avgaskoolaid

First, it's almost certain that ortho scenery for XP11 will work just fine in XP12- thats how it was with XP10 -> XP11 and LR doesn't seem to be changing the scenery system. So rest assured you will probably only have to generate the scenery once and just plop it into XP12 once it releases. As for file size, the increase is exponential with a given zoom level. It varies based on how much water is in a given area (water isn't drawn in ortho4xp so an area with many lakes and rivers will have a smaller size). ZL16 is about 2 gb per tile, ZL17 is about 8gb, and ZL18 is about 32GB. Personally, I find ZL16 for general areas I will only fly over at high levels to be completely adequate, and use ZL17 for areas around airports. You won't notice a huge difference between ZL16 and ZL17 at FL350. The tiles posted above are ZL14, except Sydney which is ZL17. So if you want to fly around Perth, Melbourne, etc you might want to generate your own but it's fine for areas you'll fly over at high altitudes. Of course, MSFS ortho scenery looks way better at lower levels. You would have to have a tile at ZL18 or 19 to match the detail shown at low levels in MSFS. Ortho4XP has more issues with color variation than MSFS, but when the colors are uniform I find that XP orhos have a more 'crisp' and realistic quality than in MSFS. One of the few areas where XP's visuals are a bit better. Regarding hard drives, it sounds like you might be familiar with linking your scenery into XPlane so you can store it on a different drive from the main sim. You can do this from as many drives as you want but sim loading times might suffer a tiny bit. 4TB is OK but if I were you I'd get a bigger HDD and just store all your custom scenery (orthos, airports and all) on one hard drive and link that into XP. I found a 20TB HDD from Seagate at Microcenter for like $300USD which is more than adequate. What issues were you having with generating ortho tiles?

As long as the cockpit door is closed (and the camera is not inside the cabin) the cabin is not loaded. So, these features do not use up any performance unless you're in the cabin looking at them. The main sources of performance hit with this plane is the SASL coding and lots of 4k textures in the cockpit. The systems and flight modeling is fantastic as expected but I can confirm a significant performance hit on my higher-end system, cabin or no cabin. I'm thinking of resizing all the textures to 4k in gimp or photoshop or something to at the very least keep it above 19.90FPS wherethe FM starts running in less than real time.

Keep in mind the realistic FMS won't be like a 747-400 or 747-8 FMS. It will be an LTN-92. It's basically a CIV-A INS with a digital screen. Very basic and primitive, just like the real plane.

It's completely different. Everything in the plane is analog- CIV-A INS navigation is standard (the default FMC is included as a 'cheat', but a more realistic early-model FMS is apparently in the works). Flight Engineer panel, steam gauges... almost nothing is the same compared to the 747-8. Even if you're familiar with the 747-400 and -8 this plane needs a lot of studying to fly from A to B at all, let alone to fly it 'properly'. If you're familiar with the 727 then maybe the transition will be easier. And that's just the aircraft itself. From a simulation standpoint the Felis -200 is way better than the SSG -8. It has much more attention to detail- it seems to be as close to the real thing as you can get in a sim, while the 747-8 has a lot of corners cut and unrealistic behavior. The SSG is really a medium-level simulation. If the Felis -200 isn't "study level", then nothing is. (I do own both aircraft btw).

No. At least, not easily. And by "not easily" I don't mean a few hours of work, I'm talking a likely months-long project. Essentially you'd need to remake the aircraft from the ground up. You may be able to use some minor elements of the systems, texturing, and modeling, but basically everything would need to be redone. I've never heard of a plane being converted from XP->P3D, only P3D->XP, but I know that in any case it isn't something to even attempt unless you're very familiar with developing addon planes. It isn't a matter of simply saving the plane as a different file format and cleaning a few minor things up. It's really akin to fitting a square peg in a round hole.

I have both (even though I don't fly helicopters too much- I guess I just hate money). The AW139 is a decent enough addon that has a good amount of detail and is fun to fly. While it clearly uses some default XP gauges/code, I still find it a faithful enough representation of the real thing to be worth its price tag. It's in beta, but I'm not expecting it to get much more than some tweaks and small improvements here and there. The 412, on the other hand, is just amazing. The way this thing handles is so incredibly addictive- I don't know what on earth X-Trident did but it feels like you're flying a solid object through the air, just like DCS helicopters (and in some cases, better). That actually makes it easier to fly than most sim helicopters because it behaves in a believable, intuitive way. Unless you have some affinity to the AW139 or strongly prefer airline/VIP flights over military/utility, the 412 is a no brainer.

Vulkan. No, but they're actively working on it. Recent updates have included various tweaks to 'get ready' for Vulkan and the dev blog has had some info on their progress. Vulkan won't make XP11 look like MSFS2020, it will modernize the sim's code to make it utilize hardware better, perhaps improve performance to some degree on some systems, perhaps give Laminar and 3rd party devs more freedom to develop better addons, and perhaps open the door for a more complete modernization of the graphics system at some point in the future. Here's an analogy, based on my uneducated opinion (not sure how accurate it is!): Vulkan is like getting new machinery and better workers in a factory. New machinery and better workers won't allow the factory to automatically make luxury goods, but it will allow them to make better versions of the goods they already make faster and more efficiently, and possibly allow the factory to diversify in the future.

The announcement has been made... it's an ATR-42-500. Interesting.... I wasn't expecting a new aircraft announcement but there you have it. I wonder if we can also expect a 72 at some point in the future. As always, initial release will be for P3D and FSX but I'm sure it'll come to XP at some point in the future. Who knows... maybe it'll get fast tracked through the development/porting process by Thranda because the ATR is so popular.

My guess is some close partnership with a manufacturer to deliver higher fidelity, officially licensed planes. No idea what that manufacturer could be- maybe Textron/Cessna? Maybe even Gulfstream? I don't think a discount or one new plane would warrant this kind of 'special announcement'.

This doesn't help you now, but have you considered using a service like privacy.com that creates virtual cards for online shopping that you can either set limits on or make single-use? Although I'd understand not using simmarket on principle after that issue, a single-use virtual card would prevent the same thing in the future. I'm sure there are similar services out there, but privacy has worked great for me and I don't think they've ever had a security breach.

The data is in [XP11 Root folder]/Custom Data/GNS430. To update this data with the navigraph data manager, you need to add an addon mapping for "X-Plane GNS430, FF757/767/777.....(a whole long list of addons)"

Weird, because I have the opposite impression of the two sims. I have both P3Dv4.4 and XP11 set up with all the different addon software and I spent a lot of time trying to get each to look as realistic as possible. I find it impossible to get P3D to look as vivid as the real world does in most situations- the whole sim just has this dingy and flat look which is impossible to get rid of without making night scenes, clouds, and lighting on aircraft completely too bright and washed out. It was better in v3, but v4 changed it for the worse IMO. P3D's lighting is great during the day in the dead of winter with clouds and snow, but not at any other time of day/time of year. XPlane, on the other hand, is not only able to get closer to real life, but it's easier (and cheaper) to do so. By default XPlane comes with some surprisingly awful sky textures that are responsible for much of the dull look. Once you switch those out for better sky textures, the overall look dramatically improves. Basically, both look dull out of the box, but XP 's lighting looks dramatically closer to real life to me in almost all circumstances. Furthermore, much of XPlane's tweaking can be done on the fly, while the sim is loaded up, so you can mess around with different settings/mods/textures and see the results in real time. With P3D, with the exception of reshade you almost always need to close and re-load the sim to make/save changes. That's just my opinion, but it's one developed after a lot of time and money spent trying to get each sim look and feel as good as possible. But, of course, I don't doubt that P3D looks sufficiently vivid to you- different monitors and monitor settings make a huge difference one way or the other along with a whole host of other factors.

It means the livery doesn't have an icon image. Select the aircraft and start the sim. Once the sim is loaded, go back to the aircraft selection menu and click 'customize' on your aircraft. At the top right corner of the window there should be a button that says 'generate icons'. Press that, and the sim will take a few minutes to generate an icon for each of the plane's liveries. You can do this at any time with any aircraft you want, even with one that already has icons.

Yep, both the Carenado and LES come with that documentation.

Thanks, I didn't know that. I've edited my post.