I do know enough as a Windows and Unix developer that compatibility upgrades are traditionally flipping variables around and in the case of FS re-sizing textures. It is hardly an effort to re-invent and re-code the entire product.I apologize for the "Shame" comment, but at that time I was pretty miffed and felt being taken advantage of. I still do, but it was unreasonable from my part.

AND some "simmers" berate other simmers for exercising their right AS A CONSUMER to question without threat of retaliation. -SHAME ON YOU!The original poster posted in a level headed and non *flaming* manner. So is it to be now that unless one has something glowing to say about a product that their posts here have no merit? If that is the case then these forums are renderd totally useless for anything other than techsupport and kissing up.

You keep saying "virtually the same product" How in the world do you think it is the same product when you admitted that you don't know anything about how things are created? You seem to be speaking out of both sides of your mouth here.As has already been suggested: If you don't like the policy, don't buy the product! Pretty simple solution to a non-issue, IMO.Maybe it made you feel better to get this off your chest, but it really doesn't mean much in the whole scheme of things.Darrell

Thank you, Mike!Let me clarify. I am just amazed how aviation enthousiasts are swallowing nearly anything that is presented to them. And, yes, I maybe blunt to attach a specific developer to my disappointment, but that's the only way for me to state my opinion.There are gems of FS developer and distributors and there are the others, who are just in for the money (Ariane), those who suddenly cease to exist (FSHotSeat, Anticyclone, Lago) and those who try to make additional money from the same product or liveries (Eaglesoft, PSS). The latter group is usually virgorously defending their policies in their forums and not even trying to keep customers ('move on, if you don't like it').In my opinion, they (not me) are giving this community a bad name, because they don't adhere to industry-wide standards and not even their own competition for upgrades or upgrade pricing, which I elaborated earlier. Yes, I will move on, becauseI know how supply and demand works.It's amazing how products can the praised in here while critique is usually frowned upon and highly controversial. My FS budget skyrocketed from FS2002 to FS9 by almost $1000 and, to be honest, maybe 1/5 of products I use frequently, while most others remain sock-drawered. Prime example:A320PIC - completely unflyable, ~5fps in a modern FS9 rig, riddled with bugs. I paid almost $40 for nothing.PSS A320 - nice product, but also riddled with bugs (banking, electrical system powering down), which the developer still refuses to fix - yet the product is still for sale. All the time, they tried to explain and excuse the bugs in their forums. If they would put the same effort in FIXING it, then they would not waste precious time.FSHotSeat - incompatible with Radar Contact, developers haven't been active in their forums for over a year.PSS777 editor - while promised on the features site, it is not available after months. Why not take it off the website and surprise the customer? Instead, they welcome people to moan and complain.FScene - arbitary pricing at its best. One day you can buy the textures as a bundle, suddenly you cannot and then later it is free. Why not make a roulette game out of it and set a random price.BEV - Commercial, Free, Commercial, Free, Gone? I still don't know. Are they still around.Ariane - need to say more? $15 to "Access my order", $15 "Service Update Subscription", $30 "Order Re-Instatement", $15 "Administration Fee".XPGoodway - developers have not been active in their forums in months. Disgruntled customers.Abacus - false advertising. Highly realistic Airbus that doesn't even closely resemble any Airbus that I am aware of. Playdoo.This is about $350 of money that I could have just thrown out of the window or light up in the fireplace. And people complain that I am starting to feel disgruntled?On the positive side, I NEVER had any problems with any of the Flight1 products or any of the major distributors. All of them were almost exclusively excellent. The same goes for Aerosoft and partially for "Just Flight". PMDG - I don't need to say more, this is an example of a business done right. Do I complain because of an upgrade of the 737-600 to the -800 series? ####, no, because it has been a major upgrade with a ton of improvements. Level-D and Carenado - excellent.I used to be quick on clicking on the "Purchase Now" button, but nowadays I tend to do some extensive research first before I buy. The attitude of some developers is just stunning and I refuse to reward them with my purchase.That enough from my side.Happy New Year! ;)

>Didn't even know about that carenado freebie. Thanks for the>heads up on that one as i love my cherokee 180 and now its>working smoothly in fsx. :) I did have to create all the>thumbnail.jpg files for them myself so that a proper pic would>show up in the aircraft choose menu but other than that they>work just as good as they do in fs9. Thanks for the freebie>carenado!:-eek Any chance of passing on how you created those thumbnails for the 'Choose Aircraft' page? I have successfully imported several planes into FSX but this is the only problem I have with them.Maybe a new thread titled "Making Choose Aircraft Thumbnails" would be easier to find rather than this 'Short rant about developers' hope to see your help soon :-newbie

I do know that 98% of the other major developers are offering FSX upgrades of a similar complexity for free or for a discounted price. Shall I name a few?FeelThere - 737, CRJPMDG - B1900DCarenado - All productsHifiSim - Active SkyFS2Crew - All productsFlight Deck CompanionRadar ContactMyTraffic

Ian:Did you read his post at all? Let me quote:"a lot of developers don't seem to do discounts and charge the full price for the same aircraft or add-ons, just by making it "FSX-compatible". No cross-upgrade, not even a discount..."He is not asking for anything for FREE as you proport in your post. Furthermore, you post about Microsoft XP-to-Vista pricing. You DO know that MS offers an UPGRADE price as well as a NON-UPGRADE price? Vista Ultimate non-upgrade is $299 and upgrade from XP is $199!Furthermore you said: "Remember MOST developers are doing FS development work part time because they have families and full time employment to consider. I know this to be true for the majority."I'm not sure what this means. Are you suggesting that somehow this should be a consideration? Would your employer pay you your full time salary if you had to work part time because you have another job and a family? As I said, product pricing is, what it is, but trying to justify it from a consumer standpoint doesn't work too well.

This whole rant is pointless, really. Your only example is "windows software developers" who market their products to literally millions of people worldwide. And you compare that to the extremely small payware market of the FS community? I don't know how these small companies make money, but your bizarre idea that they are swimming in money laughing to the bank by riping you off is laughably incorrect

Where did I state that developers are swimming in money? You have apparently not read the entire thread. I merely pointed out the fine line between courtesy and cashing in. I also never said that I would expect developers to work for free. I am willing to pay, but *not* full price.Actually, I am more surprised about some replies in here of people who just don't mind to pay up. I expected more support or at least to spark a discussion, but I also sort of knew that any negative or controversial posts will be frowned upon. *shrug*Again, the analogy of the CD and iTunes comes to mind. Would you pay twice for an album on CD and on iTunes?

>This whole rant is pointless, really. Your only example is>"windows software developers" who market their products to>literally millions of people worldwide. And you compare that>to the extremely small payware market of the FS community? I>don't know how these small companies make money, but your>bizarre idea that they are swimming in money laughing to the>bank by riping you off is laughably incorrectQuite right Alex. the only thing that this thread has `proved` is that our OP is not very incisive when it comes to choosing which developers to support. Some of those he `names and shames` are well-known to the community, others are virtually unknown even in this knowledgeable forum. Don't that tell the story?!The golden ruile of the consumer applies just as much in this virtual world as any other - Caveat Emptor.As for the commercial considerations of some developers charging while others do not, look at the level of the support they provide, for example. And if you don't understand the level of work that may bve required to get a product designed for one sim working in another, then really you have no grounds for complaint, except from the point of view of the amount of money you've thrown in the direction of duff products. And that's only one persons' fault, isn't it, when the warnings are posted all over the Net?And sometimes the complaints are just plain insulting. FSUIPC is a perfect case in point: Pete Dowson makes his ONLY income from developing FSUIPC. A product which has passed much of its functionality to SimConnect in FSX. FSUIPC now exists as a product to assist in retro-compatibility with previous products for FS9 whcih are still `looking` for a FSUIPC in FSX, in addition to the benefit of its additional features, NONE of which are compulsory, and for which a payment is sought. A freeware, reduced-capability FSUIPC still exists for FSX. ALL of which is spelled out in the documentation, in plain sight for ANY discerning consumer to make a correct purchase decision. Using FSUIPC as an example is not only disgraceful stupidity, it's insulting to the developer. Next time, if you know nothing, SAY NOTHING, or just ask. It might save you making a financial fool of yourself. Which is really the heart of what you are actually complaining about, isn't it - your own gullibility and foolishness? Allcott

I can't speak for other developers but here is what we had to do to upgrade the Marchetti SF260 to equivalent FS9 standards (or better):The flight model just didn't work in FSX as expected, so we scrapped it and started almost from scratch.The textures were not displaying correctly so we re-designed a lot of them from scratch.Our smooth gauges which worked perfectly in FS9 did not do so in FSX, so we redesigned them from scratch. We also found that our previous method of backlighting no longer worked so we re-designed the whole lighting of the gauges from scratch.We created the ability to fly from the left seat as well as right. This is a major addition but is within the upgrade price.The wing VC textures were re-designed for each individual VC (9x2 equals eighteen variants in all), and were improved with new specular highlights and bump mapping.The entire model was re-designed and re-made using Microsoft's new mdl protocols, in accordance with the last released SDK which was published well after FSX had been released.The sounds were enhanced with several new engine sounds, and the existing ones were re-sampled and re-edited to fit with the new sound possibilities in FSX.A new installer was developed that was immensely complex to implement because it had to not only recognise two previous versions of the aircraft but had to also fit in with our new database and registration system.The entire process has taken a good three months full time work and has completely halted our development of new aircraft. It will continue to do so while we complete the basic free upgrade and apply similar upgrades to our other aircraft.The cost of our full upgrade is less than the cost of two packs of cigarettes in the UK, or if you prefer a more politically correct comparison, the price of a decent bottle of wine.We never pledged upgrades for unknown, future editions of Flight Simulator but at the moment choose to do so for the sake of good customer relations.In conclusion, some developers will find upgrading easier than others, according to the complexities or standardisation of their original designs. Consequently there is no standard rule that can be applied.I do not know of a single developer who has taken unfair advantage of FSX having been released and contrary to some assumptions, in the main FSX has not created a new market: In many cases it has divided an existing and limited market amongst two platforms. It is therefore often the case that developers are now doing almost twice the work to serve essentially the same number of customers.Best Wishes to all for a fruitful and Happy New Year.Rob Young - RealAir Simulations

Rob, a heart-felt "Thank you" for the detailed explanantion, because it clears up a lot of misconceptions from my side about compatibility issues.If Ron Hamilton from Eaglesoft would have stated something similar in his post and would have taken the MINIMAL effort of an explanation, I eventually would have re-considered a purchase, yet I was hushed away in the context of 'don't like it, don't buy it' and 'we're not doing anything for free (pro bono)'. Sorry, you lost out on $31.95 for not having provided a simple post that would have taken you 3 minutes (translated into $639/per hour) in clearing things up, plus you have lost another potential customer for future products.

Aerdt did you know that with an aircraft, almost all of the gauges have to be rewritten. That's a ton of work. I mean a lot.Maybe some payware dev's can afford to do that for free. But I know a lot of them cannot. The gauges are the big issue as far as I can tell. Other addons like ActiveSky, don't require much to port them to FSX.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Rob:Exemplerary response at its finest. A consumer, questioned, and a company responds with an eloquent, measured and tempered response.The consumer is educated, pricepoints justified, no insults were levied and speaking strictly as a fellow consumer, a PRIME example of the way to treat your customers. Whether RealAir is a 5 man shop or a multibillion dollar conglomerate, responses like yours are worth more than ANYTHING you can charge for your product and more valuable than any product that your talent could provide.YOU sir are a class act...always have been and I suspect always will be.

'your own gullibility and foolishness'I dont think this is a reasonable description of an apparently honest man who wants to pay a fair price for decent product.I can see both sides of the argument, but people seem very keen to attack the op for daring to complain. IMO people who complain (with reason) are the very people you are saying he should have consulted, so surely in posting his message he is providing a service to other simmers before they spend their hard earned cash.If he is wrong and people disagree then fair enough, but would it not just be better to highlight your success with a product rather than attack the individual.Happy New Year:-jumpy