MarioDonick

It looks very good. I wonder if the reason for the improved look and performance is that it's beta, so the server load is better (fewer users downloading streaming data). I hope that it will be as good when the update is officially released for everybody.

I am not really surprised about this. Of course it's a business relationship, based on a defined feature-set and a defined time frame. So many desirable features are left out from the beginning or may even be cut during development. It's not like some aviation nerds gather in a garage and tinker until they are done. It's a multibillion dollar mega corp outsourcing part of a product to another small company, and the other company must adher to the definitions of their contract.

Yes, that one. Under Activities. Thanks! And it's somehow good to read you.

Thanks for your impressions! Would be interested in your opinion about the thermals tutorial in which you are told to circle. I think it worked good for me. But in free flight I find it a bit difficult to set weather conditions with such good thermals as in the tutorial.

The mentioned FSX book is still the best. In German language I am also "soon" publishing a book, which is covering all 4 civil sims (MFS, XP, AFS2, FlightGear).

Delete the files in Output/Preferences.

In X-Plane, anything below 20 FPS is unflyable, because time slows down and even aircraft systems may react weird. You absolutely need to keep your FPS above 19, even in bad weather with lots of clouds.

Then you'll be probably more than happy when Aerobask release their new Panthera version -- this will have these Dynons plus a pretty good GTN (including terrain view!): http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/33177-kmic-minnesota-usa/ You don't need to feel bad (except you regret the money). There's always progress made, products get old and replaced by new ones, and products show the capabilities of a developer at a given time. That's okay. To be honest, I think even the real G1000 feels old by now and clumsy to use (well, it always was...) -- the G2000 is much nicer, because it incorporates a lot of the GTN technology and UI.

Because months ago I downloaded this nice freeware for KMIC and finally wanted to use it at least one time.

I'm doing a flight from KMIC to KBIS at the moment, and I must say that the combination NOAA + VenturaSky + SMP + RWC gives a really smooth experience. I'm positively surprised.

There is no beta 4 yet.

I mentioned in my post that VS is made by you... Oh, and you're right about the shadows... they felt strange, but I could not say why.

VenturaSky is a Lua script by frontendrob that tweaks certain aspects of X-Plane's atmosphere and weather, see the VS thread here. It depends on the NOAA Python script, SkyMaxx Pro and Real Weather Connector. Besides the script, matching sky colors and a preset for MaxxFX post-processing are included. I took the following screenshots at different places with all VS settings at default and sky colors and MaxxFX preset active. Alps: New York: Telluride: Boston: Australia (near Sydney)

One would think that, yes. But far too many games are called "simulators" nowadays -- in the gaming industry it has become a general term for "here you can pretend to do job xyz", regardless if it's really a simulation in the technical or scientific sense. On the other hand, a lot of customers speak of FSX/XP as games (such as in "I bought X-Plane, but the game does not run. What to do?" support requests) Finally, regardless of simulation or gaming, in an anthropological sense we are all playing.

It's like those people who (sometimes illegally download and) use Photoshop for cropping one image once in a year.

You are probably right... Great that you mention Mike Wilson. The review I'm currently writing for my blog is his DC-8. It's for sure in the "beginners" category, except maybe if you add the CIVA (then it might be of interest for some advanced users, but these in turn maybe would go directly to FJS' products). I've made a lot of enjoyable flights with the DC-8 (but after that had to go to something more deep again). It's like McDonalds vs. a good restaurant. I like both.

Well, then indeed 80% of all X-Plane addons are not "good", but just mediocre or even worse. But isn't this nearly the same for FSX/P3D? There's much more than A2A, PMDG, FSLabs or RealAir there, too. I was always considering A2A, PMDG etc. to be a least "very good", not just "good" (And "good", in turn, is in my understanding something that is enjoyable for a lot of users, even if it's more a toy than a deep simulation. But maybe I'm wrong?)

Thanks for your statement, Tony! That's interesting -- when I match this with my rating box, I'd say in regards of FMC you'd be in my "expert" category of expectations, whereas in regard of the flight dynamics, you're more on the "advanced" side. So maybe it'd make sense to differentiate further in my upcoming reviews. Instead of having a single "suitable for" category maybe having one "systems depth suitable for" and another "flight dynamics according to POH and what real-world pilots say in reports about the real aircraft" could be better (well, not named in such a long way as I wrote here, of course). Because I think that even users of my "beginner" category are interested in realistic or plausible flight behavior -- aren't they? Or is an EASY flight behavior more important for them instead of realism or plausibility, and the latter comes into play only when you have more experience? Another interesting point mentioned by you and José is simulator independent judgement. This is something we even had an article about in FS MAGAZIN a while ago named "Für X-Plane schon ganz gut" (in English I would call it: "Well, for X-Plane, it's okay"). That article was written when the first Reality Expansion Pack for the CT210 was published (REP was way less complex than it is nowadays) and born out of a little frustration we felt over the general addon market that had a lot of aircraft already, but all more on the "beginner" or "advanced" side of the spectrum (the Saab 340 and partly the FF 757 were the only exceptions at that time). The text consisted of two parts. The first, more critical part, was written by Oskar Wagner. He was a real-world airliner pilot for a long time, did quality management for A2A's Comanche (a great aircraft I have bought, too, even though I don't use P3D anymore) and naturally has high demands. He had a lot to criticize about REP back then, starting with the fact that REP enhances an existing aircraft and therefore can not improve some things (such as the autopilot, which would involve significant editing of 3D objects). The second part was written by myself, and I was pointing out that the development of both high quality addons and of a diverse addon ecosystem takes a lot of time, and that A2A had a 12-years headstart, so any comparison from the development and market perspectives seemed difficult. I concluded my part as follows (I freely translate this to English here): That was summer 2015 and I was working on avionics at that time that would later become the base for the vFlyteAir SR20's avionics. So I was thinking about systems depth also from a developer's perspective already, and that showed in our article, too. (I can tell you it's sometimes a bit exhausting to constantly have to reflect about both sides just to avoid biases. It would be sooo much easier if I simply could adopt either the "Hey, it's all awesome and amazing!!!!" or the "Everything is lacking!!!!" view, but somehow I have the inner desire to balance out both sides.) Side note: The avionics started as a commissoned work we did for a real-world aviation company (I am not allowed to say who it was) -- "experts", so to say, who (a paradox for me at that time) were not interested in a deep simulation of the avionics, but mainly in looks and flight behavior. After we got the permission to publish a SR20, we knew we had to increase depth for the X-Plane market, because most X-Plane users would not tolerate the very simple avionics of the original product. But when you look at our SR20, you will notice a lot of things are missing and a lot of things are different. We were very open about this to customers, as everybody can download our manuals before purchase (in the introduction I clearly state "this is not a study sim" and in the text I always point out differences to the real thing). I'm still working on SIDs and STARs, though... hopefully next year... Anyway, a lot has happened since then -- the many significant REP updates (the CT210 is my absolute favorite GA plane in X-Plane at the moment), the IXEG 737, the FF 767, the many updates to the AirFoilLabs C172, etc. But of course there are still many open holes. Now the question is if a review should take all this into account -- or if the review should stay within the X-Plane world, ignoring what exists outside of it. The question is relevant to me, because the avsim forum shows that more and more FSX users are indeed interested in X-Plane, but have a lot of questions and justified worries about the overall package quality they can achieve in the end.

We like our Arrow with the black-brown cockpit and the old-style attitude indicator :-) This is how the real one we based our's on looked like. I think that other options are best done by user modifications (liveries, so to say). But actually I did not want to talk about our aircraft in this thread. Instead I'd like to know what people are looking for in reviews, and related thoughts.

There are still small things fixed at the moment, for example yesterday we made some more changes to the notification system which (optionally) gives you hints during startup and flight. Oh! I'd love to read some more unbiased and in-depth reviews. I was hoping that Angelique with her X-Plained.com website would write a bit more, but her last review is also a while back. I agree, though, that writing a review is not an easy task (and on my blog I only wrote one so far...), but hey, you can do it!!

Partly due to my professional backgrounds I am thinking a lot lately about how people judge the quality of addons. This is important for me because I do reviews for FS MAGAZIN since 2012, and also work for vFlyteAir since 2015. The recent negative threads in the avsim X-Plane forum have brought this topic to my attention once again. Often people give a statement like "good addons are lacking" without explaining what is "good" for them or what they expect from an addon. Sometimes "good" seems also to be meant as "100% perfect as in FSX PMDG quality". Sometimes, in reviews it's similar. It all depends on the reviewer's preferences and on the group the reviewer is writing for. Often both aspects are not made clear. In my X-Plane blog, I had some months ago a review of the Alabeo DA-42, and the rating system at the end of the review already tried to take into account for what user "type" (beginner, advanced, expert) the aircraft is suitable for. Today I have explained my thoughts behind this a bit more. And I'd like to have some more opinions about this, so I post this self-promotion thread here.

Real world pilots are a very important part of the flight simulation community (regardless which sim). I'm very lucky they are with us.

I seriously don't get what the measure and the context is when people say "good" addons are lacking. In school a "good" is a B (or 2 in Germany), which basically means "80 to 89 percent" fulfilled. But most of your examples from the FSX world (esp. PMDG, A2A and FSLabs) I would consider to be "very good" (A or 1, or 91 to 100 percent). I wonder why the IXEG 737, the Saab 340, the FF 767 or the REP-enhanced Carenados are not at least "good" in your opinion. What are, for you, the 21 to 30% percent missing in these cases? Or do you basically say "I don't accept anything below 'very good', and 'very good' is just 'good' (enough) for me"? Edit: Asked in another way: Are you approaching from the "serious" simulation point of view, or do you consider desktop sims more to be a game for entertainment? I'm asking because the older I get, it's more and more a game for me; the serious aspects get secondary. But I think about that a lot.

No. This feature is planned for X-Plane 11. That presentation video some weeks ago had two halves. First, they showed X-Plane 10.50, after that X-Plane 11.

Thanks for the comment -- I don't know if it's realistic (how should I know? ), but hand-flying this model gives a confident feeling -- that you can trust this aircraft.