petabread

For me none of the active sky products were ever good until active sky next and in my opinion the fsrealwx and even the efass ultrawx provide an excellent source of weather for now. As far as xpx and givin it a try, I hated the demo, it didn't provide enough time to really help make my decision so I just took a chance. While it lacks ATC and an active sky next type weather engine, I use it for all types of flights and honestly for me, and this is an opinion, the sim heaven sceneries and world2xplane has made my NYC and several cities look 100x better than fsx which was important. The final straw for me, I was doing a flight from Orlando to Las Vegas with the Pmdg 737, and on approach it just quit no warning no nothing and I was reminded how unstable fsx is. Switched to x-plane and never looked back again.

I'm would agree that the JARdesign A320 is very good as far as systems following and auto flight procedures. However, hand flying it in my opinion is a nightmare, it doesn't react the way a plane would, it gets jumpy, the turns are too heavy. I try not to hand fly that aircraft. I don't have the other ones but I'm considering them now since this bus needs to be able to handle a human at the controls and it doesn't well. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I have found by default alt-T is a real time compression.

Alt-T works up to 6x

I have noticed that HDR adds more life to x-plane and I was flying with it off for a while. I just got x-plane 10 last month and initially I preferred the higher frames with HDR but I end up getting about 20-25 frames with HDR on around high density places such as New York and I notice a difference in experience so now I fly with it on. In my opinion ATC is the big issue, when it works, it's pretty good. However, the other day it had me taxiing back and forth with no end in sight. Also the lack of ability to file vfr flights and use atc for vfr is a big no no. When I fly for real here in NY, even with VFR, atc is a must. Flight models is interesting, the Cessna 172, which I have real world experience in, doesn't feel quite right. I also have noticed that for some reason I can turn 180 degrees, with the 30 degree angle and almost stay at the exact same spot as if my Cessna uses thrust vectoring... I don't know, maybe it's just me. I have to say though, it took me a while to get on the x-plane 10 wagon, the 15 min demo for me did more harm than good but having the full version a few freeware downloads for cities and airports, sometimes I forget I'm home on the computer and that's a good feeling.

Stability was never an issue. Yes I enjoyed the flight planning tool, but I did a comparison with a real flight briefing that I prepared and opusfsx and fsgrw and both engines were off but opusfs was giving me a more accurate report, fsgrw wasn't terrible but in some spots where the winds were out 220 for example, fsgrw had 320 and the spd was off by 10kts. And I'll be the first to admit that both have faults, I just found more with fsgrw. The cloud transition was almost equal to that of opus with occasional popping and weird injection of weather. For me opus suit me better, I also like being able to pull up the weather from the drop down menu in fsx. Again don't get me wrong, as someone who tried fsgrw demo and purchased it, I will probably use it from time to time but my primary engine will be opusfsx.

Yeah, I don't sweat it anymore, I'm not here to persuade anyone to go get either product, they both have demos worth checking out. They both have positives and negatives. It really depends on what suits the individual and for me opusfsx is it, I may occasionally use fsgrw but everytime I do I don't feel the weather is complete. Oh well, unfortunately real world weather isn't any more cooperative.

I've had several unrealistic weather run ins with fs grw, I actually own it and opusfsx but have been using opusfsx exclusively for a while now. Fsgrw is a very impressive software but the winds aloft were very wrong for 3 of my flights, even though they were stable they were off. And a couple of times in my descent into jfk I've had several areas where it should have been dead cloudy and opusfsx depicted it perfectly, fsgrw gave me a patch of clear sky as I was descending and knew immediately that this wasn't my weather engine of choice. Though I don't discourage anyone from it, and yes opusfsx isn't perfect but as a real pilot with real world experience I feel opusfsx gives me a better representation of weather. I haven't tried activesky 2012 to comment on it.

The lackluster response is a shame, windows 8 is very user friendly in all aspects. No one is willing to learn, or to slow to learn. It took me no time to figure out the awesomeness of the start screen, underneath the start screen it is basically the same everyone is use to. Start screen equals start button.

Been using windows 8 since November, so far for me, a person who has used other windows os for a long time, the experience has been painless. I access all folders and files quicker than I did before and windows 8 is so much more user friendly. I think I'm the only one, it took me 0.5 seconds to figure out that the start screen is the start button. Everything you want a click away.