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In general it was a good review,. In the the area of performance though, I think you were being a little disingenuous, especially in the area of VAS management compared to FSX. While everything you said is totally accurate as compared to FSX-Box, not so much when it comes to FSX-SE, which you totally ignored in this review, and , which also has similar VAS management improvements, and in fact had them first. It's also runs much smoother then FSX-Box, just like P3D. By comparing to FSX and not differentiating between the Box and Steam version, you give the impression that both FSX platforms have the same limitations which is just not true.

Sounds like a problem with the Null zones of the controller/throttle

Hyper threading if on will probably be a BIOS setting

If your system has Hyperthreading, and it's turned on, try turning it off. There have been some reports that this will reduce VAS usage.

Found this video, looks like FSX style Mission system being used

DTG hard coded Highmemfix into FSXSE so no more need to add this line in the config file.

Timezone data is stored in a file called timezone.bgl in the scenery\base\scenery folder. The default one is kind of basic and often not accurate. One option is with ultimate traffic2. Which has a utility to update timezone.bgl ile to a specific date given. Note it's geared to the timetable currently installed, so if you have an old one it will only work for those dates. Usually not a problem unless you are setting a date close to one of the time changes.

Sorry I have FSX which has a force VSYNC setting in it's fsx.cfg file. I assumed P3D had something similar. I did find this which may help, search the page for VSYNC and it tells you what to do. http://www.prepar3d.com/SDKv3/LearningCenter/settings/display/graphics_settings.html

Tearing is usually caused when VSYNC is off and you get frame spikes above the capabilities of your monitor. Turning Aero on may appear to solve the issue because the reduction of system performance using it reduces the chance of those spikes occurring . Turning VSYNC on should cure the issue, especially if you set it lower then your monitors refresh rate. I use 1/2 refresh on my system.

I wouldn't be surprised if DTG teamed up with one existing ATC addon developers like VOXATC, same as they teamed up with Orbx for scenery. Come to think of it the developers of PROATC/X has been pretty quiet also, so maybe it's them

I think Martin would have made a good politician! He sort of danced around the subject,saying "We recognise the passion that exists in the flight simulation community around enabling players to create user generated content. We will have more information to share on this as we get closer to the launch of Dovetail Games Flight Simulator. " So he didn't say no, but also didn't commit to anything either, just like a politician.

Does it happen at every airport, or just 1 or 2. If the latter it sounds like an elevation issue with the airport. If it's the model the problem is in the contact points. In that caswe, the best solution is to find a replacement for Jetblue like maybe WOAI., unless you know how to adjust the contact points yourself. It's a little to hard to talk you through it on a forum.

When Aerosoft was planning on their own sim, they tried this approach, but guess what, they weren't able to find any engine out there that could match the capabilities of what the FSX/ESP engine was capable of. The only other engine proven in a global flightim was X-Planes, but that was proprietary to Austin. Outerra does look promising, but to date is unproven on a global scale.

This philosophy only works in a sim if there are enough addons available soon after release to keep interest up. You can have a sim that keeps some compatibility, maybe not with existing products, but with the tools ready to develop right from the starting gate, where developers can jump right in to develop first rate addons for it immediately because the knowledge and techniques are similar enough. Or you can break complete compatibility, use different methods, that require a higher learning curve where development is delayed, and interest wanes over time from waiting. We already had a sample of the latter with MS Flight, and look where that went. Same could have happened to X-Plane 10, except they had a large enough group of developers from XP8 and 9 that were able to jump right in and keep the platform going. Look how long it's taking the FS developers to get up to speed on X-Plane 10. The only ones that were successful like Carenado did it sooner by hiring developers already familiar to the platform. Look how long PMDG has taking to develop for it, one aircraft, and then only a sand box model (Their words) to get their feet wet on the new techniques required. Image if XP10 broke it's compatibility with XP8 and 9 and all the developers were starting at the same level PMDG started out, with most not having the same resources that PMDG has and we were just now starting seeing quality addons appear for it. Do you really think XP10 could have survived this long? Or more likely go the way of MS Flight! For better or worse we live in a gotta have it now world. It won't wait for the 3rd party developers to catch up, cash flow will dry up and the platform will die before it has a chance. People are not going to buy a shiny brand new 64bit sim, with basic capabilities with the potential to build it up to years later, when they already have a sim with those capabilities today. Backward compatibility to previous versions or at least in developer techniques, are one of the main reasons the FS franchise is the longest lasting genre in the PC gaming market. It's a formula that has been proven to work, for both the FS and XP markets and why we're able to be here debating it today.

Actually not that much. X-Plane builds it's flight model to the actual air surfaces to the model. So unless the modeler is a aeronautic engineer and models the aircraft to the exact tolerances to the real thing your model is less likely to fly like the real thing. Yes the flight model maybe accurate to the aerodynamics of the model, but that don't mean it will match the aerodynamics of the real aircraft. Where as with a table base system, it depends on how good the data supplied and the talent and knowledge of the developer that inputs it is. If the data is faulty you'll get an inaccurate flight model. If it's accurate, you'll come pretty close to hitting the numbers. A few developers in the FS World has achieved this (ex: RealAir), some others were able to do it with external code (ex: Majestic, A2A). There's a reason most professional Level-D simulators also use lookup tables on their simulators.

Your right I should have said DTG steam sale

That would be them!!

It won't show up in the APPs list unless you have the interface open, If you scroll down the process list to the S's you'll see Steam.EXE, and Steamwebhelper.exe running. If you look in your active task bar, you'll see the icon active, and if you try to close it, FSX will close also.

No the Steam program itself still has to run, but you can set it to run offline, and it won't phone home. That said, it really is not intrusive and doesn't cause any issues. One benefit of it there is it incorporates Steam's in game interface. So you can access the internet while in game which you can use to bring up sites with charts etc..

Just a heads up the Steam March Madness sale is on now, for those who want to try out FSX Steam, it's now 70% off at $7.49, addons are 50% off.

DTG just announced the "Steam March Madness" 50% sale so you didn't have long to wait! FSXSE itself is 70% off at $7.49, available addons 50%, so now is the time to try it. Doesn't appear X-Plane is participating, it show regular pricing for it and all addons.

Which ever route you take, you should if you can, wait to spend that gift certificate until Steam has another one of their big sales, they have periodically during the year. I don't know about X-Plane, but DTG has 50-80% sales during these times. You can really get a good bang for your money. When I bought FSX-Steam, it was 80% off and I got it for $5.00.

The main difference is shadowing, P3D has some real nice shadowing effects. Especially Cloud to ground shadows. The other big advantage to P3D v3.2 vs FSX Box is it's vastly improved VAS management, however compared to FSX-SE it's about equal in this area. Other than that, no big differences. To date there have been no addon specific to P3D that hasn't originated from an FSX release. Of those only one that I know of has added a feature to it's P3D version that won't work with FSX/FSX-SE - The PMDG 777-300ER which added in virtual cockpit taxi camera system. FSX version only has a 2D version. This may change over time, and P3D only addons, may become more prevalent, but it hasn't happened yet.

DTG knew that it was possible for a user of FSXSE to also have the original FSX box version installed, They created 2 separate ways of installing FSXSE. It did this automatically by checking data in the registry. So for the first example, A new system which FSXSE is installed (ie: clean install), the installer will install it as if it was a normal FSX installation. Putting it's config files in appdata\roaming\microsoft\FSX. This is the simplest method for 3rd party developers to support. The second method is if you have or ever had the original FSX Box installed, it will do what's been called a "side by side" installation. This is when it will creates the FSX-SE folder to store it's config files (It also creates it's own FSX file folder in your document folder for it's flightplans etc...). This is what complicates matters for 3rd party developers, as they also now have to check if you have both versions installed, to install properly. This means older addons not upgraded for FSXSE will install as if it is a normal original FSX installation adding it's dll entries (if it has any like the 744 does) to the dll.xml in the appdata\roaming\microsoft\FSX folder. If the user wants to use the addon in FSXSE, he/she will need to manually add those entries into the appropriate config file(s) (in this case dll.xml) in the appdata\roaming\microsoft\FSX-SE folder, assuming the addon is compatible with FSX-SE at all. If an addon directly accesses FSX memory addresses instead of going through FSUIPC or Simconnect, it probably will need updating before it will work. FSRecorder is an example, it is not compatible with FSX-SE (although some say they got an older version to work (V1.331) I haven't.) Tom Cain

Is this a clean install of FSX-SE? If you have or ever had FSX box installed, even if it is now uninstalled, FSX-SE will use a side by side install, in which it will set up a separate appdata folder for it's config files. (FSX-SE). If you have both a FSX and a FSX-SE folder in appdata\roaming\microsoft you need to copy those dll entries from the dll.xml in the FSX folder to the dll.xml file in the FSX-SE folder. The PMDG installer will only add them to the dll.xml file in the FSX folder, because it knows nothing about FSX Steam Tom Cain