I will be glad to stop -but trust me below the belt can go further when it comes to truth and if you continue to push with distortions I will go further-because some of us have no vested interest and are interested in truth only.

 

Geof, I think you need to settle down and enjoy flight simming for what it is. A hobby.

You're making it way too personal (you have already accused me of lying about my PPL, and now you are accusing me of lying again!).

If you can show me instances of where I lied or distorted anything, I will gladly apologize.

So please, if you wish to do so, provide some links to any past threads and posts I made where I have lied. If you can.

I'll be glad to when I get home in 4days-and I do have a list.

I'll be glad to when I get home in 4days-and I do have a list.

Looking forward to seeing it

I wish all you FSX guys would shove of back to your beloved and leave us alone

I wish all you FSX guys would shove of back to your beloved and leave us alone

 

 

I happen to think my post was very accurate, sincere, non offending, and quite constructive... besides just because I fly in FSX and prefer it to X-Plane right now, does not mean I dont know its many many faults, the X-Plane clouds video was nice to see.

I happen to think my post was very accurate, sincere, non offending, and quite constructive... besides just because I fly in FSX and prefer it to X-Plane right now, does not mean I dont know its many many faults, the X-Plane clouds video was nice to see.

Just a shot in the dark here, so I can get an insight into an FSX users mindset, but do you believe that FSX has many faults as well? If so, can you rattle off a handful of them?

As I said FSX has many many faults, the fact it is heavily CPU dependent, its poorly optimized until you either spend $$$ to get a program to configure FSX or spend lots of time tweaking. Default visuals are ok, its the 3rd party community that makes FSX what it really can be, the default weather injection is pretty bad BTW. There are intermittent errors in the game that can cause fatal errors, runtime errors, out of memory errors, or just straight up CTD's. FSX is far from perfect, but it is loads of fun once its setup right for your machine, and the community is larger than all of the X-Plane communities from past to present combined, and that is one of the ONLY saving graces for FSX. Other than the community support FSX is a lag happy train wreck that seems to have been half-assed in code at best.

 

Given that I am being quite a bit harsh on FSX, I do believe none of what I have said is untrue, that being said I love flying in FSX, I love the interface as it is very user friendly, I have a few hundred dollars invested in FSX, and they make it look gorgeous.

 

Suggestions for X-Plane 11:

 

You want X-Plane to be the predominant Flight Sim, then this is what it will take....

 

1. GET RID OF OPENGL, use Direct X 11 and have Tessellation options

 

2. Get FSX's community support, its all about the addons for Flight Sim's

 

3. Take the success's from Microsoft in its GUI design and apply them to X-Planes interface

 

4. Optimize XP11's performance 'out of the box' to run as smooth on current machines as possible

 

5. Continuously update the product and push the engine to its limits (Laminar is already fairly decent at this as far as updates goes)

As I said FSX has many many faults, the fact it is heavily CPU dependent, its poorly optimized until you either spend $$$ to get a program to configure FSX or spend lots of time tweaking. Default visuals are ok, its the 3rd party community that makes FSX what it really can be, the default weather injection is pretty bad BTW. There are intermittent errors in the game that can cause fatal errors, runtime errors, out of memory errors, or just straight up CTD's. FSX is far from perfect, but it is loads of fun once its setup right for your machine, and the community is larger than all of the X-Plane communities from past to present combined, and that is one of the ONLY saving graces for FSX. Other than the community support FSX is a lag happy train wreck that seems to have been half-assed in code at best.

 

THANK YOU for saying what I highlighted in your post and also for your honesty.

Much appreciated!

Community size...meh...that's a different beast altogether. Microsoft had a hell of a marketing campaign for MSFS since FS98. Including 2 very big names in Aviation...John and Martha King.

The X-Plane community is actually quite big. Definitely not as big as the FSX community, but not small by any stretch. You will hear some developers say the FSX community is about 40 000 strong. It's actually quite bigger than that.

 

I always said, if Microsoft put Flights optimizations into FSX, we would have FSXI.

Just a shot in the dark here, so I can get an insight into an FSX users mindset, but do you believe that FSX has many faults as well? If so, can you rattle off a handful of them?

 

Let me put it this way. If FSX hadn't been crashing on me every third flight for years, I wouldn't know XPlane existed. FSX stopped crashing in November, but that could change any time.

 

Lighting sucks after SP2, and they took away our stars, which were prominent in SP1. Lots of places where the mesh is pretty awful; try a flight over the Grand Canyon. Lots of places where textures are really hideous. Cliff face textures are... well... awful. Some building and object textures have Z-order fighting, and Sitka, for example, has missing textures on some small buildings. ATC is a pain. There are sound problems at times, and you have to press Q twice to toggle sound to get it to work right occasionally after changing views.

 

You see, we know all too well that FSX has warts. A lot of these can be fixed with third party addons. But not all of them.

 

As for tweaks, I think it took me 15 minutes total after discovering Word Not Allowed's guide, then another 15 minutes total getting a few sliders right.

 

As for Microsoft Flight, they did some incredible things. The lighting is great. The flight models are absolutely superb, at least until they made all the aircraft roll left. I prefer FSX autogen by a large margin. And honestly, I think Alaska looks better in FSX than it does in Flight, at least in the winter. The details are better in Flight, while the overall effect is better in FSX, and that extends to a lot of things in Flight.

 

Hook

at least until they made all the aircraft roll left

+1 :-) They did from the start, because FSX and FLIGHT simply do not model asymmetric slipstream effects (just p-factor, torque and gyroscopic effects), but before that patch it felt better indeed... XP10 apparently models all of these effects, only it does not do it correctly :-( ... Well :-(...

 

1. GET RID OF OPENGL, use Direct X 11 and have Tessellation options

 

2. Get FSX's community support, its all about the addons for Flight Sim's

 

3. Take the success's from Microsoft in its GUI design and apply them to X-Planes interface

 

4. Optimize XP11's performance 'out of the box' to run as smooth on current machines as possible

 

5. Continuously update the product and push the engine to its limits (Laminar is already fairly decent at this as far as updates goes)

 

Removing OpenGL would be a crazy move and would stop us Mac and Linux users from using XPlane. I personally have a Mac and don't like Windows for various reason, especially Windows 8. OpenGL is very capable, e.g. Have a look at Outerra.

 

I do agree on the rest of your points though, especially the GUI

Let me put it this way. If FSX hadn't been crashing on me every third flight for years, I wouldn't know XPlane existed. FSX stopped crashing in November, but that could change any time.

 

Lighting sucks after SP2, and they took away our stars, which were prominent in SP1. Lots of places where the mesh is pretty awful; try a flight over the Grand Canyon. Lots of places where textures are really hideous. Cliff face textures are... well... awful. Some building and object textures have Z-order fighting, and Sitka, for example, has missing textures on some small buildings. ATC is a pain. There are sound problems at times, and you have to press Q twice to toggle sound to get it to work right occasionally after changing views.

 

You see, we know all too well that FSX has warts. A lot of these can be fixed with third party addons. But not all of them.

 

As for tweaks, I think it took me 15 minutes total after discovering Word Not Allowed's guide, then another 15 minutes total getting a few sliders right.

 

As for Microsoft Flight, they did some incredible things. The lighting is great. The flight models are absolutely superb, at least until they made all the aircraft roll left. I prefer FSX autogen by a large margin. And honestly, I think Alaska looks better in FSX than it does in Flight, at least in the winter. The details are better in Flight, while the overall effect is better in FSX, and that extends to a lot of things in Flight.

 

Hook

Thanks for the honesty and adding to the list.

This screen shot from FSX kept me flying Microsoft flight longer than I otherwise would have. I'd taken the default Cub for a run around the big island in Hawaii to check out differences between FSX and Flight. This is somewhere between Hilo and Upolu on the north tip of the island.

 

Luckily, there aren't many places in FSX that look quite this bad.

 

Hook

I'm also noticing those clouds.

The clouds are probably real world weather provided by AS2012. The Beta clouds are much much better. If they're fair weather theme clouds, I'd expect to see considerable cirrus in there as well. My logs do not indicate that I was using real world weather at the time, so it may be a custom weather setup.

 

Edit: in fact it probably was a custom setup, as I wanted to fly with mild turbulence that day.

 

For what it's worth, not having real world weather is a deal breaker for me. I only fly weather themes in FSX if I'm doing flight testing or something similar. Any serious flying is done with real world weather.

 

Hook

 

PS. I still look at that pic and think, "Oh my God."