XPLANE-10 changes all that ! Its built from the ground up in 3d thats completely plausible !

It will be fine with me! I'm a "scenery" nut. I took up flying real planes for the scenery. IMO, the scenery and airplane graphics are just as important as the flight modeling. Otherwise, I don't get enough kick out of simming, to make it worth it.L.Adamson

Disclaimer:This is purely a bit of fun I had with my texturer. 100% tongue in cheek. Please see the "cheeky" side of it. I'm absolutely certain that FSX and Flight have a good few years ahead of them.

I agree with Larry, due to 3rd party, FSX still has some legs. X-Plane, without the vast support of 3rd party....yet....has to stand on it's own with its default and that's a bit tough when compared to the "best of FSX" no doubt. I don't expect everybody to come rushing over based on what "could be". It will be a while before we see a large number of custom scenery and add-ons, but at the least, we feel we're demonstrating that x-plane is a viable platform for such development....demonstrating commitment by the team to answer to the demands of users. x-plane is fully capable of matching orbx awesome scenery with V10 tech.....someone just needs to show it off. In time, that will most assuredly happen. You can't blame people for wanting to "see the money". Us x-plane devs need to get right on it after V10 is public....quit talking...put up or shut up as it were.As for comparing default FSX to default X-Plane 10...I'd agree that FSX is a bit older. So the question to ask is default XP10 incrementally better than default FSX commensurate with the time span between the two...and I could easily argue that is a definitive yes....so that xp10 is exactly where it should be. It is not our goal to go head to head with custom work...that simply cannot be matched if enough time is invested in a custom work. So as a flight simmer, I'd say XP10 definitely meets or exceeds rational expectations.....and now we simply have to wait for the add-ons to come about...which I believe will raise the bar over xp10 the same as custom work has always raised the bar over default.-TomK

Hi X-Plane folks, I'm having big trouble viewing the blog site with an iPad.Has it been tested with iOS5 or am I alone?

Hi X-Plane folks, I'm having big trouble viewing the blog site with an iPad.Has it been tested with iOS5 or am I alone?

The photos play up for me on the ipad IOS5 - flicker black

The photos play up for me on the ipad IOS5 - flicker black

I had the same prob with my iPhone. I got around it by holding finger on one pic and opening in new window. It still needs fixing though

@HowardI too was expecting more on the mesh end, but what I've seen so far is still a improvement compared to XP9, I know RealScenery will be releasing some new "photo-scenery" to go with XP10.I think, this new version of XPlane will finally attract a few of the top MSFS developers and make this sim grow.I have most all of Orbx's sceneries & airports, but I really prefer the "flight" in XPlane, so 99% of my flying is in XPlane, but when I need an "eye-candy" fix I fly FSX.What I'm loving about XP10 so far is the "realistic" autogen which will be great for low & slow VFR flights.

And the news just keeps coming...http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2011/10/atc-description-of-a-system-pt-1/

first and foremost the production has to1. look good (next it has to)2. sound good (and last but not least it needs to)3. run smoothly.

Good point!Long thread but no one yet asked about the improvements in 2. ;) heheBTW Unfortunately I think the Laminar advertising campaign leaves much to be desired.But I really wish XP10 all the best!regardsarti

Hi,Hopefully, they will lift the limit of 20 AI aircraft very soon.Big airports with just 20 AI aircraft will feel almost as empty, as without any Al aircraft.Missing AI aircraft in my opinion is one of the main reasons why X Plane 9 never got that much attention from the community. AI traffic really helps to generate a "I'm really at an airport feeling".Kind regardsMartin

why would shadows of a truck .. be important in a flight sim?

Because that's what it looks like in real life, and isn't the entire goal of a flight simulator to make the experience as realistic as possible? That includes a realistic simulation of the environment you see outside of the cockpit.

I just wish certain developers would try to HELP make X Plane a popular sim instead of waiting for others to do it and THEN jumping on board and ride the wave the other teams have started.

To be fair, it's Laminar Research's job to make X-Plane popular enough to attract third-party support. Many third-party developers can't afford to sink time and money into developing for a platform that may not be profitable.

Because that's what it looks like in real life, and isn't the entire goal of a flight simulator to make the experience as realistic as possible? That includes a realistic simulation of the environment you see outside of the cockpit.

I have no problem with all this extra detail, if it doesn't significantly affect performance to the point the sim becomes a slideshow. Remember this was the main reason FSX got the poor performance reputation in the beginning. By putting too much detail, that average computers of the day couldn't run it. With human nature being what it is, you can tell those that they need to move the sliders to the left to run it well until you're blue in the face, they still want to run it in full detail, and will shy away unless they can. This is why we have a split camp between FS2004 and FSX today. Do you really think FS2004 would be still as strong as it is today, if FSX performed well out of the box? Only now the hardware is catching up to it, and more and more are moving over to it, as they can run it better. From the detail I see here, even without AI, it's going to take the top end systems to run it. Add AI, which remains to be seen how much can be supported. Will it be able to support the 100's FS2004/FSX can? With the statement, each will have it's own flight model per core, that is an open question. While I love detail scenery as much as the next guy, performance is more important for me. The way I see it overall, if X-Plane 10 lives up to the hype, it will pull over a number of GA simmers. For heavy metal though (Which appears to be most simmers) you're going to have a hard time convincing people to give up their PMDG 737-NGX/744's, and MD-11's or the LDS-767 and like complex system aircraft addons. X-Plane right now is in it's infancy in this regard, with the CRJ-200 it's best attempt so far. For X-Plane 10 to pull these simmers over is going to take either the high end FS developers to support it, which right now it has limited buy in, or show there are other developers at the same level. Either way that is going to take time.

Here is a quick comparison from one of the screenshots at the main X-plane website. What you see in the screenies is Pismo Beech with Pismo Lake to the right hand side and Oceano County Airport to the left. To be honest I did this for myself to see what the differences between the two platforms - FSX and X-plane 10 would be like side by side but I thought it would be interesting to share. I stuck google earth in there as a 'reality' shot to add some clarity on what is there in real life. Unfortunatlely Google's texture data looks rather patchy, which is a shame but I can't do much about that. The other guest missing at this party is 'Flight' so until that is released we would have a much better comparison of all the platforms limitations and strengths.IMHO X-plane 10 should be marketing itself at 'Flight' rather than FSX. I assume that 'Flight' will use newer technolgy and better up-to-date data than it's predescessor. It will be interesting to see what it will bring to the table to our very niche hobby. By the way sorry about the low qaulity of the jpeg I was conscscious of how big the final image was going to be. Also my computer is a corei7 with an ATI 4870 card (it certainly isn't cutting edge, blimey I remember when it was pretty good though...booo!!!) so please take that into account when looking at the screenshot!!!

@rojantrojanThank you for sharing these images with us.The XP10 mesh does look much better than I expected.OSM, makes a huge difference, December can't get here fast enough for my liking!