phoenix 5m out

[3dx]

D/loaded the latest update and there is a definite improvement- actually feels like a sim now ,,
even the goblin 500 flies pretty close to real life- found that calibrating the tx after updating makes a massive difference, feels good now !!..

[SaneAdam]

I don't think it was the frequency of the updates that frustrated people - more that frequent updates were actually needed in the first place! It's not unreasonable to expect v5 to have been better out of the box than v4. As it was, it appears that v5 had too many problems that were fixed in public rather than in a controlled software develop/test lifecycle.

Linked to the download problems - there's nothing on this earth that can cause as much annoyance as a computer system. As the saying goes, " ... to err is human, but to really f**k things up, you need a computer!"

In my experience…. a lot of computer software works this way. Take Call of Duty, or any online game for that matter. The problems with the online game are always ridiculous on release. Lots of very silly bugs and errors and glitches. It sometimes takes them months to get all the correct updates sorted with the majority of gamers becoming very frustrated and even abandoning the game until updates are announced.

Lets face it…. a hell of a lot more people play Call of duty… and it has a bigger budget and a bigger team…. and they still get things very wrong ALL THE TIME. To say Phoenix is such a small team, i think they have done very well, worked very fast.

That does not mean it is right that we have to be beta testers. But it puts it into some context for me when bigger operations suffer similar problems.

Hell…. i remember people using the Apple iPhone quality argument. The iPhone has had its fair share of problems too. Lots if i remember correctly. It can't be held up as the pinnacle of quality control and product delivery. The point being anyway…. i think Phoenix did a good job…. people love to get on the moaning bandwagon sometimes.

[tomatwalden]

Adam - I don't disagree with you - I work in IT myself and understand the complications with software development. Someone outside of IT though will just get frustrated, and forums such as this are obviously going to bear the brunt of that frustration - it's human nature.

That said - for different reasons, I switched from Phoenix v4 to RealFlight 7. The CD copy I got was obviously the 7.0 (no minor updates) release, and although I did update it with all the minor revisions eventually - I installed it and startly playing with it on 7.0 before mucking around with updates.

Have to say, it worked pretty much flawlessly. It had a few issues with importing v6.5 models, but otherwise was solid and flew really nicely. I'm not saying this to make any point about RF7 over Phoenix5 - but just to point out that it is possible to release stable software. I would guess that the RF team isn't huge either - but don't know for certain.

Anyway, my real point is, computer software - simulator or not, has an uncanny ability to bring out the worst in people. Road rage with a keyboard if you like ...

[Gixxer]

In my experience…. a lot of computer software works this way. Take Call of Duty, or any online game for that matter. The problems with the online game are always ridiculous on release. Lots of very silly bugs and errors and glitches. It sometimes takes them months to get all the correct updates sorted with the majority of gamers becoming very frustrated and even abandoning the game until updates are announced.

Lets face it…. a hell of a lot more people play Call of duty… and it has a bigger budget and a bigger team…. and they still get things very wrong ALL THE TIME. To say Phoenix is such a small team, i think they have done very well, worked very fast.

That does not mean it is right that we have to be beta testers. But it puts it into some context for me when bigger operations suffer similar problems.

Hell…. i remember people using the Apple iPhone quality argument. The iPhone has had its fair share of problems too. Lots if i remember correctly. It can't be held up as the pinnacle of quality control and product delivery. The point being anyway…. i think Phoenix did a good job…. people love to get on the moaning bandwagon sometimes.

I know of one major game producer that doesn't even bother to fix the problems. They ignore all posts on their forums and if you go down the support ticket route, they say they'll look into the problem, then a few days later they close your support ticket, and when the forums get filled full of negative comments, they delete the forums and start again. This continues until the game becomes obsolete and people buy into their next bag of bugs. One of their titles was so bad that the majority of people who bought the PC version of their game couldn't play online. These people were ignored and the 2nd game in the franchise was released, and this was even worse than the first version. Very few people could play online and the forums were overwhelmed with irate customers. Needless to say the forums were regularly deleted and even now there are only a handful of posts there. How they get away with it I'll never know.

[waveydavey]

I think that unlike in the past where Phoenix actually told us it was beta for testing the only mistake they made with V5 was that they didn't.

The update wasn't good and it didn't fly at all well, seems to be back to V4 type as of now so begs the question what was the update for, apart from the fairly useless start up screen I can't identify any real feature of worth

[parksy]

Seemed to fly ok I just lost the tutorials, uninstalled and reinstalled original v.3 then updated to 4 again, so far so good, will try again to see if tutorials stay. Can I just say that after spending 2 hours trying to get circuits nailed I nearly threw controller through the screen. Precision flying is soooo much harder than just wangin it around in the air (the heli that is! Fnaar Fnaar)