Mario Donick

Dubai Morning ... Manually landing (without AP) the 707 in OMDB.

And that's why here's another one:

How close is close? Close enough for writing a news in a magazine issued in August?

Michael Wilson's Boeing 707. Very very old, but actually nicer than I remembered.

Short flight from Oslo (ENGM) to Tampere (EFTP). I love the clean cockpit layout and MFD interface design of the ER190...

New York, with converted ManhattanX by Aerosoft.

Beautiful trees

This is the E-190. And at x-plane.org, I just saw a forum post that they will release this livery soon. a) The SSG planes are no hardcore realism planes. They are certainly more complex than default XP planes, including custom performance settings in the MCDU, which gives some system depth. On the other hand, they do not offer a custom FMS, but integrate the XP default FMS with the SSG custom performance pages. b ) As far as I know, they are constantly working on updates. As you might know, the E-170 has just received a fundamental update.

5th leg of my world tour (with changed plane). From Linzhi / Tibet ... ... to Phuket / Thailand. More pictures soon in my blog.

1024x600 is okay, I think?

This is a true beauty!!

The E-190LR with (even more) enhanced fuel tanks (to resemble the Lineage 1000 business jet which is a variant of the 190LR) on a test flight in Alaska: The paint is made for my virtual world tour, where I am currently using the Falcon 7x also with a pink "plane is named after my girlfriend" painting. The 190LR Lineage mod will replace the Falcon 7x shortly.

From Hamburg (EDDH) via Lübeck (EDHL), Wismar (EDCW) to Rostock/Purkshof (EDCX) Sceneries: Orthophotos by SimHeaven.com (Rostock) and ZonePhoto (other)OSM by SimHeaven.com (Europe, with Autogen)EDDH by AerosoftEDHL-Freeware (http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=16105)EDCW-Freeware (http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=10305)my own EDCX-Freeware (http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=18984)Yes, the final airport, EDCX, is the first scenery I've ever created, this weekend. Sooo proud

Motor damage and too low and slow for gliding above the mountains.

I might think about adding reviews, but if they have a rating contrary to mine, it might be confusing for the user. But there are other websites, by others, with a bigger scope, for example http://xpworldscenery.wordpress.com/ where you can find more elaborate ratings. On my map, I have included some lego brick airports, if they are done well, for example PANC (Anchorage), or ETNL (Rostock-Laage).

Emergency Water Landing near fictional "my hut" scenery (NZMH) in New Zealand.

Yeah (and KCGX was wrongly classified as payware, which I have corrected now). I like KCGX still better; see my 2 comments on your file upload for LJPZ

I know there are already several maps and websites showing and rating scenery. Most of them, however, try to show each and every available scenery. Basically for my own use (to remember what I have installed and where I can fly to), in January 2013 I started to create my own map, where I only include free- and payware which I actually use and keep on my HDD. Maybe this is also of use for others, so here's the link: https://mapsengine.google.com/map/viewer?mid=zKdUoyDRH6j0.k7Q3rMFgZpe4 (Old version, will not be updated anymore as of Nov 23rd 2013: http://goo.gl/maps/ndsBp ) Ratings are simple: - Yellow: Okay - Blue: Good - Green: Very good You will notice that only a few airports have a "very good" rating, most of them have only a "okay" rating. The rating is VERY subjective, though, and payware is rated more critical than freeware, for example:

While 16 GB aren't used directly by X-Plane in 32 bit mode (I doubt that even in 64 bit mode these are fully used), I think these are still very useful, because Windows itself and several background processes need RAM, too. And the graphics card has nothing to do with 64 bit mode. It should prove useful even in 32 bit mode. Purchasing without informing about possible problems is never a good idea. One time, I was purchasing FTS avionics, because I wanted to have a realistic Avidyne cockpit. Only after paying lots of money, I recognized that they only included navigation data for the U.S. but not the rest of the world, which made me feel I wasted my money. But it was my own mistake -- I did not read enough about it before buying. Regarding the 64bit mode, with 3 OSes and a complex plugin architecture, it was totally clear that the transition phase from 32 to 64 bit would bring several problems. But as I said, it would have been better if this would have been made more clear to customers. I am very relaxed about that: Neither do I want X-Plane to be no. 1, nor any other sim. I am also just a customer, sometimes also frustrated and impatient, like many other customers. But I try to understand all involved actors and the reasons why things don't always work as they would in an ideal world. You can't expect 2-man-companies to work as fast as big software developers. But in the end, these are all luxury problems. If you don't use X-Plane for real-world flight training, we are just talking about computer games.

Actually, each place I visit in my world tour is a place I'd like to visit once in real life ... Maybe at least a part of it can be realized one day.

Your first assumption (or impression) is somehow correct. A user without prior experience in X-Plane buying an X-Plane version in a store or online shop will of course expect it to work as stable as theoretically possible. However, it has always been the case like this with X-Plane, and X-Plane is around since many many years. So your second assumption, based on your experience with other software companies, is not entirely applicable to X-Plane development. In the past it has always been the case that announced features eventually were all working and stable. If you are in the mood, search for the development history of X-Plane 9 -- and how different the final 9.7 version was from the initial versions. Of course, this is something you need to get used to. And it is something that should be communicated much clearer by the X-Plane developers and publishers, I think. Kris' comparison to open source software is good: You could say while FSX is similar to Windows, X-Plane is similar to Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu, for example. Of course the comparison has the caveat that many open source projects are not just free, but also "free as in beer", while X-Plane costs a good amount of money you need to spend, and trust that the original developers will do the needed work, while in open source you could fix it on your own. You have always the option to use 32-bit mode. I don't know which OS you're using. I use Windows 7 64 bit with 8 GB RAM, but flying in 32-bit mode and everything works perfectly fine. I don't have any crashes, even in dense scenery like YPAD or New Zealand Pro, or even the extremly heavy San Diego conversions I'm using.

Thank you

Today I continued my world tour in X-Plane 10. I was going from Dubai to Linzhi (Tibet / China). As with the previous legs, I've written about it in my blog: http://fly-xplane.blogspot.de/2013/04/4-dubai-omdb-to-linzhi-zunz.html

No, this is not true. When we analyze your interesting dialogue in a strictly logical way, we get the following: 1) Steven says A. 2) Tom recognizes A. 3) Tom has the opinion B that A could be misunderstood as C by others. 4) Tom tells Steven about B, with the intention to avoid misunderstandings. 5) From 4), Steven infers that Tom has opinion C. But 5) is nothing that is implied by 1) to 4). So I suggest to stop this dispute. It leads to nothing and I think nobody wanted any harm. Can anybody tell me more about the Centurion? Is it worth buying beside the good lights?