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My girlfriend just returned home from a 4.5 week stay in the hospital, 2 of those weeks were spent sedated and intibated. She was a healthy immuno normal 26 year old. And this thing nearly killed her. That's the horror of this variety. It hits the healthy and young, not childeren or the elderly. The entire ICU was full of Swine flu cases, all in similar conditions to her. She's home and recovering. Going from an active and employed young woman, to someone who can barely walk and cannot speak in anything more than a wisper. She is still on oxygen and will still launch into coughing fits a few minutes long.THere is some hype to the virus. Trouble is I wish thats all it was.

Immersion. Its a good thing. Yes I don't fly a Plane from outside, but it does add a lot to the experience to be in a plane that looks as good as it flys. The biggest gripe I would have is the panel, and that's something you look at constantly.Plus most people get into this hobby because they like planes. they like how they look, they like how they fly. You could make a cube with the exact flight characteristics of a 182 in FSX but it wouldn't have the same attraction to most people. Asthetics matter just as much as performance. Oh and to the continuing FM debate. I fly Cessna 172 M and N's in the flight school I'm currently attending. I have a little over 45 hours in the type so I can safely say I am familiar with how they fly. And the Carenado release for that plane feels really close to the real thing. It behaves exactly like I expect when I put it through our maneuvers and on approach, landing, takeoff, climb and cruise. It's even pretty darn close during stalls.It's actually been a huge boon to me to be able to practice my maneuvers before stage checks and the like. Especially now that the weather here is so unstable I'm not getting the hours I should per week and this is helping me keep the rust off.I've tried a couple of the updated FM's for the default 172 in XP and it's fairly similar. The feel is still too loose and it has no feeling of inertia, but it is much closer to the real deal.There's nothing in it for the two flight models. A well designed aircraft can fly very close to the real deal in either simulator.I'm keeping an open mind about X-Plane and am using it more and more. But neither solution is perfect, and X-Plane aircraft have a ways to go before I can use it for my primary practice device.

I just had a thought. If there is going to be a huge exodus of people from FSX to X-plane, I feel sorry for some of the smaller XP payware devs. Basically from what I have seen they have been able to rely on the small userbase and lack of competition to enable the success of releases that, in the FSX world, would not be quite as well received.Just a quick example from an advertiser on X-plane.orgX-plane. $14.95Virtualhanger 182FSX, $19.95Carenado 182Now I'm not meaning to pick on this dev, or to insinuate their aircraft is not of good quality. I'm sure they put quite a lot of effort into the model's design and construction. And in fact that is my point. It's difficult for a single hobbyist to compete with a talented and motivated team of designers and artists. Working by yourself around a standard work schedule with free/cheap tools can yield you a nice flyable plane. But it takes a huge investment of time and tools to make a seriously pro quality addon.The same thing happened when the MSFS payware community matured, A lot of smaller developers got shaken out due to the time and expertise required to create a competitive aircraft package.Not saying that's a good or bad thing. Just that I see trouble on the horizon for the smaller independant XP payware devs.

I'm fairly open minded about X-Plane. I have both it and FSX installed and both definately have their strong suits/weaknesses. I think the biggest thing XP is lacking is polish. The fundamentals are there, if handled very differently to FSX. But it all feels rather disjointed and not very well tied together. And, even worse, some parts feel unfinished. The weather system, for example is magnificent. Fog and rain are were FSX really should have been. But the lack of locally variable weather and the way real world weather is handled is just odd. Incorporate a functional system like FSX's or, even better, Active Sky and you can have a real leg up there. Flight dynamics are another. You can tell on a well developed aircraft that there is a lot of factors affecting each aircraft through different phases of flight. But there usually are some weird behaviors that make themselves aparrent around the edges of the performance envelope. Not to mention the control responsiveness issue (if a 172 responded that quickly in real life they'd be a whole lot more entertaining), and the lack of any real feeling of inertia or drag. If development proceeds along the correct course then XP has every possibility to be an absolutely amazing sim. As it sits right now it's really good, but flawed. I have difficulty recommending it to FSX flying friends because of the initial user experience, the default planes, and some lacking features. If that is improved then I would have no reservations about reccomending it to everyone.That said, with the XP dev posting here I'm hopeful that they're listening to our complaints/wishes and will work towards that goal. Frankly I could care less who develops it, if it's good I'll fly it."The staff at my school are actually considering replacing ELITE with X-Plane in the small single-engine simulator labs. I personally hope they don't now and i am personally glad i finished IFR with the help of ELITE and MSFSX."A fellow Aims student? If so Hello! :( Frankly I think XP will be an upgrade for the labs. The version of ELITE we use is really old and fairly out of date. Plus while the insturment dynamics are good (aside from that infernal compass). The flight dynamics are terrible. Sitting at 60-65kts with the yoke full back in a 172 and not leaving the ground is somehow wrong. Oh and I've never seen a compass swing through 30-60 degrees of motion just by dipping a wing slightly in straight and level flight. A newer version of ELITE probably would have repaired those issues, but they're fairly spendy if I remember correctly.Provided that XP interfaces with the panels correctly it could be a real step up and might lead to less random freakouts. But I haven't played with XP on any of the schools systems so I don't know how that all will work.

Nice! I'm currently training for my PPL in these things. :) Actually the school has mostly M's but one of them is an N. And performance was roughly the same. And while com1/nav1 in most have been upgraded there are 2 with the original com2 radios and ADF. Have to give this one a try.

Yes, because all grammatical degeneration is based in America. All people from England speak properly and completely and always have. At 3am in a bar in Essex people speak the Queens English without fail.You will remember that many horrible and disjointed forms of speaking/writing have come from England as well? many before America existed or was the cultural entity it is now. People have been mangling their parent languages with slang and improper speech patterns for as long as there have been standards with which to violate. Frequently this results in different dialects or completely different but related languages.And considering the first SMS sent was over Vodaphone in the UK and the US and UK had commercial services at the same time, I think the responsibility should at least be shared. The initial SMS speech came about due to the size limitations of SMS which is universal.Plus One hundred fifty is correct (at least as it is taught here in the US), the and designates a decimal point. One hundred fifty and twenty four hundredths as an example. One hundred and fifty is strongly discouraged in math classes due to the possibility for confusion when spoken. Sorry to nitpick but I disagree that Americans are primarily responsible for the degradation of the English language or that it is a new problem. And honestly calling it a problem misses the point, language evolves over time to meet new needs and new modes of communication as they arise. Quick comment as to the "post signing" issue. I do not sign my posts, I've been involved with internet forums in various forms for 15 years and BBS forums for much longer. And in that time I've met too many unstable people on otherwise reasonable and friendly communities to take that risk. My apologies if it offends some sense of Politeness, but I am in control of my own safety. And the risks are not worth the reward in my estimation. YMMV naturally.

Are you absolutely certain about that? I did a search and it didn't turn up anything. What category was it under?

I'm having a severe problem with traffic advisories under VFR flight,in the FSX version. Basically I am not getting the traffic warning until the aircraft has just flown by my plane at a distance of 20-30 feet (sometimes right through my plane). I will look over and see a wing and then recieve the advisory. I have not received one for an aircraft more than 1 mile away.. It almost seems like the aircraft are "spawning" right behind my plane with a large speed differential.I have paused the simulation and used the views to look and there were 6 aircraft total listed flying. All were fairly close to mine (one hit mine just after unpausing) but I was not warned until after the collision..Any ideas as to how I can get earlier, useful warnings? And is there any way that I can help AI aircraft avoid me? As of yet I have been unable to finish a flight without a collisionI'm using FSX Acceleration with the latest VOX ATC (puchased yesterday) and MYTRAFFIC X. Traffic is set to 50% in VoxATC and 0% GA and Commercial in FSX.

Having a similar issue here but only after takeoff from a Unicom airport. When I announce I am leaving the vicinity the unicom controller comes back with "Go ahead cessna..." My only option is to say disregard. And then I am prompted to request a flight following wich results in the "Unable at this time" and that's it. No more prompts and no frequencies to change to.

Sounds almost like your graphics card or CPU was having issues.I used to get that problem a lot on an older 9800 when playing games like oblivion. Objects and structures would just start randomly sprouting large spike shaped structures. The longer I played the worse it got until it would crash the system. I believe it was due to heating issues as since I have installed a couple more fans it has gone away and never returned. But it could also be a driver issue or something related.Just a thought for something to look into.

As someone who plays FPS's and Racing simulators quite a lot (love my 360). I will side with the Apples and Oranges comparo. You're trying to compare two entirely separate types of programs as if they were the sameFPS's like HL2 are able to pull much better graphics and a lot more features because of their design. Typically they render a small pre defined world. Far Cry did an entire island with amazing detail. But they were very aware of your range of view at any given instant and only rendered the mesh that would be visible to you or could be visible to you. They knew this before hand and wrote their engine around it. So if you were in deep jungle in the middle of the island they didn't bother with the beach. And if you could see the beach why render the middle of the island? Going to be at least a few minutes before you can get from one to the other along pre-defined paths. Half Life 2 worked in the same manner.In FS you have to be able to have a few hundred miles of data available to be viewed at any minute. Even if I am behind a mountain right now I can pop open a tower view and have to render everything in front of it immediately. Or I can pull up suddenly and have the entire world (say to 300 miles or so) viewable around me.The texturing is also very different. In FPS's the world is pre textured by the artists. Every object has a texture assigned and the cpu is just deciding wich texture to use (based off damage, time of day, etc etc) and fetching the textures from memory or HD storage and pushing them to the GPU for it to handle the rest. The GPU then decides lighting and what special effects and features to add to the texture. If you will read the article linked earlier you'll note that FS has to do a lot of calculations before it can hand the textures off to the video subsystem. The landclass has to be analyzed and the textures applied, smoothed together, height map information, water.. Etc etc all have to be calculated even before it reaches the video card. There is no easy way to do this because of the sheer amount of terrain and terrain data involved. If FS's models and texture data were designed like in a FPS the installs would be unmanagably huge.And as far as physics goes calculating impact and trajectory physics is easier than fluid dynamics. Especially when calculating weather and air currents and applying those to the calculations. Most of Flight Sims work goes on behind the scenes. Now while FSX's physics aren't necessarily as intensive as say Xplane's they still require a goodly bit of CPU time. A better comparison to FS would be looking to IL2 instead of a FPS. They're more in the same vein. And IL2 can look better than FS. The terrain is a bit flattened looking, but the shader effects are much better. But like FS for the graphical quality it can show it takes much much better hardware than a similar looking FPS would. And again, Il2 only has to deal with smaller "arenas" than the entire world FS has to contend with. These "arenas" are several hundred miles across but again are predefined and pre-textured. FS does it all on the fly.

Man all of this over the traditional devoloper whine, impressive. I do the same thing everytime a client requests something that we don't think we can do. i stamp my feet and whine and curse, then sit down and figure out how to do it. Everyone else I work with does the same thing. It's just how the game works. You can't refuse the client (without a very very good reason), and you are paid to find answers. So get to finding!The same thing is happening here, the dev got the rant out of their system and now can get to figuring it out. They have the luxury of choosing not to, but they will quickly be replaced by someone who will. Again, that's just how the game works. The old scenery was done through unnoficcial means, meaning a hack, somebody sat down and figured it out. It didn't just appear, someone had to do some investigation and trial and error to get it to work. That just needs to happen again. The solution will probably be different. But whatever works, right?Hacks are great, they make the development world work. I swear that if all the major software suppliers fixed all the bugs and weird behaviors in their products the internet would collapse and companies would grind to a halt. So stiffen that lip, get some Mountain Dew (or your beverage of choice), and lets break this program so it works!

"Thanks for the post. For all of those people tripping over themselves to excuse this product, keep a few things in mind. These aren't the same gripes you heard with FS2004."Actually they are fairly similar. Low performance and issues with autogen. The autogen on fs2004 was horribly bugged and had many people deleting the default autogen files to alleviate it, just like is happening now. It was later patched and worked great.Currently the autogen is not bugged, just overly dense. I don't have the link handy but there are lines that can be edited in the fsx.cfg file that really help with this. And I doubt there is anything fundamentally wrong with the FSX engine. Texture sizes are too big for what they are. Autogen is set too high, and some other settings are poorly decided. But the code on the FSX engine seems pretty solid once that is rectiified. And once again, I had to do similar tweaks to get fs9 working properly once I first got it.

Correct me if I am wrong but I remember a lot of the same problems when fs2004 came out. The fourms wrere flooded with people getting stutters and poor performance on high end (for the time) machines. Autogen was a large part of the issue then as it is now.On my p4 2.4ghz w/Radeon 9600 I had the sliders below half to try and get a decnt rate, 16-18 and even then it wasn't that smooth. After a few days spent tweaking things improved 100% and It was smooth as can be. A hardware upgrade or two later and I could floor everything and still hit the frame rate limiter.Same thing here I have a Athlon 64 3000+ with a old decrepid 256 meg 9800 pro and on windows Vista RC1 (beta os==Slowwww). when I first got it FS chugged along around 10fps. After a couple days of tweaking. I have most sliders more right than left, the sim is beautiful and I'm holding steady at 24fps. And it is just beautiful. The water.. just can't believe the water.It's important to remember that having the sliders full right in this program is insane. There currently is not terrain data that detailed on the market. FSGenesis just released 10 meter terrain files, and it is a 4 gig download. FS is capable of displaying better. Basically this program is designed to be expandable and current for some time to come.My advice, do some tweaking, set the sliders back to get a good rate, fly and enjoy. Then wait for the mod community to transform this program into something wonderful.

I'm running a Athlon 64 3000+ With 1 gig of pc3200 and a Radeon 9800. It runs rather well on mine so you should be fine. There are a couple of tweaks floating about with regards to autogen scenery and texture resizing that help. But even without it runs well and looks pretty good.