Need Help Deciding...

[warchild]

initially, all the MS based sims were an Office efficiency simulator called ESP.. I made great use of ESP instruction calls while making Flight Models for FSX for example. P3D at least at first, was little more than the umpteenth generation of ESP.
Just some bleary eyed trivia for a fathers day weekend as I sip the coffee someone made me while I slept.. It's a sweet gentle morning..

 

[warchild]

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

In my opinion, there is nothing that comes visually close to X-Plane (unless your talking clouds ). That will change when MSFS2020 is released, but till then, X-Plane is king..

Now, cloud wise, X-Plane could seriously benefit from something like Reality XP, But REX refuses to make anything for X-Plane. OrbX is good, but their offerings for X-Plane are few and quite expensive.. I just bought Cloud Surf Asia's version of Singapore.. Cost me a whole 12 dollars and every airport building is exact, most inner city buildings are exact. Theres damned little autogen here, and its absolutely gorgeous.

Ortho4XP has upped its game significantly, and a lot of developers are using it more and more.. Again! Gorgeous.

Seasons: or specifically, the lack of them.. Well, thats not completely true.. You can get plugins that give you four wonderful and gorgeous seasons, but by default, there arent any. Sorry! X-Plane was never about things like seasons. It is a professional flight trainer disguised as a consumer simulator, and with over ten thousand VREFs ( internal adjustable variables ) its anything except a game seeing as how you can easily set up any real life training situation you want.. And therein lies the difference between MS and XP.. MS was created so that bill Gates could fly his little cessna 150 around when he needed a distraction. XP was created to train pilots how to safely fly the aircraft we all fly on.. We X-Plane users have been beating up Laminar for years over the lack of seasons.. We will continue to do so.. Till then however, I suggest any X-Plane users look closely at the various environmental pluggins available. Some do a very nice job of adding seasons.. Q8Pilot on YouTube is also another great source of information regarding everything X-Plane. He's globally respected and loved and his reviews are top shelf first rate on a consistant basis..

Anyway, I'm babbling again.. Have a great fathers day all.. I'm off to try and figure out how to deal with Disco's..

 

[Bjoern]

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.

Needs work, to be honest. But the potential is there.

I'll miss being able to run Bill's Kodiak, but oh well.

It's not Bill's, but there's a Kodiak for XP.

https://store.x-plane.org/Kodiak-Quest-G1000-_p_534.html

kind like CFS-3 (hiding behind couch )

Isn't CFS 3 still going strong on a smaller scale? Last I checked there were some pretty comprehensive modpacks.

(I still rate IL-2 1946 as superior though.)

Yes. Those are obviously intended to be Mirage but they are a bit crude in the details and very incorrect in some spots.

It's no Restauravia quality, that's for sure.

 

[b52bob]

In my opinion, there is nothing that comes visually close to X-Plane (unless your talking clouds ). Q8Pilot on YouTube is also another great source of information regarding everything X-Plane. He's globally respected and loved and his reviews are top shelf first rate on a consistant basis..

Second the Q8 pilot videos. I’ve learned so much from this guy about XP. His reviews and comments are spot on. It’s funny, he retired from making videos and the uproar from the community was so strong he came back. I think he didn’t realize what an asset and respected guy he is.

Happy dads day to all.

Bob

 

[Tom Clayton]

It's not Bill's, but there's a Kodiak for XP.

https://store.x-plane.org/Kodiak-Quest-G1000-_p_534.html

That will definitely be something to look at!

 

[PilatusTurbo]

Hey, Tom! Long time no see, from me as well! I was like you. A very extended hiatus or sabbatical from FS, if you will.

I got back into it a year ago now. Flew FSX for a month. Took a look at XP, and was like NOPE. Then, got tired of photo real scenery in FSX with ZERO autogen. Took XP out again, and started studying it a bit. Joined the X-Plane Org forums, and got involved.

I have made high quality photo real scenery for 5 entire states that I fly in, and they have varying and intensifying levels of detail closer to airports, as I custom designed my photo real scenery settings in Ortho4XP. It has a bit of a learning curve, but not too bad. You'll mess tiles up a couple times, re-make tiles a few times, and then you'll really have the hang of it. And not to mention, gorgeous autogen and Terrain Mesh with Ortho4XP. It does the terrain meshes as it generates the photoreal tiles. I would've paid hundreds for the scenery in FSX or P3D.

Yes, it does have the aforementioned limitations. Weather kinda rough unless you mess with some things, and ATC kinda sucks, unless you mess with some things. I've kinda left those by the way side a bit.

Tons of GORGEOUS freeware scenery. You have to learn to add the correct scenery libraries, and learn your scenery.cfg orders, but it's NOT that bad at all. I have links for master libraries on a page at the Org, and a great tutorial video for Ortho4XP, as well. As mentioned, it's very easy to add scenery once you have the libraries in place. None of that weird, convoluted crap that FSX and MSFS had in past.

I have not touched FSX since I nuked its installation a month into X-Plane. X-Plane just got the Vulkan/Metal API update, and my frame rates nearly doubled on my predominantly AMD/Radeon system.

No seasons, but soon hopefully they will implement that. I usually FS mostly during the summer, and that season has just begun.

MSFS 2020 does look neat. It's also being very strongly hinted at being a subscription service type game. It's also got MS backing it, which MS has a long and known reputation of ruining everyone's expectations. The minimum and recommended requirements have always been dubious from MS regarding their FS titles. The way 2020 looks, as gorgeous as it does, it'll probably require systems ten years ahead of realistic computer averages out there now, just as their sims have since like 2000.

YMMV, but I almost didn't go back to XP, but curiosity got the best of me. I put some good time in, and now I have well north of 1.5 TB of photoreal scenery that I made for FREE, with a little work. The XP community at the Org has some serious heart, and developers are beginning to develop more and more for XP. I just got the HotStart! TBM 900, and it's insanely detailed and the most in depth simulated GA on the market. For any simulator. Period.

Anyway. Good to see some names from back in the day. If you need help or have questions, PM me, and I can help fast track you through some of the small but inevitable headaches of learning. I'll also PM you my bookmarks for the scenery libraries and some tutorial videos to get you going. X-Plane is truly gorgeous compared, even with its limitations. Also, lighting is real in X-Plane. You have to see city night lighting to believe it, and landing lights and other various light sources are actually rendered and light projects and is dynamic. Very cool stuff. Freeware scenery for Flagstaff here, and those global apron and taxiway textures are too realistic. And FREE.

 

[warchild]

That will definitely be something to look at!

I own it. If you can get around X-Planes notorious Q ( P Factor ) Its a seriously great plane..

 

[b52bob]

One great thing xp has going for it is the scenery gateway. Users spend lots of time upgrading stock sceneries and uploading them to this website. Before the release of the next xplane upgrade, the really nice ones are integrated into the xp release. In other words, the xp community is constantly upgrading the sim. Don’t have the url handy but there is a site with a map of every upgraded scenery, if it’s a 3D upgrade, and when it was incorporated into the last release of xp. To make things simpler, it also shows those airports scheduled to be integrated but not yet.

XP community really rocks

 

[warchild]

not to mention theres some extremely fine scenery being made that can be found with a simple search. I Have the entirety of Japan and its airports now, all free, and simply gorgeous ( Qualifier: Hiroshima is one I dont have so i dont know if its correct, looks good, is fun, or not.. ))..