AVSIM is pleased to announce what we think is a first in our hobby; a consumer's survey that rates the commercial software add-on vendors in the flight simulation hobby. In it we poll user's opinions on three specific areas for each vendor and then we ask users to provide an overall rating of that vendor. This is a long survey, consisting of 109 individual questions. Do not attempt to take this survey until you have the time to complete it. We do encourage you to complete the survey. The opinions provided will greatly assist your fellow flight sim enthusiasts in making purchase decisions. We will reset this poll once a year to reflect changing opinions of the vendors listed. Go to the Survy page and enter your assessments.

What a marvelous idea. This is, IMNSHO, a landmark survey. Kudos to Tom and the whole team for taking this one on. DougNow if I can just find the survey page.....CRS is a terrible disease..Found it...neat validation scheme...

I'm missing some options, especially among the "support" questions.There's a lot of vendors I've done business with that I never needed support from, so I can't rate the support. An option "no opinion/no experience" would help a lot there.I'd also have included some way to indicate when a vendor was last experienced. Vendors change over time, a good (or bad) experience 5 years ago may not reflect the way they work today.Personally I won't participate in the survey though, as I've too close ties with several vendors myself which could be seen as clouding my judgement.I could hardly give an unbiassed opinion about the support from a vendor I do support for for example ;)

I just completed the survey but was wondering why many scenery vendors were left out like FlyTampa; Simflyers, and ImagineSim ?Also what about HiFiSim (makers of Activesky) or edimensional ?

Also left out was Jet City...DJ

And Aeroworx. Only won the 2005 Bravo Zulu award. Guess not all that many people know of them, though. :-)

I never got the E-mail conformation after 5 minutes, and bagged it. Is RealAir Simulations in the survey, as they've always been in my top two? It wasn't listed up to the point of the comformation prompt.L.Adamson

We weren't on there either. I know we've been slow, but we did sneek another release in this year with EGKA...lol.

Guess we're in the same boat Jeff:-) Maybe we can be a "major player" in the future:-lol

I thought you were on there. I thought you were one of the ones I gave a good rating for...lol.Oh well, good things come to those who wait I guess...hehe.;-)

You were on there Ron :)

You forgot Aerosim :)---------------------------------------"If it doesn't have a VC, I won't be flying it http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v615/DarrenA300/smug.gif" ... hang on a minute .... http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v615/DarrenA300/unsure.gif ... that is too restrictive! Most flight simulator planes don't have a fully functional VC .... I'm happy to fly non-VC planes such as the brilliant iFDG range, Samdim's fantastic aircraft, POSKY's wonderful planes, and many many others! I'm the richer for it :).

Since the survey obviously attemps completeness in vendors, I agree with everyone else that some there are some important ommissions. One important factor is to perhaps seperate vendors from developers. Also striking is the high number of "I don't have it" for some categories.

I definately think that if you do this again, there should be an option on the support list for "i have not spoken to support and don't know"... But better worded of course! :-hahI've only had "personal" dealings with one of the companies there, and rated them based on my experiences before I started beta testing for them.My only other comment on this thread would be that a few of those companies will have very high "have not purchased" figures, simply because they occupy a niche market that not many people venture into such as home cockpits. There were some names in there that I wouldn't have expected to see, and a few not there that I would. I think most of them have been listed already, though.This is a very good idea, overall. Thanks folks. :-)Ian P.

I would like to repeat the intro to the survey; "To our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey of the flight simulation community's rating of commercial software vendors in our hobby. In it, we ask you questions about your dealings with the various vendors and how you rate them. We don't claim to include all commercial vendors, just those that are "major" players in our hobbby today."My emphasis...We knew from the outset that we (meaning "I") would leave out some players in the market place for no better reason than my age and fraility (read oldhiemers diesease) would guarantee it. This was a "dry run" if you will, that we will learn from and correct or amend in future surveys. The survey system itself doesn't lend itself very well to this type of huge poll and I am thinking about doing individual surveys for each company and then resetting them every 6 months or so. That way, readers would have more comprehensive information on each vendor, and the vendors would have a recycling survey that allowed them to influence the results by altering whatever shortcomings were found in earlier surveys. Anyway, there is a lot of fine tuning to do, for sure. But, this has been a positive experience for the community in my mind, and I think we need to continue this for as long as the community cares to see it available.Any and all suggestions are welcome of course, and if you can suggest and detail a more comprehensive, individual vendor survey, I am all ears.