MistyBlue

Gorgeous setup Mike! I wish you many hours of enjoyment and thank you for your sacrifice. You are a true hero. That FDS came in and set things up means you'll be spending a lot more time flying and a lot less time tinkering! Pete, Steve, and the rest of the team there are the best in the sim hardware market in my mind and fully stand behind their products doing whatever it takes to ensure you are happy with your purchase (I learned that firsthand). Love my FDS 737 MIP components and will continue expanding with more of their stuff when I can well into the future. I'll chime in a little on the Sim-A versus ProSim discussion. While I'm not going to go into all the reasons why I ended up not going with Sim-A, the main reason is that I could never get Sim-A to work right across my networked setup and after many frustrating hours of trial and error and going back and forth with the developer I finally gave up. That's not to say it isn't a good product. It just wasn't a good fit for me at the time (keep in mind this is two years ago now). With ProSim, I was able to get fully up and running in 20 minutes with minimal frustration and no help. I also found it more easily expandable, more intuitive, and the support community to be much larger. I also like the dedicated ProSim flight model which ties perfectly with the avionics software. And the frequency and ease of updates is nice as well. The cost was also significantly less for the complete suite. Again, this is all my personal experience. Mileage may vary. The good thing is they both offer trials and buyers should definitely try both and decide for themselves what they prefer. Now, when PMDG releases their cockpit version, I will also be one of the first in line for it. Their reputation for quality and detail guarantees an awesome and accurate product and the fact they are working with FDS is the icing on the cake!

Prepar3d 2.5? Continue/cancel out of it. That should about finish the install. Then install the latest ORBX libraries and it should fix things.

Man, you aren't messing around are you?! Can you teach me how you did that, Obi Wan? Awesome!!!

Very nice! Sounds like a great setup. Looking forward to seeing it come together!

What are you going to go with for avionics software? Highly recommend Prosim737 running your avionics from a second PC.

I've got the 737 DSDT and love it. Very jealous you're getting the overhead and pedestal as well. Those are on my list but gonna gonna be a while before I can afford to pick those up. I've got a Jetmax throttle on the way. Will be here Friday. That has been sorely missing from my setup. Can't wait. And chomping at the bit for the new MCP and EFIS to become available. It's looks awesome! Sigh, if only we were all millionaires!

I've got two EVGA 970 SSC's in SLI pushing through a TripleHead2Go Digital Edition across 3 1920x1080 27" monitors for my ProSim simpit. Running on a Gigabyte Gaming 5 MB, i7 4790K not yet overclocked, and 8GB DR3 at 1600 Mhz, Samsung 830 SSD for OS and Samsung 840 Pro SSD for P3D. Windows 7 64 bit. Just did a clean install of Prepar3d and not using any external NI tweaks, but do have OptimzeParts and OptimizeDenseClouds set to 1 in the cfg. Running the 353.06 drivers. I was originally running a Titan (which I now moved to another gaming PC), and tested between Titan alone, one 970, and two 970's in SLI. The 970's in SLI definitely perform better, about 33-50% faster than the Titan or a single 970. Without any addons yet, performance is quite smooth. I do get artifacts in SLI, though. Thin white lines pop up here and there and lightning effects are hideous, same as reported elsewhere. Also see performance drops when activating the menu as has been reported. Alt-Enter a few times and it usually clears up.

Tom, I wish there was somethting, anything I could say that would give back all that has been taken by this disease. I can only say your devotion to the flight simulator community has been nothing short of tremendous and hopefully you feel a sense of true accomplishment having created a vibrant, thriving community here that will always cherish what you and your team have put together for us. I, personally, have enjoyed countless hours lurking around the communities here, and though I fly alone, I never feel alone because of it. I wish you Gods speed and all my hopes and wishes that you'll be able to enjoy your remaining days at peace and around those who love you. Don't worry, we'll all carry the torch for you.

For me, it's FSDT's KIAH.

Didn't realize they changed their tune a bit based on that post. I certainly understand. One can still hope though, and yes the other solutions are good enough if nothing comes out from PMDG. Since you don't use the VC in a home cockpit that isn't a factor. Rather, a good flight model that properly integrates properly with the software would be nice, not using the default as a model. All the nuances built in by PMDG for another, particularly the autopilot and FMC. Completeness of all the systems. Quality of support. That just takes things to the next level. There are also other 737 packages that are good enough so why the need for PMDG? See my point?

And they have also stated it was something they wanted to do and at a much less cost. I actually think PMDG has a lot to bring to the table that could unseat the others. I have one of the other popular and expensive packages but I still miss the NGX. And I'm sure I'm not the only one.

The networked gauges ARE the reason this is important. While I probably could probably pick apart the NGX to display its screens where I want, it would come at a big performance penalty. There is a big difference between a cockpit builder version that can be distributed across multiple computers versus separating out views on the main computer. Particularly when you're running multiple large displays (I have 3 main displays in Portrait plus a CDU display). A cockpit builder version will allow you to break out those displays and precisely place them, in particular the CDU, onto separate computers/screens easing the load on the main computer. It also helps you maintain fluid performance of the PFD and ND which you likely wouldn't see breaking it all out on just one computer. There are other things, like an instructor station allowing you to set up approaches, easily set up failures and weather, pushback, etc from a separate instructor screen. Just look at any cockpit builder of a heavy jet and you'll likely find most of them run some sort of dedicated software for this, be it Sim Avionics, Project Magenta, Prosim 737, iFly Cockpit builder, etc. There is a reason there is a market for this type of software. Really hoping PMDG will still come to market with a version of theirs.

Been a while and just wondering if this is any closer to becoming a reality. I know PMDG have their plate full, but I'm finally starting my hardware cockpit and it sure would be nice to be able to use the entire PMDG suite. Their models and logic are just so good compared to others I have played with.

Problem with cloud hosting, like Azure and Amazon AWS, is that it can get very expensive very quickly and the cost will vary each month depending on how much usage you have that month. Hard to know what your bill will be at the end of every month. But, they sure have a lot of great options if you can afford them!

Glad to see your'e back up again! I, too, have noticed a performance increase. Hope it holds. I've seen a failure like that before on standalone servers with onboard RAID controllers. One disk goes bad, and on replacement the whole array went south. Not fun. Thankfully you have good backups!

Hope you and the team all had a great Christmas and an even better New Year! Thanks for pushing out such great products! I find the NGX is pretty much all I fly these days. It just "feels" right and is so complete that every time I sit down with it I learn something new. Sheesh, all the addons I've bought over the last year or two because of it is astounding, lol! I only wish my rig was more stable so I could spend more time flying and less time tinkering!

I've been very happy with P3D in the short time I've been using it. It has become my go-to simulator platform now, thanks to improved smoothness, overall performance, and improved feature set. Thanks for all the hard work, and continued development! Going off Biggles2010 question above, will the popping in and out of clouds be smoothed out when flying through cloud banks? It would be nice to see smooth fade-in and outs of weather, same as smooth fading in/out of autogen.

Well that's disappointing to hear. If, indeed, there is something nefarious going on then I can understand the problem at hand. But also hope it's understood how hugely useful and needed something like this is and they find a way to work a solution. The benefits to the community I think are pretty clear.

They've already indicated it's something they'd like to do at some point. Where it lies in the queue is anyones guess.

Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this Virtual CDU interfacing with the NGX the same as with the FDS, OpenCockpits, VRInsight, etc? Via the SDK? It requires the Broadcast option to be enabled so I "assumed" the data was just being fed into the "display" just like the other products. So why would this be in violation of the EULA? And a screen overlay with tactile buttons would be awesome!

What I found was really nice with Virtual CDU is that I paused FSX, turned off my iPad, had some dinner, came back, turned on my iPad, hit reconnect on the Virtual CDU display, unpaused FSX, and everything sync'd up immediately. All over my wireless network. No headaches, no fuss. Just works! Wish I could afford the FDS CDU (would love the positive tactile feeling of the buttons), but just haven't been able to justify the cost yet. So this fills the need perfectly for now, or maybe even permanently. Hope the developer does one for the 777 (but I'm sure he will). Hats off to him for a job well done!

I just picked up Virtual CDU after reading this thread and it works with the NGX on my iPad like a charm. What I see on screen is mirrored perfectly on the Virtual CDU. Setup was really a breeze and it worked first time. Didn't have to fiddle at all. Great find!

This is playing out a lot like Monty Python... PMDG: What is your name? Sir Flyalot: Sir Flyalot of Camelot PMDG: What is your quest? Sir Flyalot: I seek the Holy Grail. The 777 release date. PMDG: What is your favorite date? Sir Flyalot: The 12th, I mean the 28th, no the19th...ahhhhh!

See the following recent thread, specifically where RSR talks about why an EFB presents a challenge, and not from a technical standpoint. Though I'm sure technically it would be a feat, that's never stopped PMDG before. They seem to feed off making the impossible possible http://forum.avsim.net/topic/414633-a-proposal-for-pmdg-in-case-theyre-not-doing-it-already/?p=2730339

If they do, I hope they model the electrical and fire suppression systems really well! B)