If MS Flight was a combination of all these teams. MicrosoftX-PlaneOrbxReal EnvironmentOne can dream, huh?

If MS Flight was a combination of all these teams. MicrosoftX-PlaneOrbxReal EnvironmentOne can dream, huh?

Get X-Plane out of the picture and it will be perfect.

Get X-Plane out of the picture and it will be perfect.

Xplane 10 looks VERY impressive. I am a little bit more excited about xplane than ms flight...

Xplane 10 looks VERY impressive. I am a little bit more excited about xplane than ms flight...

Good looks don't make a good sim. I've tried the X-Plane 9 demo, and was very unhappy with the user interface as well as how the aircraft handling was. Aircraft handling seemed very odd. The flexibility of the MSFS series is what wins me over. At least you can make the aircraft behave like they should.

I agree, X-plane 9 was not very good at all. 10 Does look impressive though, if it has the "world alive" feel that MSFS does, it will be a success. Ground texturing in X-plane is very nice.

If MS Flight was a combination of all these teams.  MicrosoftX-PlaneOrbxReal EnvironmentOne can dream, huh?  

what does xplane bring?

If MS Flight was a combination of all these teams. MicrosoftX-PlaneOrbxReal EnvironmentOne can dream, huh?

If ORBX was involved I would be concerned about performance at the large hubs if they are anything like YBBN. I wouldn't mind if they were responsible for the ground textures however.

Good looks don't make a good sim. I've tried the X-Plane 9 demo, and was very unhappy with the user interface as well as how the aircraft handling was. Aircraft handling seemed very odd. The flexibility of the MSFS series is what wins me over. At least you can make the aircraft behave like they should.

Honestly the "good looks don't make a sim" can be applied to FSX and Flight as well.I agree with the user interface part. They would be doing themselves a big favor in upgrading that aspect of the sim.I have to disagree about aircraft handling though. I think X-Plane has a much more robust system. Just look at how many systems you can fail even on a single engine piston. Fly a 777 into a microburst and the thing doesn't fall out of the sky when you properly pitch to stick shaker. In FSX, the stall horn seems to indicate you're falling straight out of the sky.Flight dynamics in FSX seems to me to be this mysterious concept that few people really understand. For example, I have yet to fly a light aircraft in FSX that accurately reacts to rudder input without having to go in and tweak it a little.

Trouble is, if past form is anything to go by it will be X Plane 10, then X Plane 10.1 a week later, then 10.1.1 two days after that, then 10.1.1.1 a week after that etc.No developer with any business sense will dare commit to spending four years on making something decent for it because the goalposts will be moving around all over the place and it will be too risky a proposition. It's one thing to knock out a simpler GA aircraft for something like that, or a set of textures, but when you are talking about spending literally years developing a complex airliner, you need to know that it's going to work right on a platform that is the same as it was when you started out on that endeavour.Hopefully I'll be proved wrong and X Plane 10 will be a stable platform that developers can trust to remain that way, but we'll have to wait and see about that.Al

No developer with any business sense will dare commit to spending four years on making something decent for it because the goalposts will be moving around all over the place and it will be too risky a proposition. It's one thing to knock out a simpler GA aircraft for something like that, or a set of textures, but when you are talking about spending literally years developing a complex airliner, you need to know that it's going to work right on a platform that is the same as it was when you started out on that endeavour.

That's exactly what Ryan or Robert R. over at PMDG said when asked if they would ever do anything for X-Plane. Perhaps it would be a different story if Austin only published updates or a new version every 2 to 3 years.

That's exactly what Ryan or Robert R. over at PMDG said when asked if they would ever do anything for X-Plane. Perhaps it would be a different story if Austin only published updates or a new version every 2 to 3 years.

Playing devil's advocate here, but as I understand it Acceleration/SP2 gave developers its' own share of headaches. Still pales in comparison to the amount of patching that goes on over at X-Plane and I agree with you gentlemen that stability is crucial to develop a sizeable payware community over there.Anyways, going back to the OP, I think he was getting at a combination of all the GOOD characteristics of the sims. I am always for a more realistic depiction/simulation of weather (like with REX).

I have both FSX and X-Plane 9. Although I KNOW that FSX is miles better, as a real pilot, I must say that X-Planes "Flight Dynamics" are much more realistic. I'm not saying, but just saying. :(

I’m not familiar with Xplane, but I suspect at the core they use the exact same formulas as FSX. There’s a conventional way to simulate aerodynamics and that engineering has long been publicly documented. So I don’t think either is reinventing the wheel here. But the FSX SDK makes no attempt to teach the details and concepts of aerodynamics...which are really complicated. There’s a lot of very sensitive and interconnected data that goes into making a model(data). At the core the formulas are sound, and that’s why we have some very polished sim aircraft that do fly well – because it’s all about preparing good data. The sim is just an approximation, but I think it’s more sophisticated and complete than we generally think. Lot's will disagree with me - and that's fair :(

At the core the formulas are sound, and that’s why we have some very polished FS aircraft that do fly well – because it’s all about preparing good data. The sim is just an approximation, but I think it’s more sophisticated and complete than we generally think. Lot's will disagree with me - and that's fair :(

+1

I’m not familiar with Xplane, but I suspect at the core they use the exact same formulas as FSX.

Actually they don't. X Plane uses Blade Element Theory (BET), which was originally developed to try and settle arguments about whether paddle steamers were either more or less efficient than ships with underwater screws. BET calculates the forces generated by shapes, which means X-plane reads the shapes of its 3D objects and then calculates how they will act in a fluid (air in the case of X-Plane of course).FSX is completely different, in using 'look up tables' to determine the effect of values in the aircraft configuration files, which it then translates into how the aeroplane should fly, so the 3D model itself has no bearing on how it acts in the sim.You'll get a lot of arguments over which one would be more accurate or flexible, they both have plus points. Of course if you drill right down into all that, both sims do eventually have to emulate the laws of aerodynamics, lift, weight, drag etc, but they get there by very different routes, as far as the computing aspects go.Al