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Another good company closing its doors.

Bone, I was able to utilize FSRecorder within certain extents. Now, unless something changed that I am not aware of when I was deeply involved with the project, I have no clue what you are talking about. While I am not part of their support team, nor is it common to provide support outside of the VRS website, I called Jon Blum, owner of VRS and am awaiting an answer from him. Either he will himself respond with an answer here, or I will tell you what we talked about.

All I know is that it worked for me, within certain limits for a VIDEO ONLY. Even if what you say is true, and the system unlocked liked it worked for me, I don't think you would be happy regardless. The custom programming literally takes your input and reruns it back into the simulator. Even if you were able to utilize it, many aspects such as afterburners, many control surfaces, animations and other core features of the product simply would not work. And rightly so! These are NOT features that FS was ever intended to cover, and to make the plane fly correct, they HAD to do it this way. As I said, this is a problem with MANY complex addons. To say the least, filming the PMDG 747-400X for FSX took me 2 weeks, for only 2 minutes or so of footage, which ended up only showing the plane taxiing around and taking off.

The same problem occurs with the A2A Stratocruiser when doing shared cockpit. Because the coding was so heavy, when in shared cockpit all functionality slowed to a complete crawl. It takes almost two minutes or more for a light flipped on to appear in the other person's cockpit. FS in general was never given the efficient coding, nor the SDK given to developers in order to make this system efficient, and any attempt with such a complex addon often falls FLATLY on it's face when used. I could give tons of similar examples, because I fight with these features on a daily basis when attempting to film them with FSRecorder and on multiplayer sessions.

This is all I am going to say further until I get a hold of Jon.
 
Bone said:
If you want to reformat your hard drive, you need to transfer your license back to VRS first. It's nice, but I wouldn't have bought it if I knew about this.
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That's the post you replied to Cody and your reply is what I responded to.

How can you transfer a license that is trapped on a broken disk?

For clarity, I don't have the Superbug. I have no use for it at the moment because I don't use FS9, but I have had to deal with this situation both as tech support (we issued them a new key) and the customer (the developer dug their heels in). For the company I was working with as the customer side of that, it cost us £6000 for a new license because the software was mission critical and was a single machine, hardware locked, license.

Is that a severe kick in the teeth? Yes, it is. And we went out and found replacement software instead of the same potential problem happening again. The replacement software was still running happily on a replacement PC when I left it.

The point I am making, however, is not about the Superbug, but about software protection in general. When many people see and hear bad things about an activation system, they don't buy. It's happened time and time again, so while there is a balance to be struck, it is a balance and cannot seriously penalise legitimate users. A lot of developers seem to forget that in their rush to protect their software.

Flight1, incidentally, go out of their way to make a system that doesn't penalise the customer. Intrusive isn't the problem - the problem is how well it works when the system goes wrong and the more complex you make it, the more likely it is to go wrong for more people.
 
CodyValkyrie said:
My only aim here is to extinguish misinformation and clarify how the system works, and franky it is getting a very fallicious and unfair shake, mixed in with information that SIMPLY ISN'T CORRECT.
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I'm assumming you are trying to extiguish misinformation that is in my previous two posts. Maybe you should reread my second post before you completely extinguish me.

Even the VRS people say you can't use the Superbug with FSrecorder. If you got it to work, please let the rest of know how you did it. I'd really like to know, it would make me happy as a clam. I also couldn't get it to work in multiplayer, let me know how you pulled that off. I'll gladly come back to this thread and say YIPEE IT WORKS, WOO HOO!
 
yago9 said:
Well that was the next logic step I quess..Never heard of them and from what I see on their website no wonder..How can you sell something like that this days ? Maybe the screenshot are deceiving but i,ve seen better looking freeware for most of those models..You have to keep with Nemeth Design ,Aerosoft, Alphasim and other few top notch helicopter designers.It,s called progress.I think the days when one single guy could make a payware model from start to finish it,s kinda over. The quality standard that CptSim ,A2A and Aerosoft models have today requires a lot of man power.
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I to had the same immedate thoughts when I looked on their website for the 1st time just now.
 
The VRS Superbug to my knowledge worked only by the playback feature, and NOT as play as traffic. Unfortunately, as I said, this is due to the coding required and was evident very early on. In order to make it work completely, I had to alias the model which literally took me two days of tweaking to get it to work, and used a defunct Cessna 172 file to mimick some of the features. Needles to say, it was a hack at best. The same applied to a multiplayer session.

Even in testing, when I went to Jon's house, we could only make it work via the playback feature... which meant I simply could not fly with myself and record multiple tracks. The same can be said for a lot of addons, regardless of how they implement the anti-piracy software. In order to make the system work 100% through such a device, Jon and team would literally have to strip all of the core features of the product and "dumb it down," making it more like a default aircraft.

The problem is very similar to why many helicoptors do not work with FSRecorder.

The misinformation I talked about was that the anti-piracy software was causing the problems. I tend to disagree, and want to confirm it with Jon before proceeding forward.

When you mention the VRS people, I'm curious who you are talking about... I know the whole team and know Jon as a friend. I'm not throwing around names, I just want to know who you talked to. With a large product like this, a lot of people may not know the full story, or even the limitations of such a product.

I would like to point out that nowhere did the product say it was compatible with multiplayer, NOR should a product ever be produced to work directly with FSRecorder. Doing so would mean the end of technologies like PMDG, A2A, VRS, CaptainSim, LevelD and numerous other companies have created. That is why you more than likely have never seen an FMC work fully and completely compatibally in a multiplayer shared cockpit.

Ian:
I understand what you are saying, but you have the system of activation completely wrong. All that is needed are the keys generated by the sale, which you can easily find in your e-mail when you purchased the product. There is no hard file that you must somehow retain, but even if there was, how is that any different than backing up the product originally when you purchased it in the first place?

I digress. I'm not making any additional money by saying any of this. I'm just trying to defend the reputation of a very excellent product of which I helped market to consumers, and that of Jon the company owner. I fear however I may be doing more damage than good and would like to have this clarified by Jon himself.
 
To CodyV. Here is the VRS answer to my FSrecorder querry. Pay attention to his remark about anti-theft device.


Re: FSrecorder issue

by Rob P. on Mon May 04, 2009 11:05 pm
It's not going to work because when replaying, FSRecorder makes the sim think the aircraft is being loaded again. This cannot be done unless you load the 2D panel to initialize gauges - without initializing the guages, the Superbug will not function and/or will not show up. The FSRecorder loaded flight tries to load the aircraft, and without being able to open the 2D panel, it is unable to do so.

You could call it an anti-theft device.. sort of like self destruction when in the wrong hands. No solution as of yet. Sorry!
 
Just to be clear, understand that FS Recorder has two entirely separate "replay" modes:

1. Instant Replay - this will "mostly" work because FS Recorder is using the currently loaded user's aircraft for the replay.

2. Replay of Recorded flight - this mode creates a new instance of the recorded aircraft, and leaves the user's aircraft alone.

It is #2 that won't work if there's any form of gauge/model protection in place.
 
Interesting response. To note, I do not believe Rob is part of the team, but is certainly knowledgable on most parts of this aircraft. My understanding was even more diabolical than previously described, and is more closely related the control system and how it was implemented outside of FS itself. Since it is making a call to the control system, on an aircraft "shell" so to speak, FS doesn't know what necessarily to do with it therefor simply doesn't render the system at all. This is a very similar issue that I have had with other pieces of software that do not have any anti-theft programming. Similar to what Bill described, but more diabolical because the system altogether requires a control set outside of FS to work. It has the same effect regardless.

At least, that is my understanding with spending a month trying to film this thing. As I said, I was able to loosely mirror it with a default aircraft description, but not only did I not document it because the system was only for show (video), but there is no use for anyone else out there to utilize it.
 
heres an idea, haveing a thread about FS paywares that didnt spiral into yet another priacy discusion. Its around, it always has been, it always will be, and in my mind disscussing and posting the names of the places only leads to the advertisment of it :engel016:
 
The facts here are that the packages I have from TheLZ have no copy protection at all and that they are closing, claiming that people breaching their copyright killed them.

Here's why I no longer buy their models: They're not FSX packages and don't port well at all. Multiply me by many people who have switched from FS9 to FSX and sales go through the floor.

Would I buy the Huey B again were it released with exactly the same features, but re-animated and re-compiled for FSX? Almost certainly (price dependent). According to their website, most of their customers use FS9 - well considering the fact that they sell FS9 models with problems in FSX, that isn't at all surprising to me - the same as Aerosoft can quite legitimately say that 100% of their customers for AES use FS9. It's an FS9 only package!

I may be in a minority here, so I'll ask the question: How many people here would pay a reasonable amount for FS9 standard aircraft compiled into FSX to remove the problems such as transparencies and the frame rate hit?
 
there are much probabilities i will be the next to end with aircrafts...especially after some treatment...i know i will not be missed.
 
IanP said:
I may be in a minority here, so I'll ask the question: How many people here would pay a reasonable amount for FS9 standard aircraft compiled into FSX to remove the problems such as transparencies and the frame rate hit?
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I would. I've spent too much time re-guaging port overs, and I could reclaim about 50 gigs of hard drive space by deleting my FSX SP1 version (needed for glass issues).
 
Ok, I talked to Jon. He substantiated what I was saying.

Essentially, the VRS plane takes the input from your controller, runs it through an algorithm and then injects it into Flight Simulator to produce a true fly by wire system. All input controls are capture through the VRS software to produce the effect. Because of this, while some modes of FSRecorder work, the system breaks down due to FS's inability to see this background coding, and quite frankly there is no way other than through the default controls in FS to make it work properly. This is the bane of attempting to produce such a system, as the default controls in FS simply are not sufficient for a realistic simulation.

As for the licensing, if any hardware is signifigantly changed there are two options that the user can do. 1) they may ask for a reactivation on their key and wait until Jon can do it or 2) they can send the license proper to their servers, which will reactivate the software automatically. The latter is the easiest for most and can be done in a matter of a couple of minutes. No rootkits, no 3-5 days of waiting for the reactivation, no calls to home, just a simple process to keep the pirates from getting illegal keys of the software and giving Jon the ability to shut down keys that are being used by tens of people across multiple IPs.

Jon Blum at VRS also stated that should anyone be unhappy with the software he is happy to offer a refund.

Cheers and sorry for all this mess.
 
icarus said:
there are much probabilities i will be the next to end with aircrafts...especially after some treatment...i know i will not be missed.
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Aww man, please don't say that.

I have been trying to get a hold of you mate.

My apologies BTW for not getting your video done. With the spike in work, I brought in a new videographer and we are currently working on your video as we speak. As a sign of good faith I'm going to give you some early PR for the wait you have had to endure.

For those that do not know, I was given all of his wonderful products for FSX in exchange for a video. I simply haven't had time to finish it proper, and I would like to publicly apologize to Icarus.

Contact me soon mate. I would like to discuss it further with you.
 
I have to agree with Colin. Icarus, there are going to be occasions when people are going to criticize. I have been following the exchanges in question. It happens...part of the game. I realize that your health has been an issue recently, and you are just getting back into the game, but I do hope that you do not give up over a few negative comments. Your group does good work, and as much as we would like to be...we can't always be perfect ;)
 
your health has been an issue recently
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yes and still giving some minors problems now, probably i am too much sensitive to comments in this period.

criticize is well accepted..criticism help emprove products... bytheway sometimes i can't get frustrated of some comments and don't say nothing...it's one of my many many defects...good to talk here with many nice people.

I am working to become as the blade runner's enemy...I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Aircrafts modelled by themselves...painted by themselves and going around forums to post and to sell themselves..(this part is mine--humorism help) and customers always happy and saying i like also defects and please don't correct......lol

My apologies BTW for not getting your video done.
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no problems i will try to catch you tonight or tomorrow cody
 
Icarus, stay strong man.

There are always people who go off on models and say bad things. Pretend they dont exist.

The Epic was written up perhaps 5 times (personal reviews) at SimFlight (by one single person...) as being the worst model they had ever flown, was barely worth being freeware, etc. The rudest comments I had ever seen 'ever'. Meanwhile, I am getting tons of emails saying its one of the best models they have. So, dont listen to the negativity. Dont let one person get you depressed enough to quit. It would hurt all of us...



Bill
 
The Epic was written up perhaps 5 times (personal reviews) at SimFlight as being the worst model they had ever flown,
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Really? unbelievable....so having for the gladiator zero negative comments and 5 stars on simflight and fspilot it's a miracle...strange i didn't visit lourdes this year......
 
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