lefteris

Someone brought this forum post to my attention - I am surprised to read this, as our development team has grown, rather than shrunk, as I mentioned in our announcement - you can read it here.

Hi Tom- first of all, we're very much still a working company 🙂 and yes, the FSLSpotlights are freely downloadable as long as you register in our forum. No need for payment, however, we turned that utility into a freeware one awhile ago to say thanks for the long-time support by our customers! We might not find out, but then again, the system is based on honor, not necessarily verification. Yes, there are those who take advantage. They are a very small (tiny if I may say) minority and eventually they get flushed out by the system. We ask that people respect this rule - and that's all we ask - because we find that when there is a real name, people tend to behave much more respectfully to each other than when they post anonymously or hide behind a pseudonym. Kind regards, Lefteris Kalamaras Flight Sim Labs, Ltd.

Dear David, I appreciate your need to have more frequent updates. You are correct, we're not that great in providing them, indeed, and that's my fault mainly. We're putting most of our efforts in the work itself and we could do better with more frequent updates. At least, we hope that the updates themselves should reward that patience.

Can I suggest that you "bump" the support ticket? (I'll look for it immediately after). In the meantime, also make doubly sure that you have followed our antivirus exclusion suggestions, because the screenshots show suspiciously like something's being blocked on your end by the antivirus.

No, they shouldn't be.

I, for one, would love to hear of an alternative solution that is: 1) Non-intrusive (i.e. doesn't replace the default DirectX DLLs in the Prepar3D folder, causing umpteen compatibility issues) 2) Can run immediately when the Prepar3D process is started so it can initialize the proper handlers which need to run before the Prepar3D DLLs had a chance to load, at which time "it's too late" 3) Will sit dormant taking virtually zero CPU time. With Windows 7 and later, the check for "process started / process ended" is virtually nil in terms of performance footprint. If you really wish to have a constructive, technical discussion on this matter, feel free to stop by our forums, identify yourself and start it.

Kinda hard to start the service only when aircraft is loaded in the sim, if the service's only purpose is to detect when the sim is started before anything has loaded in the sim yet . Please take my word for this: The service only does that. Checks for sim start / sim stop.

I have an easier question for you, Andreas: FSLSpotlights (which is really what you should be blaming here) is doing its best to stay out of the way of any 3rd party shader add-on and in many cases, we work with the developer to make sure their code (which loads AFTER Spotlights have loaded) is aware of what is going on. In FlyInside's case, they actually ADD a dxgi.dll (or d3d11.dll) to REPLACE the default DirectX mechanism, thus "interjecting" themselves in between P3D and 3rd party code. As such, wouldn't you think that FlyInside should be looking into why their stuff breaks (or crashes) when the Spotlights are installed? Does it matter that they came first? So did Steve's DX10 Fixer, but he was very eager to call on us and work directly with us in finding the common ground. We've got no such attempt from FlyInside.

The FSLService is there to detect when the sim starts and stops. It does that to inject necessary logic for Spotlights upon application startup. Otherwise, it takes zero processing power while the sim is running. If you have stutters or spikes, please look elsewhere for the culprit - the FSLService is not doing anything other than what I just mentioned. Are you on latest FSUIPC? 4.9.6.1 or later? Pete fixed a cause of stutters with the logic that checked available VAS - he moved it to a separate thread for that exact reason. EDIT: I am not sure what "other developer" you are referring to, but I do assure you that the FSLService is only "activated" (i.e. takes processing power) when needed.

There is no such "issue" per se with rudder pedal brakes - it's a matter of knowing how long to step on the brakes for. Also, if you haven't calibrated the pedal axes properly, they might be firing "full scale" before they reach full press. Hence the suggestion for FSUIPC. In any case, if you talk to real pilots, they'll all say that pedal action is an acquired art with the A320.

Dear Robert- 1) I have not found your name in our customers' database. Are you sure you have purchased? 2) The brightness and symbols are already perfectly readable, the comparisons with other add-ons that you're making are with displays which deliberately set their lines and fonts to be twice as thick as in real life (and is unrealistic IMO - just resize them to the real size of 7 inches diagonal and then compare them to pictures from their real-world counterparts - once you see it, you will not be able to unsee it), but I will not enter into a debate on this matter, I will only say that: In our A320-X, we provide all kinds of customizations for our display units. Edit LCDColors.ini and let colors be changed to your liking. If you followed those threads in our forum, you'd see that various users have suggested other colors they prefer for the Flight Director bars (what is an ILS bar? do you mean the LOC and GS diamonds?) Also, our upcoming update already features a new LCDPens.ini file which will allow you to change pen thickness for these display units, to make it as thick or as narrow as your heart desires. This has also been part of the discussions in our forum - perhaps you missed that one though, as you haven't provided the link to that post... I'd respectfully recommend that you restrain yourself from comments such as "crappy PFD/ND" - these comments do not help a productive and respectful discussion, they only serve to lower the level of conversation to "troll". As for the price (which is $99 + VAT - VAT goes to your government and from the rest we only get a portion, as there are several other costs involved), I'd really welcome you to produce a simulator product that does all what our A320-X offers for less. In fact, many customers who have taken the time to explore what it offers are amazed that we're not charging much more - to give you an idea, the closest competitor to the quality level found in the A320-X charges $30,000 *just* for the ECAM actions package alone (as an add-on to their A320 sim package, with less failures built in). This, of course, is also a different conversation topic, so let's not argue it in here either. If you have constructive criticism, we're very open to it - you'll see many more discussions in our forums that are technical in nature and will showcase exactly how deep the simulation level goes. Feel free to visit us - you'll always get the same level of respect that you put in...

So... Alex... was our support team not able to assist you on this, that you had to turn to AVSIM to ask? eSellerate was quick to respond and we have in turn reported their findings to you directly. Wouldn't you find it more appropriate to contact us further after you talked with your bank about it? We'd appreciate a copy of your credit card statement where that fee shows, blank out any sensitive information of course.

Hello, thanks for supporting FSLabs! The answer for this issue (as well as many other questions first-time users may have) lies in our forum, in the A320-X FAQ section. Follow the suggestions in there and your issue will be resolved.

Gents, always take these types of polls with a grain of salt - unfortunately, in our imperfect world there are those who prefer to stand by the sidelines and focus on the negatives, rather than find good in life and enjoy it. I'd like to thank all our customers (and future customers) who have elected to participate in this poll (even though I am not too sure it provides any sort of scientific result as it's wide open to anyone - even those who have other reasons to provide negative votes). As I've repeatedly mentioned in our updates before the release, we're continuously working to improve our products - this is true for the Concorde-X (for which we came out with two updates in the past six months) but is also true for the A320-X which received two updates within days and will be receiving more updates soon (minor ones, to solve smaller issues as we go along and larger ones to add secondary functionality we've acknowledged in advance was not included in the first release). We feel that continuously supporting our product is the best way to provide service to everyone - the A320-X is a product of hard work and attention throughout these past six years and will continue to be so for the years to come, along with additional products, such as the A319-X, the A321-X etc. Thank you once again for your kind words and support - without that, we'd not have been able to provide "the best A320 simulation in the world bar none" (your words - not ours).

Just out of curiosity gentlemen, those of you who have installed FSX (Steam or legacy) to be able to run the A320-X until we come out with the P3D version - what are your P3D settings? Similar to FSX? (LOD, scenery ranges, texture ranges, autogen etc). Or are you running them much higher?