years of IT in the Air Force, I never saw this before. So...I started "GOOGLING", and found out that the above is a problem associated with NET Framework 2.0 if the CODE for an application is wrong. I find it hard to believe REX wasn't tested on somebody's system with Net Framework 2.0, and/or it didn't surface during beta. Net Framework 2.0 is a standard upgrade for many applications found on many computers, and part of the Windows Update recommendations for all versions of Windows.Something doesn't add up here. Does anybody have any expert experience with coding applications and Net Framework 2.0 incompatabilities? I re-installed the default backups of all the texture files REX backed up on the initiall install, and I don't have ANY clouds anymore. I'm looking at a full Disk Image re-install on my computer if there isn't a fix for this. My FSX is basically trashed right now.I tried joining the REX Support Forum to post a question there, but it looks like THEIR servers are so swamped right now, I can't even get in there to join. Keep getting the message to "try again later."FalconAF

FalconAF -Our support site has been up all afternoon, however, it has been extremely busy as you may imagine.This is the first time a user has reported this problem.Please contact our support forum and include your order # and will be happy to help you get things sorted out.

i didn't have any major problems downloading or installing... nor any .net bugs.. the servers did act a little bit wacky the first time i tried and i had to manually click the resume button once. maybe it would've restarted on it's own anyway. i really wasn't expecting it to go flawlessly what with the large amount of data and also i think a lot of people all hammering their servers at the same time. i don't think they can really be blamed either, there's no point in installing the capacity to handle a zillion concurrent downloads when it will stabilize in a few days. same thing happens with any major software release (the new WoW expansion had some problems too and those guys have been doing it for years with 11million customers lol)initial impressions after a couple flights are favorable, i would summarize it in a few things..flight planner seems like it might be fine for newb use but i'm not entirely sure what the point of it is other than to get you a chart with winds aloft and for looking at weather systems that might be in your way. would be cooler if you could import a plan since it doesn't seem that useful for people doing fuel planning, sid/stars, etc. maybe this is possible, i haven't looked at that part too closely, but i couldn't find a button for importing anyway. it seemed like i ran into a bug when i made a plan using a custom-entered plane but i really only scratched the surface there. i'm not sure how much the integrated planner ties in with theme selection, in the end i just made a theme and fired up fsx to start flying..one airborne..overall it looks pretty, i think for folks who have used default weather until now they will be amazed, if you already have fex/asx/x-graphics combo then it's comparable and more like 'different' than an across-the-board improvement..main differences that i saw were that they seem to have licked the problems with visibility layers, the visibility smoothing looks really really good..flying into ksfo last night where there was a low visibility warning looked really natural as things fogged up when i got near the airport. they seemed to get rid of the weird hard upper visibility layer that shows up sometimes with asx, and also the low-lying mountain cloud texture that looks really bad. i already made custom fex themes to get rid of that (just make a very transparent cirrus overcast texture) or can be done with x-graphics so that one's not such a biggie for me..but in general the smoothing is awesome and by far the most noticeable difference to my eyes.cloud textures looked good and comparable to fex shd, the difference is subtle and hard to characterize.. i need to try more of their themes to really get an idea of this but the two i tried were very nice. other environment textures like runways and skies also seemed well done.. water textures looked very good. i think the lighting from the skies seemed different too like when i rotated the camera around an external view it seemed to take the colors from sunset/sunrise and light the clouds based more on the camera angle which was a neat effect. i think possibly this was just due to the design of the sky textures rather than any fundamental change or shader stuff i don't really know.their generation of cloud layers looks like it is trying harder to make the structures actually look natural instead of just stacking more layers than the default, i think this is the physics stuff doing it's thing. there were a lot of cool swirly cirrus structures..swith some areas the structures looked awesome but a few times they seemed kind of strangely put together with more stratus than cumulus in places where maybe it would've looked more natural with all cumulus. until i do more than a couple of flights and through other types of conditions it will be hard to tell how common this is. i've gotten used to the idiosyncrasies with having weird clouds now and then in asx so i'm sure in rex it's a similar case where sometimes the metars are just presenting a situation that is hard to really model using what building blocks fsx allows. overall i was pretty intrigued by how it was working though and i'm keen to get more time on it.turbulence seemed a bit more natural than i'm used to feeling in the sim and it was a welcome change but haven't flown in enough of it yet to really get an idea of its effects and dunno if it's a lot more realistic or not.when it updates weather it forces the sim to pause for a few seconds which i think maybe helps cut down on really strange weather hiccups or fps drops but is also a little strange. didn't really bother me, only happened every hour or so, but i could see how purists might not dig that..i'd be annoyed if it kicked in on final probably, but i guess that's better than having the fps tank at a critical moment so i can see both sides of the issue.interface is pretty slick. i think it kind of feels like asx/fex but made simpler, for users that don't have a weather package or hate tweaking settings i think it is a good buy for the money, out-of-the-box it felt similar to what took me a while to get with asx tweaking.. to get the same quality of results with asx/fex/xgraphics costs a bit more plus you need registered fsuipc to avoid the wind issues imho. (i forgot to turn off fsuipc smoothing when i tried rex so i'm not sure if rex solves those issues but i'll test that later.) i have fun using the fex designer tools too so i'm not sure how much i'll want to give those up so i'll be experimenting a bit with combining the two, after i check out some more of the rex themes i'm keen to try some of my favorite old fex themes with the rex engine..cheers,-andy crosby