Gandy, thanks for the feedback. That was my impression after working my way through the PREPAR3d forum last night. Three things really impressed me working my way through the forum apart from them acknowledging the good work of CAPT SIM (I will forgive them picking the eyes out of other aircraft to showcase Lockheed stuff (Team KBT and others) but hey I fly them too and why they not do this, I would too.

1. They are up to version 1.4 and are actively working on bugs and problems and encourage feedback and bug reports from users. The participation by the software gurus there on the forum shows they are keen to make this as bug free and seamless to the user as they can. The underlying theme seemed to be that they thought FSX was effectively old (in software terms) and effectively held together with string and wire so to speak and they are aiming at a product that does not rely on countless fixes and other programming script fixes by enthusiastic amateurs and others to overcome the work not done by MS to make it work they way it should.

2. That they cleaned up the world scenery and they support and use addon scenery products like ORBX and another company to enhance to make it as realistic as possible. They also provide for porting across other good stuff like REX and FSUIPC to enhance and improve the programs useability and experience.

3. They respond to problems and issues almost immediately.

Now that is so different to Microsoft is it not.

It seems the price is now US$199 per copy not per month and although they require you to be an aviation industry participant that is I believe their primary goal but is also a result of some contractual clause from MS not to target gamers and recreational users (wink wink nudge nudge were all private pilots are we not?) but it is not such an issue now MS Flight has bitten the dust which was probaly the original reason for the restriction.

The future just looked a lot brighter for all us simmers and to have it tied with an aerospace manufacturer or renown is to my mind a marriage made in heaven.

Got a lot of tidying up of my other files to do then into the new sim future with my Capt Sim stuff.