I had a guy email yesterday saying he couldn't work out where the option is to install an AIRAC in IF so got a refund after less than 24 hours with it. He didn't even bother to email for help - just emailed to say he didn't understand it.
I'm offering very good help and support and he missed that deliberately. I've had only two like that in all the time IF has been available so it's a bit of a record and has such little problems the biggest event recently in the support forums was some tumbleweed blowing through it.
99% of help i'm giving is system related and a good thing is that IF sniffs it out if your setup is not up to it. It's not going to work if it cant use the sim or the system properly. There's a million things can stop it yet still proves utterly reliable - one of the best in that regard.
Remember that IF uses data in scenery and planes that even P3D doesn't need to run, so a poor addon can mean IF can't gleam enough information and might even cause issues with indexing. Anything like that can be fixed in a day and I'll get out a fix promptly.
Problems with odd scenery techniques have been handled with work around for several years and I've had only one issue with a certain scenery package in the last couple of years.
To get an understanding of the sandboxing, IF doesn't come with any information about planes and scenery. A typical situation faced by IF is knowing if the plane has floats so it can land on water. In these circumstances we have to help IF by setting the Water Surface checkbox. IF knows what FSX stock aircraft have floats and that's not simply done by pre-programming it in - the data is in the plane and IF finds out about floats, so other addons can provide the same information but unfortunately do not.
IF being the sandbox cannot always extract everything it requires from planes and scenery - if they work in the sim doesn't mean the are complete. Some airports have come out with incomplete records as well and work perfectly in the sim. But a machine reader like IF needs data to read or it makes it up.
Another aspect not realised about IF is that it analyses all waypoints in the AIRAC and fixes errors during the indexing process. With IF we fly all around the world but AIRAC types usually fly a few routes with well honed data and never see problems. With IF it would bring up support issues here pretty soon with just standard data.
Getting to know how to use a program can be hard. If we don't know where stuff is in a new program there's some leg work to do. Right-clicking on the first page of IF for the popup menu didn't occur to him though. Once a function has been found it's hard to forget so there's really only a very minor learning curve with IF per-se, the real learning curve is all in the flying and understanding the sim.
IF being a kind of sandbox program means we can do what we like and suffer the consequences. A simple analogy would be using a CAD program to design a house and put the roof lower than the walls, it doesn't work. But that's easy to spot. Setting up routes and aircraft parameters requires some thought and experience.
IF is made to work with planes not come out yet. So with IF we get an arbitrary performance setup and start with that. IF monitors the fuel used during the flight and we can set our range accordingly. The precision is homed in and we discover the true performance and economy of the sim model in the sim.
We can get an addon plane and Google up the fuel economy and range and have a look at the brochures - that's for the real plane - good luck with using that data for the model in the sim.
In real life the test pilot fly's the plane to ascertain the performance and the fuel requirements stem from those test flights.
Behold, that's exactly what we do in IF and it's not something I'm willing to give up. Flight simming seems useless flying around like a goldfish in a tank, look there's my new Posoidon addon scenery nestled in the weeds, looks great doesn't it? I like scenery but half a dozen airports does not make up for no IF.
Another thing i'm not willing to give up is the amazing IF routes, especially when it finds routes around mountains rather than going over the top. I hate simple join the dots routes and downloaded plans are pretty boring like that usually and unreliable ... loading GPS plan ... waypoints XYZ have been ignored, tut-tut!
Even so IFs routes are based on airways, so if it can find airways around the obstacle and the route is not too far in consequence it's going to look for those. Some of my most memorable flights are like that.
One last thing, IF isn't a mapping product there's loads of those, many free. It is a very small footprint, tiny deliverable, doesn't go online during the flight, occupies less RAM than an Explorer window and uses less than 1% of an HT logical processor during the flight. Sure the map page is grungy but it's a tiny jpg for a reason and it's only for getting an idea of where we are on the globe, we can use proper mapping apps for that online. Everything you see is done for a reason, if you want glossy showmanship in your frame get a painting. IF's development time is in the doing of sim stuff not for the looking at - same goes for the website. I'm not improving those all the time I can improve the guts of IF - glamour can wait. I'm not fooled by clever marketing hype and glossy adverts and so it seems are most of you guys.
I'm building a list of updates planned and what's most important. However I've been sidetracked lately on other complex material, but I'll be back 100% focussed on Flight SIms soon. Anything you want to add?
Happy new year and thanks to all you new IF chums. Don't hesitate to come and post your thoughts.