Cameron

Ed (Xflyboy), Again, I apologize you feel insulted by this. It's also very unfortunate to lose you as a customer, however, I'm confident that the way we are going about this is better for everyone in that it allows us to keep our costs down in the end. We could jack up the costs instead and offer you some free re-downloads, but given that not everyone needs that opportunity why should you have to pay for it too and stuff X-Aviation's pockets with cash? I'm going to try and explain this as best I can so you all understand... I'm a very fair person when it comes to doing business. Any one of the developers who deal with me and money will almost undoubtedly say the same. I'm very confident in saying this. I want to be able to offer high quality products at the lowest rates that are economical enough for everyone to make a living off of, but at the same time accessible to all of our customers. I don't like nickel and diming. As such, I'm almost too fair when it comes to even my own cut on products. RealScenery products are unique in that they are very large and shipped on a separate server set than what our typical products (aircraft mainly) are deployed on. Unlike a typical server that has a flat rate for a set amount of allocated bandwidth, RealScenery is shipped on top tier systems that we are quite literally charged for every time you transfer a single byte of data. As such, when you come to us and ask for a re-download, you are also causing us to incur a higher charge for operating costs since we don't have a set allocated amount of bandwidth to operate off of for these scenery packs. You are getting upset because you are quite literally asking me to pay out of my pocket for you to have another go after an already successful download. While digital goods may not feel tangible to you, the bills that come to our doorstep are, and you must realize that we cannot be responsible to pay for someone's hiccup unless the problem occurred from something we did wrong, or failed to provide. The cost to re-download the scenery products are NOT to capitalize on, but rather to forward on for the charges X-Aviation incurs for allowing you access to said files. Even if I go and download a package right now, I will end up increasing our own bill and have to pay out of my own pocket for the service offered to "ship" any given scenery to me! Consider it like FedEx of the virtual world. Now, here are a few scenarios that come to mind that are similar in nature: 1. Go to Best Buy and purchase a DVD, CD, or Game. Bring it home, play with it for a bit, and have fun! What happens when you misplace the item and it cannot be found? What happens if someone in your family accidentally threw the item away in the trash without thinking twice to see what contents were in the box? What do you think Best Buy would tell you if you approached them with a valid receipt and told them this story? I think you know the answer here...and it's far worse than what we have even offered to you in terms of replacement cost. 2. Let's get a bit more relevant to our line of products. Let's say you like MSFS and have enjoyed your favorite add-on from PMDG. Let's take it further and say you never thought or had the time to backup your product even though you knew you needed to, and your hard drive failed. Now you need a new download and maybe even new serial numbers or keys again. Guess what happens here? Check it out: http://www.precisionmanuals.com/productcart/pc/viewCategories.asp?idCategory=10 That's right...for something way less in size than what we are offering, the charge is $4.95 per item to re-activate or extend your download link. 3. Let's say you lost your software CD...X-Plane for example. Something completely out of control of the developer of the product you personally lost. When you call the developer they sympathize with your situation. They know you purchased it, and are a valid customer. They offer you a FREE CD replacement so you don't have to pay $30 again, but there's one little issue here: FedEx, UPS, or USPS want some money to ship those goods to your home! The developer asks you to cover the cost of shipping (something you also had to do when you first purchased the product), and then you're on your merry way. Example #3 is very closely related to how we're doing business here. There is no reason that we should be made responsible to pay a bill that is incurred because a customer loses their purchase. As much as I hate to say it, responsibility is responsibility. I don't mean this in any rude form, and I sincerely do appreciate any business that has come our way through your purchases. It's a very unfortunate situation, and one that I do sympathize with. At the same time, I must be equal to all, and this re-download method has been in place for as long as we've sold the scenery, not in place for financial gain, and allows us to continue to offer as low as possible pricing to our customers. I'd like to keep X-Aviation open and to be able to offer our customers the highest quality products at the lowest possible prices while still having a life. In order to do so, I need to be vigilant in how we serve our customers both in the price sector and customer service sector. We want to be able to continue to offer these products for a long time to come, and staying in business as a financially sound company is the first ground rule for stability. We ensure we do that so we can continue on the road to amazing products in the future. Again, it's sad to see you go, but we do appreciate the patronage. Perhaps in the future you will change your mind and realize that nothing done here was done in greed. We love our customers and work hard to ensure we work on equal grounds. Without our customers there is no us. Perhaps you'll understand why now. Thanks for listening. It's been a healthy discussion, and we're more than happy to provide insight!

Ed, This comes down to a matter of economics. You purchased a product for $24.95, your product was delivered, successfully downloaded, and installed on your system. At this point it is your responsibility to backup your files, and not ours. It is simply beyond our control. You must realize that there are multiple people involved in bringing these products to fruition, and as such the cost of business is not cheap. Perhaps if X-Aviation made sole profit on that entire $24.95 I would be more than happy to provide you with a free re-download. However, considering the multiple people involved, the unique delivery method of RealScenery product and the fact that it literally costs us for every file YOU as a customer download, as well as the ease to be under in profits because we choose to provide our products to you at a lower cost, this is simply not feasible. Other "competitors" have counter-acted this in the MSFS world by charging upwards of $150+ for certain state packages. Instead, we choose to make things more accessible to our customers, but this comes at a minor cost. There are ways to avoid a simple $5 fee. You can backup your item or purchase a DVD in addition to the download from us. Or, you can pay $5 after an unfortunate crash on your system that was out of our control. This is a very generous offer considering the circumstances and the simple fact that if you were to try and tell a retail store you lost your product the most common answer you're going to get is to re-purchase the product at cost. Our part of the transaction was done when you first purchased. We successfully delivered the product to you, and from there it is your responsibility. We understand things happen. No one thought you were abusing anything. On the same token, we'd like to stay in business. Is that too much to ask? Thanks for being a customer with X-Aviation. It is very much appreciated.

To you as well!

Fair enough. This project, however, will not see it through and for obvious reasons. There are multiple 747s in the works anyhow, so you'll eventually get your fix one way or another (free and payware). Karma is decided by other forum members. It's a matter of what people consider your context to be. It has no effect on your freedom of speech, so have at it if you feel so inclined. I'm sure in time you'll get it reversed as you contribute more to the community.

Here: http://www.x-aviation.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=57

All this project has been is talk. Don t get me wrong; it s a beautiful sim but people have waited too long now and there hasn't been anything to try out. You're right. We should just scrap the project. What do you say? Lose the talk, stop the development, and let life go on? ...or would you rather keep the talk and someday have it? This argument is old, guys. We're not releasing a beta. We're not releasing an unfinished product, and its finished when we say it's finished. That's all there is to it.

The answer is "No." Beta testing and feedback is the least of our worries. We know what we need to do.

Way to bring back an over one year old thread. Nevermind the fact that the developer realized he was doing wrong and did the right thing. I'm really disappointed in your lack of realization that the 747 here is rather obsolete considering the rather nice one coming out as a default aircraft in X-Plane 10. Okay, so which part are you contributing to?

No.

Any orders placed since August are pre-upgraded to 1.1. 1.2 is still in the works, and we have no tentative date at this time.

Don't assume. I can appreciate your attempt to make an educated guess, but our previous method of allowing the re-downloads ended up nearly costing us more than acceptable. In many cases it was a wash and overhead was more than income. There are many fees that are factored in to running this business outside of transfer. There are transaction costs, split revenues, upkeep, and licensing. Please stop challenging. Business is not free, and we'd like to stay in business, not out. 1% of the people who GENUINELY deserve a re-download out of some kind of fault of our own, or a malfunction with the delivery process to our customers after initial purchase. Think out of the box! People are not always honest. Some like to share, some like to come back months later down the road and re-download things from our server on our dime for a new computer, or a re-formatted computer. It's of the essence that you back up and store your products in a safe place, just as you would your X-Plane CD or any other software you may purchase. As a side note, our new system is designed to handle much larger products...some so far anticipated to be in the 90+ GB range. We want our products to be accessible and within reason cost structure wise. We very much enjoy our products as much as we enjoy making them, and we're happy to be able to extend the hand of lower cost to our customers over the greedy method of charging $200+ for a state package seen in other markets. I would hope our customers are too.

Ok, guys, Let's let this rest a bit. It's been said time and time again in this topic that engine numbers have been adjusted, and the windscreen has been changed. The last post stating so here: http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=1117.msg13536#msg13536 We can work on any further criticism once the next update gets released, unless you have something new to state that hasn't already been mentioned in this thread.

Our income after overhead is very little on these products. We have elected to take little in income over providing YOU as a customer a lower price. As such, allowing unlimited leeching on a file where we LITERALLY pay a fee for every megabyte transferred does not make sense when it's so easy to ultimately make our overhead cost more than our income. Not smart business, you see. The other alternative is to sky rocket the price and allow more downloads (very similar to what MSFS equivalents do)...or you could take the more than generous amount given now on initial purchase to obtain your product and back it up just as you should with anything else you purchase. We have measures in place to help those that DO lose their products, but such cases are dealt with on a case by case basis. One in every few hundred sales (if that) is hardly "difficult" (yes, it's really that rare), and as such this argument is really quite moot.

Thanks! I assume you selected the European region for download? You should not be getting too slow of a download speed like you suggest. Users have been reporting very high download speeds up to this point. These products are based on about as fast of a server as you can possibly get. This is not the place for support regarding this particular issue. Easy fix, but requires more sensitive information from you that shouldn't be shared with the public. Please send in a support request with your order details here: http://www.x-aviation.com/catalog/contact_us.php Okay, so it sounds like it was an issue of your throttle not responding and not so much the download speed? Sounds like it went up to a very reasonable download speed. No, but for whatever reason your download attempts were exhausted on those particular files. Easy fix, just send in that support e-mail! Thanks for purchasing!

Thank you. Been playing a little too much GT5, Simon? Back to reality... I challenge you to find a better night lighting system across X-Plane and even MSFS when it comes to orthophoto scenery. In the MSFS world it's pretty subpar, especially in urban and rural detection, and we've gone the extra mile to do so. Bear in mind that we cover large amounts of area with accurate light outlines where you would typically see lights in REAL life, and not just sporadic placement....something that has taken months of programming and careful thinking to accomplish. The other alternative is to go back to the old way...nothing but black at night. That's not so fun. Assuming you're speaking of night lighting seen in XP 10...it's based on global lights, and something X-Plane 9 is not capable of accomplishing today. Fair is fair, right?

Hi, Ed, Thanks for the compliments! No buildings are not included with this scenery pack, just as with previous other RealScenery products. The aim for these products is to increase the realism by means of VFR, and Reno enhances this further with the "Enhanced" line of work noted in the comparison chart on the page here over the old sceneries of the past: http://www.x-aviation.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=24&products_id=64 You are always free to add an overlay custom scenery pack to show buildings on top of the scenery, or you can also download and convert sceneries from the MSFS world (there are some good one's for Reno...like Mach1 designs version) and have objects placed that way. Thanks again for purchasing another RealScenery product. We're happy you enjoy what you've seen.

Hello, all!, RealScenery Enhanced: Reno - Carson City HR shown in the Work In Progress section of this forum has been released and can be purchased here: http://www.x-aviation.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=64 The Work In Progress section for Reno has been changed to a read-only forum, and all new topics regarding the scenery should be posted in the support section here: http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?board=22.0 Enjoy this incredible new scenery!

Reno has been released! Please post all support questions here... http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?board=22.0

Below are screenshots taken in-sim of RealScenery Enhanced: Reno/Carson City HR. More info on Enhanced products can be found here: http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?topic=532.0 Enjoy!

The referral is uniquely stored within the link Ben provided. Nothing more for you to do but click Ben's referral link rather than just going the normal route through their website.

You should be able to get very satisfactory fps with this setup.

Hi, Ekran, It should run very well on your system.

Hi, All, We get frequent requests on RealScenery product progression through contact forms, so I felt compelled to make a post here regarding the status of this project. Reno is complete, and we are happy with the road network, imagery resolution/color, and are currently doing internal download infrastructure tests. As we roll out these new "Enhanced" series of products like Reno, a lot of changes come with it in how we distribute them in the backend. Reno will introduce a brand new downloading application, new delivery infrastructure, and a new installation method to make it less confusing for our customers, and more streamlined to get you from purchased, downloaded, and running in sim in very minimal time. The servers used for the delivery of these RealScenery products are very high-end systems, and the download speeds are fantastic. So, with the above said, be on the lookout for the Reno release very soon!

If you want, you can save the following two files and delete the rest: Keys X-Plane Calibration See how that goes...should save your joystick and keyboard settings.

I've done some spring cleaning here and been getting rid of all the nasty characters as well to have some nicer looking topics and titles. Most should be back to norm or better now.