I'm a little bit confused by some of your comments, to be honnest.
To begin with:
jphespe wrote:1. Excessive time to load the program to begin using it.
Do you mean the time needed to reach the menu ? It's not really long is it ? I mean, it's just a few seconds or so ? :/
2. Equally excessive time to define and load flight.
You must have a problem with your computer.
Defining a flight takes the same time as with FSX, it's exactely the same choices/options anyways.
The flight loading time seems long, but mainly because we don't see the progress bar anymore.
It does take a little bit longer than stock FSX or P3D (with no addons at all), but nothing to complain about I think :/
3. The scenery is very poor. The airport and local terrain around them bears NO resemblance to the actual area. For example, I live in SoCal and the areas on and around KLAX,KVNY, KSNA AND KFUL are unrecognizable.
The scenery is exactly the same as FSX or P3D, excepted that you get FTX Global textures as a bonus. You had to download quite a lot of sceneries to make FSX/P3D look somehow acceptable, it's exactly the same with FSW. And you can just reuse your FSX sceneries in FSW, by the way.
4. Really confusing to create flight plan.
No it's not.
The new interface is quite pleasant and much more reactive than what it used to be in FSX or P3D.
The flight plan is defined visually and is just so easy and fast to create: just click on all of your waypoints until your landing area. What's so long about this ? If anything, this is equal or faster than what it used to be in FSX or P3D, isn't it ?
5. NO ATC!!
The sim is VFR only for the moment, so the ATC is limited to VFR stuff. This will evolve with the future updates, normally.
6. Frame rates range between 4 to 11 fps.
If you want to use modern games, you have to use reasonnably modern and powerful hardware.
Using a laptop for FSX-like simulations (FSX, FSX Steam, P3D or FSW) is a terrible idea to begin with.
Now FSW performance is not great anyways, but is being worked on by DTG. We have to wait to see what kind of optimisations they will implement.
To their credit, the modeling of the aircraft was excellent despite not being to change the HDG bug with a mouse.
I haven't tried to use the autopilot yet. Which aircraft did you use when you noticed the problem ? One or all of them ?
Installation after the download defaulted to C:/program files (x86)/steam/steamapps/common/FSW.
This is the default path but you are free to choose another destination drive, just like with FSX Steam (or any other game on Steam).
My FSW is on F:\Steam Library\Steamapps\common\FSW\