Let's be honest, some of the best scenery we have is freeware.

That's true, and five pieces of freeware just have made for a wonderful afternoon/evening flight:

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/422228-late-afternoon-trip-near-the-baltic-sea/

 

THIS is when I love X-Plane And am extremly thankful for the hard work of addon developers, both freeware and payware. (Well. The destination airport was done by me, so no thanks in this case )

But seriously .... so many are complaining, but so few dare to start doing "something" (as there is still a lot that can be achieved outside the platform itself - which of course only LR can improve ... mostly ...).

 ++++ 1 :lol:.

 

I remember the "good" old days of FS9 (and before), where many people did "something" themselves, within a great community where people helped each others.

Nowadays it is more "I want to have" and a lot of discussions (and also complaints) on the forums but less "doing something" oneself. If someone is not happy with something, start doing something about it.

And that's fine. Trust me one of the things I like about XPX is the fact that you can tinker easily. Creating an airport with WED and it's even got me learning how to create my own 3D scenery with sketchup, a skill I'd not looked into prior to XPX's arrival. But not everyone has the time or the skills to learn how to create scenery, aircraft or anything else for a sim. But we're starting to drift of topic.

 

For now, the excitement of XPX has wore off, but no doubt come 10.30 (which I believe is near release iirc Andras) people will enjoy the new stuff and the buzz will return.

Let's be honest, some of the best scenery we have is freeware.

 

Why is it "bad" when (very) good scenery is freeware? As a user I'm happy when I can get good scenery for free.

 

In discussions about the "other" sim, I have seen several times something like "Ugh! Freeware ..." - even it it was a really good one. Not so in the X-Plane forums (thank god B)).

(Some) people seem to forget the value of work (even when they get it for free). The word "freeware" seems to have a negative touch in some communities. What would we do without freeware in this world (Firefox, Opera, Irfanview, Sketchup, Openoffice, Linux, GIMP, VLC, .... and soooo many more)?

 

Enough ranting :lol:, I have to leave ...

 

EDIT: imagine, you have the choice between a Rolls Royce for (much) money and a Mercedes for free. "Let's be honest, the Mercedes is for free. That's what needs to change."

Because we're not seeming companies come in and building on what freeware has to offer. It's not that freeware is bad, in fact compared to some fsx freeware, XPX's selection is excellent. I love Andras's New Zealand and sim heaven's photo vienna with osm is awesome. But there are so few companies coming on top of this with teams and computer power to push it on to the next level ala orbx for fsx. Know the guys at truscenery are really pushing the envelope with a few guys who use to work in the film industry. We need more of that.

My main concern is that the promise of two years ago

 

Can you elaborate a bit more on this. I seriously doubt Austin & Co. promised anything more then the next ver of XP.

 

 

 

We have no orbx like regions, no UTX like products or no real choice of products to choose from

 

Why should XP have regions like Orbx, or UTX in order to make XP an alternative. There are others 3pdv's working on these shortcomings, so lets be patient and give it time, there are other alternatives to XP after all.

Also, JRollon, LES, Carenado,  Philipp, Ramzzess, True Scenery, Simhaven, Aerosoft, Alabeo etc, etc. are all REAL choices.

Jessica is right, in as far as the huge gap between 3pds for FSX and XPX goes. This doesn't mean it's bad to have a lot of excellent freeware.

 

Most of my aircraft add-ons for X-Plane used to be freeware. I am now a lot more selective - have a few from XPFR, and had that great IL-14 by Felis, unfortunately not available for the 64 bit XP :-/

 

This has a positive impact on those who can't afford to have many add-ons, but also can easily be interpreted as, a lack of interest in the platform by the major players in flight simulation industry.

 

Even Aerosoft gave a great initial support to X-Plane 10, but appart from converting their sceneries, which I think is a good thing, I haven't seen great results, and I regret having bought from there the FF 777 because, apparently not by their fault but rather by the late response / support from the font, because whenever a new patch is made available at the org, it takes 1 month to get it from Aerosoft.... I complained and they said they couldn't do better, when the updates aren't provided to them, or have problems that delay the release of their own installers.

 

I also tend to compare X-Plane to DCS. Both have small teams, not comparable to the Aces ( those mighty Aces ) or some of the greatest developers for FSX.

 

DCS's scenery / terrain has been the same for quite a while ( more than 4 yrs I believe ) and the number of add-on aircaft released is rather small. Even so the team behind, say, the Mi-8 is bigger than LR's team!

 

The team at LMOC is also small, but let's not forget that they are builing their platforms over ESP, and the core of the sim is there. P3D v2 will bring huge improvements, but none will cover, for instance, the flight dynamics, as far as I can tell, nor did they decide to create their new sim using 64-bit code!

 

I know the size of the team shouldn't be an excuse, but the fact is that it really has to be taken into account. And arguments like I myself have used, like "Austin should hire more elements to the team" are easy to write, but I believe the income from X-Plane 10 wasn't probably that huge, and I believe the copies aren't selling at a big rate these days... yet they keep supporting the product and working on improvements.

 

There is something about X-Plane that can't make me stay away from it too much time. The fact is that even given the limitations it has, the problems I sometimes bring on the forums, this flight simulator still gives me excellent moments of "pretending I am flying for real". Yes I can't yet have a PMDG-like product in X-Plane 10, but I can have very good add-ons like most probably the recently released Saab 340 is, that EC 135, the Carenados, the Mu2j, the DC-3, some of the XPFR aircraft, even Peter's A380 which lacks a lot of detail in the auto flight system but has a remarkable FBW implementation for the Airbus Normal Law ( well above that of any product I have used for FSX... ).

 

I will definitely keep using X-Plane 10, waiting for whatever the future updates bring, for what Andras, uwespeed, PilotBalu, and others offer us for free! ( and that GFS weather injector based in Python, which I really like to use, and would love to see upgraded with new features...), and those, certainly many users who used WED to crreacte airport scenery, those who enrich OSM databases, etc...

Because we're not seeming companies come in and building on what freeware has to offer.

The question is: What could attract scenery developers to spend (more) resources into X-Plane?

 

IL-14 by Felis, unfortunately not available for the 64 bit XP :-/

Theoretically it should work if you replace the included "xap" plugin with a recent SASL 2.0 version.

Why should XP have regions like Orbx, or UTX in order to make XP an alternative. There are others 3pdv's working on these shortcomings, so lets be patient and give it time, there are other alternatives to XP after all.

Also, JRollon, LES, Carenado,  Philipp, Ramzzess, True Scenery, Simhaven, Aerosoft, Alabeo etc, etc. are all REAL choices of products.

 

Ok, look at the list. Jrollon, les, carenado, alabeo and phillipp ramzzess all produce aircraft and I've no issue with that.

Truscenery are making some excellent airports but little at the moment outside of Finland and sim heaven is freeware. That leaves aerosoft and given their back catalogue or scenery, there's been little movement lately.

 

Whist I agree the are 3pd fixing the gaps in XPX, progress is slow. The new skymaxx pro clouds are awesome though. .

 

No the reason we need an orbx or UTX is to fund LR. I flew into Iceland this afternoon, and whist the scenery is ok, it could b better. Much better. With a region approach like orbx, or a huge land class product like UTX, we can attract new users, wowed by what they see. This in turn puts money in the coffers of LR, which in turn beefs up development of XPX with perhaps an extra member of staff, who in turn fixes say the atc system, which we all benefit from in the way of a free update to version 10.xx. That's why we need something with the 'wow' factor.

The question is: What could attract scenery developers to spend (more) resources into X-Plane?Theoretically it should work if you replace the included "xap" plugin with a recent SASL 2.0 version.

Good question. And following my last post, it's like a vicious circle. Lol

FSGRW is still considereing their X-Plane weather injector!  I surely look forward for it!

 

 

huge gap

 

 

 

3pd fixing the gaps in XPX

 

I sincerely don't believe there are any "gaps" in XP, now if you want to call "gaps" your own expectations of what you need on a sim for it be a better alternative to FSX/P3d then by all means. 

I sincerely don't believe there are any "gaps" in XP, now if you want to call "gaps" your own expectations of what you need on a sim for it be a better alternative to FSX/P3d then by all means.

 

Seasonal textures would help. An ATC that was easier to use would be nice.

 

I'm not looking to play down XPX's strengths but part of simulation surely is the suspension of disbelief. At the end of the day we're all just flying pixels behind a desk, so anything we can to help suspend that disbelief helps. And nothing breaks that more that flying into Innsbruck for example, in the middle of a snowstorm only to see snow sweeping across the runway, but green grass everywhere else. Modelling the effects of the weather is one thing, but you really need to see the effect out of the window?

 

There are gaps, whether you're happy without them or not. The fact is that there are things that XPX could do better.

That leaves aerosoft and given their back catalogue or scenery, there's been little movement lately.

 

Don't forget TropicalSim (which somehow only a few people know... but they have 3 of their products available for X-Plane), and even Tom Curtis (who is still very active, but should maybe think of using better textures for his not-too-bad models...) and Santiago Butnaro (same).

 

This said, I have just seen that for things like the SimHeaven OSM, in the FSX world you could get the same by buying payware products (like openVFR Autogen for Europe)... Maybe X-Plane's freeware scenery is just too good

 

And of course, there's FS2XP, which works quite well for many airports... good for users (esp. those who have already scenery from their MSFS installation), but maybe bad for developers (because those "converts" probably hesitate to buy the same scenery twice)

At the end of the day we're all just flying pixels behind a desk, so anything we can to help suspend that disbelief helps.

 

lol...I certainly agree to that...

 

 

 

The fact is that there are things that XPX could do better.

 

 

...that too!

 

 

I sincerely don't believe there are any "gaps" in XP

 

Pirata, I believe I didn't use the right word... I meant the gap in the number of available comercial add-ons, not on their features ;-)