of course it had sliders ... heres what I meant, FS2004 at full detail and FSX and lower detail only changed the graphical presentation/frame rates ... basically the FS2004 and FSX (ATC, AI, airport detail, etc) were the same.Based on what I have seen .... xplane X will have fundamental changes over xplane9 .. so going back to xplane9 will be a step down. With the MSFS series stepping down from FSX to FS2004 .. you didnt lose too much...... that was my point.

Airport detail the same? Did FS2004 have 1200 detailed airports? Did they have animated jetways? (Other than 3rd party in some airports) Was FS2004 scenery capable of 7cm resolution, and default to 1M? I can go on, like the level of autogen in FS2004, was no where near the level in FSX!

To say that FSX offered no meaningful improvements over FS2004 is ridiculous.

To say that FSX offered no meaningful improvements over FS2004 is ridiculous.

Agreed, the main reason people didn't like FSX was performance, in which ACES shot themselves in the foot, by turning on animated jetways by default, which turned FSX into a slide show out of the box. It got the rep of a poor performer, and as they say First impressions last. Add to that C2D's were just coming to market, so many still running Pentiums couldn't run it with any kind of detail.

The video is amazing and the car traffic and great looking roads add tremendously to the reality for those of us that don't fly in the flight levels. I notice there are no trees-were they turned off to achieve better fps?

To say that FSX offered no meaningful improvements over FS2004 is ridiculous.

it did offer improvements .. but at its core.. it was more of the same. xplane 9 to xplane 10 will have some fundamental improvements.

The ground texture resolution alone was enough to keep me in FSX. FS2004 just looked like poo.

The video is amazing and the car traffic and great looking roads add tremendously to the reality for those of us that don't fly in the flight levels. I notice there are no trees-were they turned off to achieve better fps?

Trees where switched off. The scenery demo is made near the 1 detailed airport that wil come with X-Plane 10. FPS with this Beta was between 15 and 40 fps. Austin was honest about this and the demo is about the new scenery engine.I was impressed with wingflex and wing condensation effects. Austin demoed the standard 777 from X-Plane 9 and these effects where added automatically.Again the emphasis of this demo was the believable world scenery and that part was impressive. The clouds, environment lightning looked impressive. The street lights and moving car lights also where amazing.I haven't seen any Prepar3d setups. There where FS-X, X-Plane and Flightgear groups. Aerosoft was pushing X-Plane hard. The X-Plane X demo was on the large screen at the entry point of the museum.

it did offer improvements .. but at its core.. it was more of the same. xplane 9 to xplane 10 will have some fundamental improvements.

To be fair, FS2004 was already a feature-rich flight simulator, so the main focus of FSX was improving the visuals and fine-tuning existing features. It's hard to compared it to the jump from XP9 to XP10.

@MM,Do you OWN a full copy of XP9?If you do, then you have no idea what your saying.XP10 over XP9 will be a HUGE jump from XP9.

It's interesting everyone here want's the eye candy, no one ask about the flight model improvements (no word from Austin too), modern(!) tools for programmers & engineers...

@MM,Do you OWN a full copy of XP9?If you do, then you have no idea what your saying.XP10 over XP9 will be a HUGE jump from XP9.

I'm honestly not sure why you think I'm disputing that.

It's interesting everyone here want's the eye candy, no one ask about the flight model improvements (no word from Austin too), modern(!) tools for programmers & engineers...

Didn't you know? X-Plane's flight model is already perfect.

This post is going to forget 3rd party developments when comparing the sims. XP10 has hinted at a community airport modification feature, but I have seen little of it. This would be somewhat not a 3rd party as it is only modifying the defaults of XP10 and would be allowed to update automatically. Everyone would have access, as opposed to 3rd party addons where the defaults have been improved significantly or overridden completely.That being said...Some people felt when FSX came out that with the reduction in graphics settings/autogen/scenery details to get an acceptable performance instead of a slideshow, the graphics were just as good as FS2004, but the performance in FS2004 was better, so switched back until the patches came out that allowed the sliders to move right far enough to make up the performance gap with significant graphics improvement.Comparing apples to apples, going from XP9 to XP10, there isn't much the same except for the flight models. The XP10 world, having no underlying 2d imagery, without autogen, would look fairly bland and empty minus the roads and airports. Without thinking about AI/ATC, there would be an obvious urge to switch back to XP9 as at least you can have some autogen with 2d textures that make up the lack of 3d. Factor in the inability to get AI aircraft and ATC due to necessity to reduce the AI in order to achieve acceptable graphics performance in XP10, you have better world details (autogen/living world), but the same lacking AI/ATC. This would be acceptable tradeoff to some, as the environment in which the flight takes place looks more believeable, but some would say that the AI/ATC is more important.I have always steered towards FS2004/FSX due to the AI/ATC that it involves. Flying in a world by yourself is not very realistic. I also sim in order to achieve what is not monetarily feasible. I enjoy the interaction with ATC. Even with FSX, I was hoping for a way to voice control the built-in ATC properly. VoxATC came close to what I wanted, but not close enough. I actually like the FSX ATC better than the VoxATC.My biggest hope is that, even in time, XP10 will have decent performance with the ability to interact with built-in ATC with an external interface (I could write a program to interact with the ATC menu - choosing the menu entry based on detected input) if only I have access to what the choices are. Microsoft, as big as they are, aren't very open to ideas as this. LR, however, will take good ideas and implement where possible from whereever the idea originates. I would take a more generalized flight model for distant taxi or flight, but a more aggressive realistic flight model for nearby aircraft. 20 aircraft at a time is the LIMIT of what XP10 can do. As has been discussed a lot lately, no computer can do anything to the limits imposed as of yet. So to me, the debate is better graphics or better AI or maybe moderate Autogen with 5 - 10 AI?I know for one thing, though, XP10 will be vastly different by the end of the development cycle. FSX is the same, minus some performance improvments.