Need Help Deciding...

Tom Clayton

Tom Clayton

Administrator
Staff member
Long time no see!!!

I got out of virtual flying a few years ago when real life got in the way. Now that those issues are no longer issues, I'm looking to get back in. I have a new gaming rig that's just about ready out of the box, though I want to upgrade the RAM from 8 to 32. So that now leaves me to one last quandary - which Sim do I buy? I'm torn between P3D and X-Plane.

I know about the sloped runway feature, and that's a definite point in XP's favor.

My main concern is the weather engine. I like to fly in real time with real weather. In FS9, I had the option to download and run a real weather snapshot and go flying. Is this a stock option with P3D?

Thanks for the help!
 
Welcome back Tom, I remember you from a while back.

I changed from P3D to Xp-11 a while back and am really glad I did. The whole xp world was more vibrant, easier to add scenery and aircraft, and realistic flight dynamics. That said, there are some things in XP that P3D has and Xp does not, talking about a terrible ATC and lack of seasons.

there is a vibrant xp community that will give you a leg up when you need it. If you want to try before you buy there is a free demo that you can use. Also look at the screen shots here to get an idea of what it looks like.

Again, welcome back.
 
Hi, Tom:

To answer your original question, no, P3D can't do real weather. Most of the people I know run Active Sky, I use FS Global.
 
P3D has better weather rendering and I say this as an exclusive X-Plane user. Heck, even FSX and FS9 have better weather rendering. And FlightGear, which is open source!
 
As Bjoern said above, P3D (like FSX and FS9) has a better weather rendering than XPlane11 for the moment.
However, for getting this nice weather rendition, you'll need an external, payware weather engine. Active Sky is for the moment the best choice.
Also be aware that P3Dv5 now also has real sloped runways, altough that's not automatic: the scenery creator has to use that feature. So older and default sceneries will still have flat runways.
P3Dv5 also features some new atmospheric effects with real 3D clouds, but that basically an early beta version for now. Quite limited for weather rendition (again, for now. Nobody knows where this is going...).

XP11, despite its limitations (weather sucks, ATC is worse than FSX/P3D, fewer addon planes), has some very strong points and I would strongly advise you to take a "serious" look to it.
You can download a demo.
Contrary to the FSX demo that was available many years ago, the XP11 demo is always updated with the actual engine of the complete sim... In fact, you DO download the complete sim, but the scenery is limited to the area around Seattle, and the flight time is limited to 10 or 20 minutes before you need to quite and restart the sim. It's more than enough to make experiments and study the "feeling" differences between the two sims ;)
 
Leave it too me for not being satisfied with simply throwing a spanner into the works and instead opt for the entire toolbox..
Everything here is free by the way,, Doesnt make it bad, in fact, the first is frikkin awesome seeing as it doesnt come from the horses mouth, it IS the horses mouth..

https://x-plane.joanpc.com/plugins/xpgfs-noaa-weather

Next up, you may wish to look into two little plugins that I find very wonderful.. The first is Cloud Art.

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/40952-cloud-art/

and the second is Vivid Sky..

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/48315-vivid-sky/


Those three alone will put you very far along weather wise.. I wont advise on Payware weather injectore, As there is no REX for X-Plane they are all merely weather injectors like Active Sky, or full Graphics packages that Eat up your resources like mad like Sky Maxx+.

I personally use Active Sky with Cloud Art and Vivid Sky. My ONLY complaint is that I fly light and medium twins these days and even a ten knot cross wind can be a major pain in the patooty..

Check them out.. They're all free so you cant go wrong, and installation and uninstallation are so bloody easy its not funny..

May I also recommend "Fly with Lua". You;ll find it to be the perfect little swiss army knife of plugins and a great friend when used wisely..

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.ph...eneration-edition-for-x-plane-11-win-lin-mac/

Pam

eGDhUyB.png
 
Hi All. Since HiFi's Active Sky is being discussed and disregarding the sim (just noticed this is the X-Plane forum -- how did I get here?), what version would one buy if they mostly use P3D4 but still do use FSX-SE on occasion. It is on sale at SimMarket through the rest of the month so I thought I might take the plunge. I have a couple REX products but Active Sky seems to always get mentioned more. Was thinking of getting the FSX product and then upgrading to the P3D version since they both seem to use the same account key.

Again, sorry for asking in the wrong room but you all sound knowledgeable about it.
:ernaehrung004:
 
Daube said:
As Bjoern said above, P3D (like FSX and FS9) has a better weather rendering than XPlane11 for the moment.
However, for getting this nice weather rendition, you'll need an external, payware weather engine. Active Sky is for the moment the best choice.
Also be aware that P3Dv5 now also has real sloped runways, altough that's not automatic: the scenery creator has to use that feature. So older and default sceneries will still have flat runways.
P3Dv5 also features some new atmospheric effects with real 3D clouds, but that basically an early beta version for now. Quite limited for weather rendition (again, for now. Nobody knows where this is going...).

XP11, despite its limitations (weather sucks, ATC is worse than FSX/P3D, fewer addon planes), has some very strong points and I would strongly advise you to take a "serious" look to it.
You can download a demo.
Contrary to the FSX demo that was available many years ago, the XP11 demo is always updated with the actual engine of the complete sim... In fact, you DO download the complete sim, but the scenery is limited to the area around Seattle, and the flight time is limited to 10 or 20 minutes before you need to quite and restart the sim. It's more than enough to make experiments and study the "feeling" differences between the two sims ;)
Click to expand...

I cant help but wonder at just how that demo will change with the advent of Vulkan/Metal and the realities of Ryzen. Ryzen with its obligatory parallelism and vulkan/metal with its much more efficient graphics processing have changed the world foundation just enough.. before, if you couldnt get thirty frames per second, LR would cause the haze to close in around you till you did. This was especially prevalent in the demo where it pissed everyone off.. But now, Ryzen is giving us smooth graphics all the way down too 24 FPS ( the rate used in movie theaters btw ) and Vulkan/Metal have kicked up frame rates to almost double in some cases.. My little Ryzen 7 is getting upwards of 53 FPS over Tokyo with the Carenado Waco. Thats nearly unheard of.. So yeah, Its a real curiosity for me..
 
fsafranek said:
Hi All. Since HiFi's Active Sky is being discussed and disregarding the sim (just noticed this is the X-Plane forum -- how did I get here?), what version would one buy if they mostly use P3D4 but still do use FSX-SE on occasion. It is on sale at SimMarket through the rest of the month so I thought I might take the plunge. I have a couple REX products but Active Sky seems to always get mentioned more. Was thinking of getting the FSX product and then upgrading to the P3D version since they both seem to use the same account key.

Again, sorry for asking in the wrong room but you all sound knowledgeable about it.
:ernaehrung004:
Click to expand...

Easy peasy Frank.. ASXP. Unlike their lines for FSX and P3D theres only one product for X-Plane made by Hi-Fi and thats Active Sky XP.. Its a good product and I believe now includes cloud textures as well.. I use it, I like it..

For P3DV4 you;ll want to use Active Sky for P3DV4 ( its actual name )..
 
fsafranek said:
Hi All. Since HiFi's Active Sky is being discussed and disregarding the sim (just noticed this is the X-Plane forum -- how did I get here?), what version would one buy if they mostly use P3D4 but still do use FSX-SE on occasion. It is on sale at SimMarket through the rest of the month so I thought I might take the plunge. I have a couple REX products but Active Sky seems to always get mentioned more. Was thinking of getting the FSX product and then upgrading to the P3D version since they both seem to use the same account key.

Again, sorry for asking in the wrong room but you all sound knowledgeable about it.
:ernaehrung004:
Click to expand...

Unfortunately, since FSX-SE (32Bit) and P3Dv4 (64Bit) run on different OS platforms, you can't use just one version of Active Sky for both.

For FSX-SE you will need AS16, and for P3Dv4 you will need ASP4.

A positive thing is though that when you but one, you can use the same licence key for the other.

Copy from Hifi sim product page: AS16 for P3D users receive a free copy of ASP4. Likewise, ASP4 users receive a free copy of AS16 for P3D. A single license key works for both independent products.

I hope that answered your question.
 
That MirageIII is in my hangar and it's not too far away from the freeware MirageIII that we have in FSX/P3D. Can't tell for the systems or the flight model though.
Concerning the Mirage 2000, it seems it doesn't have a 3D cockpit according to the screenshots ? I haven't tried it yet.
The bad thing with XPlane is the general lack of military jets, even in payware. It's the only thing keeping my P3D on the disk, really....
 
After taking another look at P3D, I'm pretty sure I'm going XP. Seriously - what is a submarine doing in a flight simulator? That, and the fact that you have to either put up with a watermark or pay out a pile of cash... I'll miss being able to run Bill's Kodiak, but oh well.
 
Tom Clayton said:
After taking another look at P3D, I'm pretty sure I'm going XP. Seriously - what is a submarine doing in a flight simulator? That, and the fact that you have to either put up with a watermark or pay out a pile of cash... I'll miss being able to run Bill's Kodiak, but oh well.
Click to expand...

You might want to wait for the upcoming MSFS.

Oh, and I run P3D Academic. Don't remember seeing any watermark or forking out a sh*tload of cash...

But in the end, I'll be very happy to go to MSFS. If M$ doesn't do what they're good at: destroying people's expectations.

Priller
 
Daube said:
That MirageIII is in my hangar and it's not too far away from the freeware MirageIII that we have in FSX/P3D. Can't tell for the systems or the flight model though.
Concerning the Mirage 2000, it seems it doesn't have a 3D cockpit according to the screenshots ? I haven't tried it yet.
The bad thing with XPlane is the general lack of military jets, even in payware. It's the only thing keeping my P3D on the disk, really....
Click to expand...
Yes. Those are obviously intended to be Mirage but they are a bit crude in the details and very incorrect in some spots.

One thing I always noticed about X-Plane was that whenever a neat looking scenery was listed on flightsim.com it was always for X-Plane. Made me jealous. Or maybe they just photograph better?
:ernaehrung004:
 
The watermark is in tiny white writing in the very top right of the screen, you won't even notice it unless you specifically look for it.

As for the submarine, P3D is developed by Lockheed Martin and Is primarily intended as a military training tool. I guess the sub is included for anti sub warfare training.
You can ignore it or if it really bothers you delete it from the SimObjects folder.
 
I'm not knocking X-Plane, obviously tons of people like it, and it is growing. FSX is on it's last legs, I imagine, kind like CFS-3 (hiding behind couch :) ) (Obviously NOT dying).

But I tried out X-Plane for a couple of months, worked really hard to get it working for me the way I like, but, I just had too many issues. Mostly around travel on the water (I'm a big sea-plane nut, Beaver, C-185, C-206, Grumman Goose, etc.), it was awful (I read they have done some fixes for it in the last revision, but I haven't tried it out yet), so many revisions kill so many planes, (kind of funny watching an AI Corsair do ground loops and cartwheels trying to take off down the runway), weather, lack of seasons, I couldn't get the photo landscape stuff to compile on my computer, and there just weren't too many planes available I wanted to fly... to be specific.

So I ended up back in FSX and FSX:SE... I've contemplated P3D, but, with MSFS2020 coming out, it doesn't seem worth it since I'd still have to buy a ton of planes I already have in FSX to get the upgrades (A2A to be specific, but there are others). I enjoy the system modeling that a lot of addon vendors have added over the years, and it's just lacking in X-Plane if you want deep system modeling. There's a couple, but not many.

Still have X-Plane on my computer, but haven't used it in about a year except to start it up and see if any upgrades have been published and what they fixed. And searching for planes in X-Plane.org is succhhh a pain. So much fluff comes up when all you want is the latest rev of the plane and where to download it. (not to mention the people who run it are a bit arrogant)

But there are lots of nice people who use it and contribute, and some pretty good sites out there. (Heck, I pushed to get an X-Plane forum here when I was trying to use and developing some paints and stuff for it :) )

But, heck, it's worth a try, what's $60 anyway? a dinner out with your wife? Would she mind if you skip it for a week?... you could be looking for completely different things than I do.
 
fsafranek said:
Yes. Those are obviously intended to be Mirage but they are a bit crude in the details and very incorrect in some spots.

One thing I always noticed about X-Plane was that whenever a neat looking scenery was listed on flightsim.com it was always for X-Plane. Made me jealous. Or maybe they just photograph better?
:ernaehrung004:
Click to expand...

I see what you mean.
Indeed the sceneries in XPlane look really nice very often. One thing is, the default generic buildings included in the sim look much better than the generic things we got in FSX and P3D.
Thanks to this, many default airports look much better than their default counterparts in FSX or P3D.
On top of that, you also get very nice autogen buildings which make XP cities also look quite good, and many other details... all these things make the XP experience quite enjoyable, especially for people like myself who are coming from a 100% FSX-P3D environment, but were starting to get bored with it ;)
 
Tom Clayton said:
After taking another look at P3D, I'm pretty sure I'm going XP. Seriously - what is a submarine doing in a flight simulator? That, and the fact that you have to either put up with a watermark or pay out a pile of cash... I'll miss being able to run Bill's Kodiak, but oh well.
Click to expand...

Ideally, P3D wanted to be a simulator, not just a flight simulator.
The goal of Lockheed Martin was probably to offer a sim that could run any kind of military vehicule, I suppose.
In any case, the watermark is barely visible, you stop looking at it after approx. 3.5 seconds in the sim :)
 
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