bennyboy75

I suppose we don't know. PMDG, Aerosoft and others will be able to give you the hard facts as to the health (or otherwise) of the market. MS themselves have a large hand in the current situation by not having a current FS title on the shelves of places like PC World, supermarkets and other stores so that has probably served as a barrier to 'new' entrants into the hobby. In many ways, we've never had it so good - the bar keeps going up again and again and add-ons that we deemed cutting edge only a few years ago looks like something from FS98 to my eyes these days. How much money there is to be made from it, we don't know. It seems that MS decided it wasn't worth the bother but then again they've hardly made the best judgement calls on a whole host of things in recent years so I wouldn't place too much sway on that. There will always be plenty of folk obsessed with aviation and who will play that out with desktop simulation, but on the scale of other types of gaming such as racing and shoot em ups? Naw.

I have win 7 on a 128gb SSD, FSX and P3D on a 240gb SSD and a 2tb HDD for general stuff. Still plenty of room on the FSX SSD but the Win 7 one is nearly full. I should have got two 240 ones really. Booting up, installing, dragging stuff between drives etc is lightning fast. FSX boots up from cold into the NGX in about 10 seconds. Compared to the old days where everything was on one creaky hard drive and you'd go make a cup of tea while it was booting....

I had deleted all the default num keys for Ezdok which is why I could only ever get the front pax door to open. I've brought them back and they work pretty well, although occasionally I can't get one of them to play ball. This still needs to be incorporated into a pop up panel or the FMC though. I delete pretty much all the default keystrokes with an FSX install so I can use them my own way.

The Avro is really rather nice, although you can see where the corners were cut compared to say the NGX or the Q400. Their 757 has a rather nasty VC by FSX standards which is a shame as it's a lovely looking bird.

Tried them all. VOX ATC baffled me, but it has its fans. Fair enough. Radar Contact is old and has its limitations but generally works as advertised. PFE is the most immersive and by far tries the hardest to provide a 'full' ATC environment. Hamstrung by its origins as an FS 98 program however and is a chore to set up and use. Pro ATC has potential and is a doddle to set up and use. Biggest gripe for me is chronic lack of voice add ons rendering it rather unrealistic and it gives you really odd ATC instructions. It's still rather buggy at this time. Definitely could be excellent though.

I'm not a GA-er as a rule but I recently bought Aerosoft's DA20 Katana 4X to explore Orbx Scotland's lochs and Highlands. It's not particularly quick but it's stuffed full of delightful features and has become a particular favourite of mine.

Airport charts or if I'm feeling particularly lazy I use GSX's follow me car, although relatively few airports use them much in the real world. I never use the progressive taxi, giant pink arrows are so lame. Some airports are a nightmare to navigate around though, Paris CDG springs to mind.

The NGX, Q400 and Airbus X are all very nice. I fired up the QW 146/Avro the other day and it wasn't as nice as I remember it being. Although I also installed their 757 for some exterior screenshots and the VC was pretty nasty - wrong fonts on the PFD, flat and blocky texturing and rather hard on the frames too.

I just keep it simple - I delete all the default FSX view commands and just use Ezdok and its mouse view. In fact, I only have 3 VC views set up as I use TrackIR for taxying, takeoffs and landings so I just have a 'pilot eyes' view straight ahead on num key 8, an 'overhead panel' view on num key 5 and an FMC view on num key 0. Then I have X as the key to go outside into the Ezdok Universal camera and then a further three or four views around the outside of the aircraft which are cycle-able via the C key, which I'm using as the key to cycle between Ezdok views. That's it. So I only need to remember a handful of keyboard pushes. Often I just use TrackIR during the pre-flight as well in the pilot eyes view, as a real pilot doesn't have the ability to slide himself all over the flight deck unless he has a magic carpet. From the pilot's seat you can see all the main controls and switches if you have the seat and eye point set correctly.

But the daft thing is, MS clearly don't give a stuff about FS any more. It's 7 years old, unsupported and we're lucky the activation server still works! For them to let a third party developer into the AI code would make precisely zero difference to MS one way or the other. Annoying!

It's supposedly coming in the update. I usually fly from smaller regional fields so it's less of big deal to me than someone flying out of Schipol or JFK or somewhere where there'd be carnage. To be honest they need to look at how it gives out ATC commands first before worrying about AI. ATC is very hard to do in FSX. It's annoying as if you look how far we've come in terms of realism with stuff like FlyTampa, FSDT, Orbx, the NGX and the Q400 there isn't much to separate it from what really happens in the lives of everyday pilots but ATC is the one mighty let down. The first person that can come up with really realistic ATC that sounds and acts like the real thing is going to make a few $$$$.

I plumped for it but it's not there yet. The two big issues for me are thus: 1) tiny selection of voices. Unlike PFE (even RC) you've no hope of selecting a sufficient number of voices to enact a realistic flight. They need LOTS more. 2) the ATC side of it is not realistic. You get weird instructions from ATC to waypoints, transitions and nav aids that aren't even on your flight plan. So you'll be under your own navigation in LNAV and ATC will clear you along the airway you're already on. Errr, ok thanks for that. Then at some point during the STAR you'll get vectored off in odd directions and given clearances to random waypoints off in wild blue yonder. On approach to Stansted I was given a clearance to the Luton NDB! It's a pity, as it has a lot of potential. Setting up a route is wonderfully simple, unlike the brain bender that is PFE and it dynamically gives you SIDS and STARS based on wind and the runway in use. The customisations of voices, runway use, AI chatter are are nice and simple and it comes with an editor which allows you to record and upload to their site your own voice. Cabin announcements and a pretty decent co pilot capability are also included. So there is much to like but until they sort the weird non-realistic ATC instructions and some more voices I'm afraid it's on the shelf for me.

I've fiddled about with the effects until the cows come home but inevitably end up going back to the default effects in the end. It's an excellent program but there are probably just too many options and you need to be a quantum physicist to make sense of the effects menu!

The doors are definitely something that should be incorporated into the FMC menu. The default keystrokes are a real crapshoot and don't work half the time. For an add-on that is so well thought out the doors seem like an afterthought.

I'd like to try it but I know I'll not fly it much. In a world of RNAV flying around raw data twiddling VOR knobs with no autothrotte and a primitive autopilot sounds too much like hard work to me. I like to enjoy the view

Seriously though will the 200 or 300 be that much different? The Majestic guys have shown the world how to nail a prop in FSX. I'd love to see them do it for a different airliner such as the ATR.

So I told my ex wife To be honest I do miss it when coming out of the NG. Flying an approach with no altitude constraints I like to see where I'll be along the flight plan at the selected altitude. You can easily see if you're a bit high or a bit low on the profile and adjust VS accordingly. Yes of course you can just fly the whole descent in managed mode but sooner or later you'll come across a portion of the approach (or get vectored) that puts you off the nicely plotted path the DES mode has given you. Then it's all out of the window and you need to go back to basic speed, VS and altitude. That's when you need a hockey stick. And to play, er, hockey.

Different arrow. You get a white one for TOC and for TOD. That's modelled. The hockey stick is blue and the same thing as the 'green banana' (why do pilots give them such daft names?) in a Boeing and isn't modelled. Would be very handy.

No problems with Accu-Feel, but the flight model outside of FSX thing renders it impervious to turbulence. Turbulence is generated by FSX and as such the Dash doesn't know it's in turbulence, thus this is reflected by Accu-Feel. I think. It all gets rather confusing.

Wind predictions - meh - for the length of even real life A320 flights it probably makes little difference. V Speeds - yep that'd be nice to have. I use TOPCAT with the data for the Airsimmer Airbus to give me Flex/V Speeds and they vary wildly from the speeds given to me by the FMGC, as well as some crazy configs - flaps 3 for takeoff? Is that right? Third ILS - yep I could see how that would be handy. All I want is the target altitude indicator, better known as the 'hockey stick'. Helps with descents no end as you can see where you'll be levelling off. Even the crappy FS2004 Wilco Airbus managed it......

GSX is a great utility You can adjust the 'message verbosity' in the settings to stop it nagging you. It will simply wait for you to do the requested items. I've also replaced the nasty default 'bong' with the Airbus triple chime, so it doesn't break the immersion in the flight deck. I agree about the gate settings. I usually go into the settings for each gate I'm at and have a look at what is set. Often it won't offer any pushback or bring airstairs and crash into the gate. A few clicks sorts this. A pain compared to AES where each gate is hand built and each pushback is designed individually but it is free, well once you've paid for it, it is !

It's excellent. There are still a few challenges such as GSX doesn't allow you to start the engines until push is completed (no biggie, a few airports don't either) and there are still for me a handful of issues around nailing down EZdok's DHM/CR/RND which seem to be all or nothing in their effect. Maybe it's just me. The fuel and load manager is a bit of a pain when you've come from the NGX's beautifully simple integrated FMC interface, meaning you have to tab out to the desktop, fire up the control panel, select each cabin zone, select baggage, select fuel, select trip fuel, set the load, send it to FSX.....blah blah. Oh yes and the default key for the doors is a real FS2002 flashback - Shift + E + 1, 2 or 3! That needs to be looked at. But - everything else is marvellous. The sounds, the flight model, the texturing, the VC, the systems depth is first rate - PMDG standard, no question. It's challenging to fly certainly - with no auto throttle and what can be described as a rather primitive autopilot - you need to keep ahead of the aircraft. In the descent and landing phase particularly the workload is high, but it's a very satisfying aircraft to fly and the amazing frame rates mean you venture to many places that you'd enter with trepidation in something like the NGX. Definitely worth the money.

To be fair (or not, you decide) to Aerosoft it was a stinker when it was first released. No SIDS/STARS, you couldn't even display the runway or the extended centreline on the the navigation display! This actually made this 'lite' product incredibly difficult to fly as your track simply led you to the airport rather than to any defined waypoints around it. Inevitably you would end up circling around trying to fly the ILS in raw data - not an easy task! The flight model was wobbly and landing it required a steadier hand than a bomb disposal expert. It also baffled me that the 'lite' audience wasn't deemed smart enough to want SIDS or STARS yet they happily modelled stuff like Flex? It's a very different beast now, however. The APU start time is still amusing, as are the Grand Prix engine starts but all in all you can happily fly full line flights with enough eye candy and immersion to keep all but the most hardened simmer satisfied. The checklists are a very nifty feature and the virtual FO does the donkey work while you fly - just as in the real world. Until Ro's colleagues bring forth their A320 which is a day 1 buy for me then the AXE will do fine.

Forget the 200/300 - do an ATR!

One thing to bear in mind with Ezdok is that when you load up the Q400 with it all the camera effects are set to zero. This is probably why so many folk (me included) felt no effects when flying the Dash. Make sure you turn those effects on and you'll be fine.