Around half a year ago I bought X-Plane 10 and found it quite good, especially at night and particularly it felt like I am really flying. I'm not a real world pilot myself (but a friend of mine is) and I often had the opportunity to take control in the planes of his club - of course only in the air, not during takeoff and landing.

 

Now, as many people are stating that FSX is a superior flight simulator, I bought it (fortunately it is cheap these days ) to test it and have a look myself. Being registered at x-plane.org until now, I found this forum, I think/hope it is the right one for my questions.
On the one hand the colors in FSX look quite nice and bright (although I think a bit overdone), but there are some aspects in which the (mind you) stock FSX lacks compared to stock X-Plane. In particular I mean the following: the mesh is horrible, the streets are not as detailed, the night lighting, the turbulences inside of even a thunderstorm are (sorry for the expression) ludicrous. In X-Plane I have to steer clear of thunderstorms, like in real life, even with an airliner.

And what I've read so far, you have to do a lot of tweaking in text files, what I also find annoying - is it still and really necessary even nowadays with so much horsepower under the hood (I have an i7-2600K and a GTX660)? Imagine, you would have to tweak Excel or Word through text configuration files before they run well .

 

Oh, and by the way, is icing somehow simulated? I didn't find anything yet.

 

Ok, enough ranting :lol:, are there ways to eliminate my above concerns with addons (and, if possible, which ones are the best for the task)? Thanks lot for your help.

 

Regards,

Jörg

 

Welcome to FSX... Yes, the stock scenery is not that great, but luckily there are some quality add-ons

that will improve on that.

 

Start by getting the demo version of Orbx Pacific North West scenery - and fly out of Bowerman airport..

that will give you a feel for what FSX can look like when you dress it up.

 

Also have a look at the add-on aircraft available... the RealairSimulations Scout if you want a little bush plane, their Duke for a nice twin, the Carenado aircraft for general GA, and the PMDG tubeliners..

Just to add, icing is simulated, but is not used by all addons developers. You can use Ice Gauge - search AVSIM Library for that, or buy FSCaptain - icing is just one of features.

 

BTW, Bert gived you excelent advice - try ORBX for free, and search library again for HD clouds

No problem with ranting...  I do my own for FSX and XP.

 

All of those things that you wrote about XP tends to do better.  Except the mesh...  I've found the two sims to be about the same.  

 

Icing occurs in FSX just not as much as XP.  I'm still formulating an opinion about XP icing because I think it occurs too rapidly.  But I agree it is more realistic than FSX's almost non-existent icing model.  

 

XP is the clear winner for nighttime flying.  In fact I've only been flying XP10 for about a month and I just it mainly for night flying.  

 

The rough edges of XP are dayttime.  The autogen and land use data is horrendous.  Cities don't look anything like the real ones.  Where if you get GEX and UTX, FSX looks quite realistic... at least from a land use perspective.  There are some other rants I've got about XP but I'll leave them out so this one doesn't turn into a FSX vs XP thread too much lol.

 

About the tweaking - I found it to be no different than the tweaking I did for XP10.  All you really need to make FSX run smooth is to make sure you have SP2 or FSX Acceleration.  Then add highmemfix=1 under the "Graphics" section of the fsx.cfg.  Then you just generally set sliders where you want them.  This is exactly what I did with XP10 to get it working.

 

Honestly both stock models in XP and FSX generally suck.  You've got to get into third party (usually payware) to see the flight models become realistic (my recommendations: RealAir Legacy, A2A Mustang, Baytower RV7, Flight1 Citation Mustang, Lotus L39, PMDG NGX).  To answer your questions: For nighttime you can try UTX with street lights on, or Experience X, and also custom Orbx sceneries have the street lights option too.  I'd also try a weather addon like OPUS or AS2012 as they produce better icing and convective activity. (Not that you want to fly through convective stuff anyway lol).

 

Just a note about Orbx sceneries, http://www.fullterrain.com/, They are are local sceneries and don't cover the whole word.  But they are quite good and you'll find yourself easily navigating with VFR sectionals if you want.  

Other broader sceneries are Ground Environment X (GEX) which covers most of the world now, but it's only a texture update.

Ultimate Terrain X is something every FSX user needs to own, basically it updates the vector graphics (roads, rivers, lakes and some land use) - I suppose this doesn't cover the entire world either but there are the most popular areas like USA and Europe, Canada, Carribean etc

 

Weather programs you've got the ones that include textures and weather generators:  AS2012, REX....  Then you've got OPUS which is just a weather generator (the best imho), and FEX which just has textures

 

Then for standalone airports look at FlyTampa, FSDreamTeam, Orbx, FlightBeam, SkySunJet

 

One thing you'll find is that FSX offers much higher quality textures than XP both in sceneries and aircraft.  That's one of the downfalls I've found with XP acft.  Once you get into the high end payware like RealAir's Legacy or PMDG's NGX you'll find flight modelling and "eye candy" to be right at the top of the spectrum.  Another reason why I use GA planes in FSX is for Reality XP GNS430W/530W support and integration into VC's.  As you know XP's 430 modelling is just bad and maybe someday Austin will make a unit that actually operates realistically.  For now I'm stuck filing /A for equipment suffix when I fly XP.  I think I read RXP exists for XP but only as popup panels (which is great if you've got a home cockpit but I don't).

 

Honestly I think you'll miss some things from XP but you'll gain others by flying FSX too.  Despite all my gripes about XP I am enjoying parts of it and like flying both sims!

Around half a year ago I bought X-Plane 10 and found it quite good, especially at night and particularly it felt like I am really flying. I'm not a real world pilot myself (but a friend of mine is) and I often had the opportunity to take control in the planes of his club - of course only in the air, not during takeoff and landing.

 

Now, as many people are stating that FSX is a superior flight simulator, I bought it (fortunately it is cheap these days ) to test it and have a look myself. Being registered at x-plane.org until now, I found this forum, I think/hope it is the right one for my questions.

On the one hand the colors in FSX look quite nice and bright (although I think a bit overdone), but there are some aspects in which the (mind you) stock FSX lacks compared to stock X-Plane. In particular I mean the following: the mesh is horrible, the streets are not as detailed, the night lighting, the turbulences inside of even a thunderstorm are (sorry for the expression) ludicrous. In X-Plane I have to steer clear of thunderstorms, like in real life, even with an airliner.

And what I've read so far, you have to do a lot of tweaking in text files, what I also find annoying - is it still and really necessary even nowadays with so much horsepower under the hood (I have an i7-2600K and a GTX660)? Imagine, you would have to tweak Excel or Word through text configuration files before they run well .

 

Oh, and by the way, is icing somehow simulated? I didn't find anything yet.

 

Ok, enough ranting :lol:, are there ways to eliminate my above concerns with addons (and, if possible, which ones are the best for the task)? Thanks lot for your help.

 

Regards,

Jörg

FSX was made back in 2006 of course it's not going to be as good as brandnew software unless you add addons. I tired xplane didn't really like it

There's a nice description of the FSX terrain system here: http://www.microsoft.com/Products/Games/FSInsider/developers/Pages/GlobalTerrain.aspx

 

FSX ships on 2 DVDs versus 8 dual layer for XP. My understanding is that XP includes 78GB of scenery data out of the box.

 

Microsoft had to dramatically cull and downsample their 1+ TB of raw terrain data to fit on to 2 DVDs. It's too bad they didn't set up a download site where you could get higher rez data but it did create an opportunity for 3rd parties (UTX, GEX, Orbx, FSGenesis, FSGlobal etc as mentioned above). With better data FSX scenery looks much much better than it does by default. It's also usually necessary to tweak video card settings using Nvidia Inspector for example.

 

As far as colors, you can use added tools such as Mogaisoft Shade and FXAA or SweetFX to make adjustments. ENB is another option to add bloom. There is also a tool to adjust water shading call FS Water Configurator.

 

With FSX there are excellent weather addons such as OpusFSX, ActiveSky and REX. OpusFSX is also a camera addon that adds dynamic head movement. There is also AccuFeel from A2A which add other physics effects.

 

I could not say whether FSX is "superior" but with some effort and some well-placed purchases you can vastly improve the experience over what you get by default.

 

As for text file tweaks, there may be some GUI tools around to help with that, for example UTX Setup Tool can help with performance tweaks.

The ORBX Pacific North West scenery looks quite nice, but I'm less the "scenery watching" guy, but the one who's primarily interested in FLYING. I have seen some comments from MSFS guys that (even) XP10 looks like FS2002 or even FS98. So I made an experiment - I turned the table , downloaded the X-Plane 6 demo to have a comparison of the impression of flying XP6/FSX. And I must say that even XP6 feels more like really flying in a fluid than FSX (no joke!). Comparing both in thunderstorm they are approximately on par.

 

As it seems, I have to spend a lot of money for getting (in some regards) the same results in FSX as I have in stock XP, eg. mesh, roads, street lights, ...
But ok - before spending (too) much money on payware (I already have invested a lot of time and money into X-Plane), I would like to test some really good freeware GA's and also helicopters. The stock Bell 206 from FSX is (sorry again) a joke. You increase thrust (actually called "collective") and the helo takes off vertically without any torque effect. Any recommendations for good freeware aircrafts?

 

Regarding land use data, I found the following post (coincidentally only 3 days old). I didn't know myself that the land use data in X-Plane is this correct, as I haven't seen a similar post on x-plane.org or elsewhere.

 

Icing is simulated, it might not be visible on aircraft surfaces (except for a few payware exceptions) but it is simulated.

 

Regarding settings try by turning down the cloud density to <20% and all autogen features to default to begin with. That'll help a lot

 

L

Remember that X-Plane 10 was released I think early 2012 (maybe late 2011), whereas FSX was released in 2006.

 

....5 or 6 years is a long time in the software game. :smile:

 

Perhaps XP10 is a little better "straight out of the box" than FSX is "straight out of the box",   but FSX has so many amazing add-ons that when these are are taken into consideration, I personally find the whole experience hugely better with FSX than with XP10.

 

But each to their own.

 

Perhaps, for you, XP10 is the better simulator, that ticks more of the boxes that are important to you. :smile:

the problem of x-plane is that the development team tends sometimes to fixate with some areas of the sim other than others.

WIth lots of people migrating from fsx a stronger atc and more populated default airports (especially when the surrounding world is so detailed) was probably in order.

Having said that there are exciting prospects for the future. there will be lego-block plausibile airports built by users and slowly integrated into patches. Likewise world tiles will be updated as the open street map data evolves etc. I think it'll be quite exciting in a year or so.

This looks like yet another X-Plane vs FSX thread... especially since it's filled with the typical subjective statements that don't prove either sim is accurate or flawed.

 

The default X-Plane aircraft are, in a simple word:  junk.

The default FSX aircraft are, in a simple word: junk.