Pelos
Senior Heliman
Location: Bizkaia (Spain)
| For those asking, I agree that for now iVol may not be the way unless you are beginning in the hobby and don't want to spend money in a radio just to drive the simulator. If I had this option 4 years ago, I probably would not have broke an expensive 9Z that is also expensive to repair.
However, I think the few new models and sceneries, and the highly improved graphics performance do justify upgrading to the new version at the price of the new slimstick interface.
What I don't know is the politics of the Reflex team if you later want to go to iVol. Will they exchange slimstick for iVol? At the same price you pay now for exchanging it for the old interface?
Getting back to my particular iVol review:
It works great in models with governor activated And I'm beginning to get used to the different layout of controls and feeling of the gimbals.
However, if you deactivate governor:
*I noticed that the trims don't work at the extremes (they work arround center, but if you pull per example the throtle stick to the highest or lowest value (+100/-100) and move the trim up or down, the value does not change, so I couldn't simulate the throtle going to idle at low stick and cut with trim down. It simply cuts at low stick.
* iVol for now does not send a pitch channel, what makes sense 'cause we don't have a way to mix channels or program pitch and throtle curves. Both Pitch and Throtle must be assigned to channel 2 wich gives a linear response -100,0,100, what makes imposible to fly inverted if governor is deactivated (negative pitch gives low throtle values.
* Throtle hold switch does not work. Again, there's no mixing, so the switch don't change the throtle value; just activates the autorotation funcion of the simulator.
So you are practically tied to the governed model option only Until they release the iVol programming software.
Model and scenery selection seem to work better than before, although it may be just that I haven't copied the huge amount of models and sceneries that I have in the folder of the previous version. It stil has no way of "collapsing" all the tree to only view the root and th whole tree is displayed by default. I think it's a simple option to implement and that way would be easier to find the model you want to load when you have many.
RMK (model constructor) is a new version. I didn't see any new functions in a quick view opening one of my models (see my gallery), but i suppose they corrected some of the issues it had (I must say that the previous version was very stable). When I have some free time I'd like to remake from scratch my millenium II model and try it
RSK (scenery constructor) does not come installed by default, but I suppose that you can install the same version available from their web site. Would be great that all we could make our favourite sceneries, but being in german I only installed it when it was released and didn't even try to use it.
Best Regards.
Is there a life outside the sim? |
