Enjoyed reading your review Ray. Thank you for taking the time. Perhaps they should let you write their aircraft manuals. :)Best regards,David Vega

Some years ago I swore to never again purchase from either Captain Sim, Feethere or Wilco, unless there were substantial changes in their attitude to not only customers, but potential customers.In the last few months it's been a real treat for me to return to Captain Sim addons, with a MUCH changed approach from them 10/10 CS :( As for the other two.... well it's already been said I think.

More information here:http://forum.avsim.net/topic/292787-e-jets-v2-whos-gonna-bite/

Here is additional information from just a few days ago:http://forum.avsim.net/topic/317843-did-the-latest-e-jets-v20-embraers-by-feelthere/

Wilco/FT documentation is the worst of any developer I have seen and although their products have improved from good to excellent in the last cupla years their paperwork has not That provided for the Airbus was almost useless: the E-Jets manual was better but as the plane was so good and such a hoot to fly I managed to get around the lack of intelligable paperwork. Even the better manuals from other developers often suffer from the short-sightedness inherent in the same people (the nerds, the geniuses, whatever they are) who made the product writing the manual. Manuals should be handed over to a mid-level simmer with English-as-native-language to be re-written for the average guy: the developers are often too close - and too clever - to be able to see the weak areas that will confuse the average simmer. If the iFly book had been proofed and finished by a native-English speaker it would have been pretty darn good, but even so veered off too often into detailed discussion of a particular point when in the middle of the Tut flight or general explanation. Talking about support forums, Level-Ds "Mummy knows best and anyway, how dare you suggest that there´s something wrong with our product" has to take the booby-prize, and its true, sometimes Scoob really should have stayed in bed that day (and responding with "Read the manual" for a Wilco/FT product is rather like saying "Put it back in the box and fly something else",) but even the traditionally exemplary PMDG gets beaten by iFly. Not only do iFly respond quickly, they accept that you, the customer might be right, they look again at the product then respond with a frank and clear answer. The scariest support of all? Peter Dowson! Now, Peter is a genius and has given our community so much and thats the problem: its like he cannot understand how the rest of humanity can be so dumb and whoo-eee!, he can ruin your day with a single-line response that will make you give up FS and go play The Sims for the rest of your sad life. But thank goodness we have all this support, and all these forums, and all this interest in what we do from so many other people, because its that human involvement and exchange of ideas and experiences that helps to make our (essentially solitary) hobby so much more gratifying.

Edit: I made a mistake above. I wrote : -------Good post. Poor support is not so uncommon among addon developers nowadays.It's actually easier to count those that offer decent support rather than the other way round.What is surprising is that they claim they offer good support even if it is as clear as day their support is no good----It should have read " ..Poor support is not so uncommon among addon developers nowadays.It's actually easier to count those that offer _crap_ support rather than the other way round.What is surprising is that they claim they offer good support even if it is as clear as day their support is no good".Vic

.... The scariest support of all? Peter Dowson! Now, Peter is a genius and has given our community so much and thats the problem: its like he cannot understand how the rest of humanity can be so dumb and whoo-eee!, he can ruin your day with a single-line response that will make you give up FS and go play The Sims for the rest of your sad life... But thank goodness we have all this support, and all these forums, and all this interest in what we do from so many other people, because its that human involvement and exchange of ideas and experiences that helps to make our (essentially solitary) hobby so much more gratifying.

Scariest support of all ? Take a gander over at the pmdg forums..might be worth a look :)

Enjoyed reading your review Ray. Thank you for taking the time. Perhaps they should let you write their aircraft manuals. :)Best regards,David Vega

Thanks but no thanks. I have found that the whole world is an editor. If someone will write something down, everyone else is quick to point out the shortcoming and typos. I do plan to make my own copy of the manual with corrections as I see them. If they are technical and I crash, then so be it. Remember, in this version you can walk away from any bad landing.Kinda interesting tid bit though. I got an email this morning from a higher up at feelThere, a very nice pleasant email offering to assist me in getting things worked out with the forum. What is sad is just below his name was a web address. www.fellThere.comit must be something in the water that causes all those typos. Ray

Paragraphs.

or "Cliffs Notes"  :(

I bought the Volume 2 (sic) not version2 of E-Jets Embraer 175/195 this week. This is a neat little regional jet without an identity. Embraer dropped the Regional as in ERJs from their ID about 10 years ago, now they are just E-Jets. They look kinda like a baby Airbus in the way a cheerio looks like a doughnut. Major difference in size but, not so much in speed or complexity. They both are fly by wire, but looks like FeelThere's approach must have been different than Aerosofts on the FBW model and CDU. The E-Jets CDU appears to be capable of just about anything ask of it. Now, that is a whole new game in knowing just how to ask or tell or request or query it. Totally foreign concept if you grew up in the Boeing camp.The twin jets come with a 100+ page pdf manual that could be condensed to about half that if you took out the reference materials like the Vspeeds, abbreviations, tutorial flight, map!, Call!, etc. The manual is riddled with typos and just plain errors, but, a seasoned simmer can usually recognize the glaring errors and just have to wonder about the others. I started in the middle on page 62 with a 45 minute introductory flight. After about an hour of inputting the CPU and following along with the do this, then that, then look here kinda instructions (which I acutally prefer on on new, complicated flight decks) I was ready to taxi.The flight deck is a mix of really great looking stuff and some FS9 looking stuff. My big disappointment was the multitude of buttons on the Guidance Panel (GP) have lights but they do not light up when you press them. Duh! The manual says in several places "this is not a bug, it was intended this way". You gotta be kidding me. Seems most of the operators opt out of that feature. Now, we can press buttons and look someplace else for the action "just like real Embraer pilots do". Yea, right.The takeoff was real smooth, climb as expected, then I made a 90 to the left, turned on the AP, HDG, and VNAV and while I was trying to figure out if I had indeed pressed the button or not (no lights, remember) I managed to get off course enough that the FMS/CDU thought I was probably a terriorist that had stolen the plane and refused to do anything I thought was necessary for flight. I hit the famous P key and took my screenshot and compiled my email to the support forum. The new split the sheets with Wilco feelThere support forum is just like the old Wilco no forum support. No support, just a reply to "read the manual". The one with all those typos and errors. But, I did. I marked it up and with red ink and read it again. Back in the air about 10 minutes faster this time and locked on my path with Magenta colored stuff. In the Embraer, the only color better than green is magenta. Magenta means the FMS know what the pilot wants and is hard at work making it happen. Cyan means the pilot is responsible for those items. I forgot what white means but I think it is something like Armed for green or magenta. Anyway, it appears to be pretty solid southern hemisphere logic.The 45 minute tutorial has about a jillion changes and updates in a extremely short period of time. Somewhere between Dulles and Raleigh-Durham I missed something because I came down from FL220 right on the money and made all my mandatory waypoints - except I missed the airport and the ILS never came to life. Third time I do it all correctly and looked great. The intro flight has you making a manual landing but the system is fully capable of Cat1 full autoland. I think, might be a typo.After completing the intro flight, which is a nice, 45 minute regional flight between KIAD and KRDU (I told you earlier the cities) with about an hour pre-flight and startup time, I started looking for some decent repaints. This is the weakest part of the Volume2 pack. I'm not totally sure, but, I think McPhat Studios did the repaints to get their foot in the door to market their very nice high end HD textures for the Emb E175/195. For about the price of the package you can get upgraded repaints in a Combi pack from McPhat that cover 25 or 30 liveries. It a good thing too, because the choice and quality of the supplied liveries would make a FS2002 customer mad. You only get 4 for each model and they have exotic names like Rollout, Royal Jordanian Airlines, Trip, Azul, Windrose, Royal Jordanian Airlines (not a typo) you get one for the 175 and an identical one for the 195 (stretch model), and another Rollout for the 195, just like the 175. Excitement galore. The Intro flight uses the Rollout E-175 model. Check out the outstanding quality in the screenshot at the bottom of this post.I found a couple of nice looking repaints over at FlightSim for FS9 Embraer 170 models so I did a cut and paste and stretch to fit adaptation and came up with a decent looking US Air paint scheme. I posted the screenshot on the feelThere forum and Wham, Bam, all of a sudden It's like I just put a baby ruth in the punch bowl. I get a pm from the feelThere Professional telling me I'm in violation of all rules known to mankind and He is going to delete this that and the other. He never gave me a chance to tell him I was in contact with the orignal author and we were going to release the repaint for the 175 as a dual deal. I think the idea is to supply these "exotic" paints and if you would like something kinda nice or something you ever heard of before, you should spend you money at the McPhat Studios credit card department. Short story, I deleted all my posts at the site, including my long one with the errors in the manual (just in the Intro Flight pages) and said goodbye. Nothing gained, nothing lost.I do think the new feelThere forum will acheive Wilco status in no time at all. Think slap in face with cold fish. That is how I felt.But, the good news is they ain't the only forum in town. I figure if I can't figure it out after reading the manual I can post on one of the other sites and get direct help from the embraer simmers. There are so many versions, mostly FS9, of Canadian Geese, not geese, jets, regional jets, Legacy ERJs, regional Legacy ERJ jets, ERJs, ERJs ver2, etc. that surely there is something in common with this latest Volume2. I think I read at Wiki that all these miniture Airbus' have about 90% commonality in the flight deck.So, bottom line is this is a neat little regional jet with its own brand of CDU (unlike any other) that will or should do most anything you ask of it. The plane flys very smooth, manual and automatic. Flight deck looks good except for the dumb decision not to include little green lights for GP buttons. who cares what the real E-Jets pilots have to put up with. They are just working their way up to a real pilots job at Delta anyway. I honestly think we should think like we are own our own when it comes to support, that way we won't be disappointed.UPDATE:I would like to add that I think the callouts are a really useful feature and the speedtapes have a tremendous amount of information in and around them. The complication with me is that is may actually give me too much information, if that's possible.Another point worth discussing is the use of "hidden clickspots". FeelThere may have gotten carried away with the use of these phantom areas for important clicks. We probably have a whole generation of simmers that think the TO/GA switch on the B747 is the little screw head on the panel due to the PMDG click spot. Well, on this one just about every knob on the Guidance Panel has a hidden click spot associated with it. Either the word is a hot spot or just above the little green light that doesn't lite or somewhere close by. There is no way I will ever remember all those conveniences. I may be flying a Twotter and a hour later a B767, then an Epic Jet, then a float plane in the Pacific Fjords. All in the same day or same evening. You will need a cheat sheet for the cheat spots. Speaking of which, the CDU also has undocumented cheats. The Intro flight reveals one to make sure you have sufficient fuel. I thought FSX already had that one.This small regional airliner also makes a great large private jet. It will be a nice one just to go flying, all manual type stuff. You know, drop the bottle, hit the throttle kinda reckless flying. I may go thru the manual and try to figure out the minimum setup required to "go fly" I'm sure someone will come up with a nifty repaint for the corporate side of things.UPDATE ENDI posted over at Orbx that I had spend the last couple of days trying to work my way thru the tutorial flight when I got an email from CaptSim telling me about yet another price cut for the 707 and that the next project would be a 737-100, 200. I'm taking bets on which will be out the door first, the CaptainSim 737-100 or the PMDG 737NGx.Pride and joy of feelThere. Screenshots deleted for the updateRay

Added a few paragraphs above as an UPDATERay

Why posts are being deleted in this topic?

Why posts are being deleted in this topic?

Possible piracy links which are being investigated.

Possible piracy links which are being investigated.

Really, I guess I missed them.Ray

Really, I guess I missed them.Ray

We would rather be safe than sorry.

Possible piracy links which are being investigated.

And the screenshot has links too? I'm sorry, but the links in the screenshot was shortened, being impossible to read them.Funny. I've never seen so many posts being deleted on a thread as I'm seeing right now. It seems that Avsim is as so dirty as the fellThere. What does the money, right?