Pilot's FSGRW - no support

[curt1 79]

I've been having issues with Pilot's FS Global Real Weather (FSGRW), and they are no longer active in their own support forum.  A number of posts have been made the last couple months without a developer response.  Anyone have any knowledge on what's going on?

[newtie 533]

What problems are you having?

There should be a contact link on their website as well.

I believe I've used it.

[curt1 79]

It's now taking 8-10 minutes to download weather, which is painfully slow.  Also, there's a gust of wind at runway threshold that balloons my landing attempt.  This started about 5 or 6 weeks ago, and happens even in low headwinds.

[newtie 533]

Weather has always taken time to download so that's nothing new.

Now, about the wind problem....I'm not sure. Does this occur at other airports? With same or different aircraft?

[curt1 79]

In my experience the download speeds have never been this slow.  It's taking four times as long compared to what was normal over the years.

For the wind problem, it seems the surface winds kick in right at the runway threshold instead of earlier on.  It happens with all aircraft, and probably 80% of the time.  I'm having to change my landing technique to compensate for the sudden wind (below normal landing speed, nose down pitch, etc..),  

[newtie 533]

At all airports?

[curt1 79]

2 minutes ago, newtie said:

At all airports?

Yes, all airports.  On occasion I'll get through a landing without the sudden wind gust but that's rare.  I do have thermals turned off in the P3D settings.  Another user posted the following on the forum having a similar experience:

"I have an issue raised with the flight planning in FSGRW. It seems that for each waypoints the wind data taken into account by the soft are those at the altitude of the waypoints itself and not at the altitude of the aircraft. Apparently this problem showed up after the last release."
 

[newtie 533]

Did to contact Stefan directly about this?

 

https://www.pilots.shop/Cms/Ui/Pages/Menu/MenuPage.aspx?id=c280557a-1d05-4dc9-a22a-47095f7a7f09

Edited April 8, 2018 by newtie
sp

[curt1 79]

No I haven't, but I can.  The manner in which they ignore their own support forum I find disappointing.  In any case, thank you for the link. 

[newtie 533]

Support varies among developers.

There are others that do the same thing although most are pretty good. Their livelihood depends on it.

[AnkH 2,263]

Honestly, the non-existent support and the way they did communicate and perform the update for P3Dv4.x was the reason I finally switched to Active Sky. Pity, because I really liked how FSGRW managed the weather on my end, but no, I decided to no longer support this kind of developer. I guess there were quiet a lot of former customer doing the same as I did, and obviously instead of improving the support, it now even got worse...

[Stefan Schaefer 10]

Hello!

EMail support always works very quickly. Sometimes even within minutes. But we must be emailed first in order to be able to respond. So of course there is no "non existing support".

To answer the Qs of @curt1:
1) We have not made any changes to how the wind is inserted and we do not experience these problems in any test nor do we have any other support calls in regards to such an issue. Are you sure you have no other weather program running or installed? Take note, that even though other weather programs are not running, their dlls may be present in the sims dll.xml file and as such loaded and interfering with FSGRW. For reliable use of FSGRW these dlls must be removed from dlll.xml.

2) I just tested and it took 28,53 seconds to download the current weather file. Internet speed may be different at different places. There are backbones involved which may be overloaded or it may have a zillion other reasons. Especially recent laws regarding net neutrality made it possible to have different qualities of speed in most cases depending on payment. I have no idea how that may affect download speeds. Our servers have a high bandwidth and logs show they are not overloaded. So I do not see, what we could change here.

@AnkH: A product not ready can not be released. The announcement we were working on the update and would release once ready was clearly made available to the public at our website and via social media. May I ask on which occasion you did not get any support?
 

Edited April 9, 2018 by flight_guy747

[AnkH 2,263]

Sorry Stefan, but do you really want me to put all the links from the FSGRW Forum showing how lousy the support was, here on avsim? I guess no. Just as the topic starter stated: the fact that there was hardly any reply to questions about P3Dv4 and also the activity on the forum itself with posts unanswered for months is proof enough, no? Not everybody want's to join your FB Group to get some news, the last entry in the "News % Announcement" is from 2015 and the last entry in "Known Issues" is from 2013. And so on...

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Given recent events, developers should reconsider using Facebook for anything. But back to the topic. These days I only use FSGRW with XP and although it doesn't compare to Active Sky for P3d4, it does the job. The few times in the past that I posted on the official support forums, I received quick responses. The developer's response to updated sim versions is not the speediest, but then one has to consider how many sim platforms and versions FSGRW supports.

[Stefan Schaefer 10]

@AnkH The forum is not where we spread the news. We intended to in the first place, but found users prefer going to the website. So we stopped it. You noted that well and given the dates of the last official "news" posts one should realize that. Posting news has nothing to do with support and you can not hold that against us. As well as "Known issues". There are no "Known issues" since then, as all have been attended to. We run the forum mainly as a platform for users answering other users. It is not our first source of support. Our first source of support is published at the readme and the FSGRW manual.

Quote readme: "If you run into troubles during installation, please contact support at 'bla bla @ bla bla dot com' and attach a detailed description of the problem that occured."
Quote manual: "If you experience some trouble, please contact support at 'bla bla @ bla bla dot com' ..."

Unfortunately I can not do anything if one does not stick to this rule.

All important news are made available in due time at our website and at social media. For accessing our website you do not have to be member at facebook. Actually looking at the website always should be the first thing to do when running into an issue. In most cases the solution has already been made available.

Of course there was no reply to *some* Qs about P3D V4, since everything already had been published and we had answered to the always same Q in several other threads already. The always repeated Q was "when will it come, when will it come".  The answer "When it is ready. We do not know yet and will announce it". That must be sufficient and I can not answer that to every individual Q, if it has already been answered a hundred times. We can ask the users (and that actually is the forum for) to read the forum and find their answers. We announced that we would update to P3D V4. So that was clear from the start. But we must also say, there is no right to the user to have that done. FSGRW has a clear system requirements section and it is clearly defined for a certain set of sims. If a new sim enters, we may or may not update it. In most, if not all cases we will of course. We also want to use it in these sims! But it is solely at our discretion when and how we do that. And I do not accept any pressure on that point. And I am very sensitive to blackmail. "If you do not do that, I will do this." I can show you several emails like that. If someone can not wait, please do what you have to do. When it comes to updates, we always want to have them out as fast as possible, but on a reliable base. Better late than badly done.