Hi Michael, thanks for purchasing.
I did the programming for the FMC and will try and answer your questions. Mike Ray's book was a effort separate from the IXEG development, so I can only surmise here as I have not gone through it myself fully. Mike's book contains some good info that specifically relates to the particulars of X-Plane and our simulation and so the "IXEG" part of that title has some validity; but in doing so, also gives the impression that it should coincide with our simulation behavior 100%, so I understand your perspective.
Could you please provide the title of the tutorials, any version numbers if applicable... and the page numbers that you are following and I will take a look and see.
I can say that the minimum requirements to get the EXEC light to light up in our sim is the presence of at least one waypoint....and then hitting the ACTIVATE button from the LEGS or RTE page. Once the ACTIVATE button has been pressed and the EXEC button pressed, then the route with be 'EXECUTED' (and the route on the EFIS will be shown in magenta). Any change to the route or weights after that point will cause the EXEC light to illuminate. In reality, there are many versions of software that the FMC uses and it may be that one version will illuminate the EXEC light once weight data is entered while another does not....I couldn't say without looking at the software version history of the real FMC, which I don't have handy. IXEG doesn't claim to implement any specific version.
The FMC does have some unimplemented features (holds for example) and shortcomings with regards to the VNAV calculations, moreso when edits are made while in-the-air, but is robust in quite a few areas. We support two data sets, Navigraph and Aerosoft, and some aspects of the Navigraph data encodings are slightly different and have caused me difficulties in trying to support them both, particularly with STARs and SIDS that have runway transitions. If you have runways entered before entering SID/STARs ,then the behavior tends to be a bit more stable. Now I have been in contact with Navigraph as recently as this past weekend and they are working to alter the data so that it contains more resolution with regards to runway transitions. I believe this will allow me to stabilize the routes and editing appreciably.
The plan is to implement the the new XP11 ARINC 424 formats for FMC data, which will give the most accurate routing IMO. I have begun writing code to work with this data, but it is not a fast process and I certainly can't give an estimate as to when it would be deployed. Unfortunately, I have been side-tracked for the past 3 years in a rather busy endeavor, but am happy to report that I am working on it again and very much looking into enhancing the IXEG FMC.
-Tom Kyler