For anyone who might be using VelociDrone in free trial version mode, or who might have been thinking about taking up the free trial option, be aware of the following statement released by Ashley yesterday on Facebook. For those who don't use Facebook, a copy of the post is quoted below.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/velocidr...2288638069

Quote:Ashley Davis
Admin · Yesterday at 6:06 PM

For some time we have been considering whether to continue to offer a free trial of VelociDrone and today have come to the decision that we will no longer offer this.
The reason for this is whilst customers may find the comfort blanket of using the trial useful to assess if they can run the sim, it creates for us an overhead of support for customers who effectively are using our resources to support them but without having contributed to the provision of those resources.

Demand for our trial has become so large that we can no longer continue to provide this as a free resource and as such we will be moving to the same model as other gaming products whereby you can purchase the full product and if you are unhappy in anyway with the purchase in the first 24 hours a no questions asked refund will be honoured.
Additionally this removes the overhead of creating and maintaining the trial versions and takes a significant load off our website for trial downloads, handling logins and generally managing a non paying customer base accessing our servers.

The benefits of this are two fold - one is that we only end up supporting customers who are serious about making a purchase and we don't end up spending valuable development time supporting customers who may never make a purchase and just use the trial forever.

Secondly customers who do engage with us in this way will experience an unrestricted full version of the product rather than a frustrating restricted version in making their assessment.

We feel that we should place our resources more firmly with our paying customer base and this should be seen as a positive step towards that goal.
We are sensitive that some customers may not make a purchase without trying it first and whilst this has worked for us in the past we don't believe it is helping us or our paying customers for the future.

We have a solid reputation as a quality FPV simulation, we no longer feel we need to justify that with free trials to assess if this is the case.

Are they putting Velocidrone on Steam or another platform?

I never used any other simulator than Velocidrone. 
After using the free trial with a gamepad I bought my transmitter and also the Velocidrone license right away. 
I understand that decision. I think they can rely on their reputation and their very cheap license to keep people interested.
For that price there is no justification for us to not compensate the developers hard work and all the infrastructure that the simulator implies.
For someone making a custom build or even buying a kit, 25USD is quite cheap and can be seen as a part of the build.
I can only say good things about Velocidrone. Besides one broken prop it helped me keep all my parts intact to this day 

(22-Mar-2019, 07:58 AM)Andreas-sa Wrote: Are they putting Velocidrone on Steam or another platform?

I can't see VelociDrone ever going onto the Steam platform. There would be no real benefit in them doing that IMO and they would then be tied into the Steam platform and framework (plus whatever commission Valve charge for that). One of the selling points of VelociDrone is that it effectively runs standalone even on machines equipped with older spec hardware.

I did a trial of LiftOff back at the beginning of November last year when they hosted a free tryout weekend of unnrestricted access to all the features over 2 days at no cost. I really liked LiftOff but you could tell it was quite resource hungry and some people who aren't gamers don't really want to have to to install the complete Steam framework on their machine just to play an FPV sim.

A month later, I then downloaded the free trial of VelociDrone. The trial version was really restricted and was quite frustrating to use (single quad only, single track only, time limited sessions), so after I got a flavour of it I almost immediately just dived in and purchased a full license. VelociDrone is much kinder to older spec machines and there is quite a lot of granular control over configuration of the graphics engine to help you tune the game to the spec of your machine accordingly, although on the flip side you do have to be a bit patient waiting for it to load up, but once you're actually flying in the sim it's fine.

I don't really get why some people complain about the $20 price tag of a sim because it's just the cost of a new motor, and I'm sure a lot of people easily spend more than that on a single night out, so why not just stay in for once and use the money on a sim license instead. Plus it's a lifetime license unlike your night out which will be p****d down the toilet (literally) and all be forgotten about a week later  

I also subsequently bought a license for LiftOff over Christmas when I got tempted by a 20% discount offer. I prefer VelociDrone for the actual flying characteristics, but I prefer LiftOff for the more real-to-life graphics and there are scenes in LiftOff that I enjoy flying more. That said, I don't fly either sim nearly as much as I should, and I really should be doing so more to get muscle memory practise in, and to get my moneys worth. I think I'm probably just spending way too much of my spare time on here instead replying to posts   

DRL on Steam is supposed to be good as well and they are just about to release a whole new physics engine based on real-time 3D modelling of actual quads flying around but I've not tried that particular sim. JB published a video on DRL and its new physics engine last week HERE.