General opinion on X-Plane add-ons and features...

[jcomm 5,910]

Under this topic we can now freely ( within the AVSIM TOS, of course... ) post and discuss general opinions on X-Plane-10 add-ons, features, wishes, critics...

 

 

[alexcolka 183]

Well love the fluidity, the not so saturated colors, that fact is portable, multi platform, the dynamics, all the potential it has, night lights, believe it or not the nerdy interface, the scenery model, well lots of things. Hoping mostly that developers may fix the distant visibility issue. I'm a very forgiving and easy going simmer.

 

Sent from my GT-I9500 using Tapatalk

 

 

Oh! The developers, I was forgetting them! They're doing so well these days releasing great add ons so all my congratulations for their hard work and the contribution they make to the community. Happy holidays!

 

Sent from my GT-I9500 using Tapatalk

 

 

[RWFeldman 159]

Still really new to XP10 but one of my current complaints is no season change ground textures in a snow storm and -20c. Lack of Autogen/Buildings details at airports. Sure would like to have, or figure how to have pop up panels with multiple monitors.  Again Im new maybe there is a way but not easily. Need better cloud details like REX provides in FSX. External weather engine. I know there is this skymaxx thing but haven't explored it.  Good things... Excellent performance and AA quality. Realistic runway slopes and more realistic flight dynamics. comprehensive axis and switch assignments. Constant improvements.

[brucek 38]

It's been some (10) years since I have last been into a full-motion sim (United Airlines here in Denver). So, things may have changed in professional sim technology. My recollection was minimal scenery (roads have computer-generated traffic, airport runways and taxiways are all present with great night/IMC lighting-- for obvious reasons). Great weather depiction, clouds, etc. No native ATC (I was given the job of being "ATC" when attending a recurrent training event in a sim by a foreign airline that rents the UA sims). Excellent flight dynamics, a real cockpit, and of course full motion, etc. The purpose was to test and/or familiarize procedures and approaches to realistic minimums, but never to emulate real flight as far as scenery and ATC- call that "environmental"- as these pilots got plenty of that in their real flight time....

 

XPX, in it's current form, reminds me much of those full motion sims. Practicing flight to minimums, runway-environment lighting and markings, great flight modeling, fluid visuals. But limited opportunity to fly VFR and look down and see your house or city.

 

We should never expect real cockpits and full motion from a $70 sim. But I wish that we could attract more commercial and freeware developers to give us Level-D / PMDG quality in systems and real aircraft functionality. Not to dismiss some really good existing products- the 757, 727, etc. are excellent, but there's a need for more like this. I would rather see this than those "environmental" factors of ATC and real scenery with changing seasons, given that we may not get everything that we would wish for in the lifespan of XPX, in it's various versions to come.

 

I keep coming back to XPX- I have the KORD add-on, and coming out of cloud to minimums at night , looking for the "runway environment", is something to be believed!

 

And yes- in full disclosure- I do get the opportunity to look down at the real scenery from an actual flight, albeit from a C172 when I'm not flying on instruments, so I don't need to substitute for "real flight".

 

Thanks, Bruce.

[twiggys 41]

+1

we'll said.

[LAdamson 240]

And yes- in full disclosure- I do get the opportunity to look down at the real scenery from an actual flight, albeit from a C172 when I'm not flying on instruments, so I don't need to substitute for "real flight".

 

I have a different view. I DO need a subsitute for real flight. My real flight days as PIC have come to an end. I'm not all that interested in airliner systems, and always had a much greater interest in the beauty of mountain flight, than finding the runway enviroment at minimums. In fact, I'm more into a high tech world, where the runway enviroment is shown through new night vision systems, as well as synthetic vision using airport and topograpghy databases. This view comes from the "experimental" aircraft world, that I've long been involved with...... where many builders are also commercial pilots, military pilots, and those who work with tech firms that are producing much of the new navigation equipment.

 

 

Therefor, it will have to be flight simulators that are capable of creating a sense of actually being there, or I just skip updating to a new computer altogether. Happily, it does appear, that certain senses are available, if you don't mind going back and forth between sims to find the most believable part of what your looking for. X-Plane is certainly getting good on the mountain topography end. I sure enjoy some of the HD videos available.

 

[PingPong 60]

I am absolutely loving XPX as of late.  I have recently taken an interest in helicopters and have been using it to simulate rotor flight.  I only have a short discovery flight under my belt IRL, and my wife won't let me take heli lessons, so this is as close as I can get right now,

 

I have separate XP-heli and fixed wing installs on my flightsim PC with separate rendering setting, controls, aircraft, and scenery. I also stuck a throttle to the side of my chair to act as a collective and use an unpowered Sidewinder ffb joystick as cyclic.

 

I have all the notable heli addons but the Dreamfoil R22 and the Bk 117 keep me coming back, they are so well done.

 

Scenery wise I use converted aerosoft city sceneries over g2xpl photoscenery or the few really high definition airports that are available like the truscenery offerings.

 

So looking back these are the things I am most happy with

 

Multiple Installs on the same PC

Awesome flight modeling for rotor flight

Scenery tools available to finely customize your sim(FS2XP, WED, G2XPL)

Stable as a rock, can count the sim crashes on one hand(this is a biggie).

Awesome heli addons.

No blurries. 

No tweaking possible(this is good for a fiddler like me who is compelled to get more performance out of things).

 

I have another install for fixed wing flight where I can mimic my flights around central Florida in my own Vans RV, but I have been using it less and less.

 

As far as critiques:

The flight loading screen is still a little primitive

My Falco is not 64 bit compatible

No traffic

Weather is kind of all or nothing.

[bk2000 0]

I am just about ready to purchase XPX. What would the top 10 or so addons I must have to make my first flight tell me I did the right thing switching over to XPX?  (or direct me to a post that is specific to my question)..many thanks...

[HiFlyer 9,358]

I am just about ready to purchase XPX. What would the top 10 or so addons I must have to make my first flight tell me I did the right thing switching over to XPX?  (or direct me to a post that is specific to my question)..many thanks...

This might help. http://forum.avsim.net/topic/429465-x-plane-10-add-on-resources-freeware-and-payware/

[JimmiG 244]

My favorite features and aspects:

Very fluid flight modelling, no doubt in part because the sim mostly runs at 30 - 60 FPS

 

At this point, the sim is very stable - no OOMs, no CTD's. Just fire it up and fly for 30 minutes or 8 hours.

 

No tweaking necessary to fix blurries, stutters etc. I don't know how to edit X-Plane's .cfg file, if it even has one, because I've never needed to.

 

A ton of freeware scenery and aircraft are available, and payware is generally reasonably priced.

 

WED and Plane Maker are actually quite easy to use. I've used both to make some adjustments to planes and scenery.

 

 

My main issues are:

Lack of AI traffic and ATC (for VFR in particular)

 

Scenery generally looks very good, especially considering 99.9% of it is automatically generated with no manual corrections. However sometimes "strange" things happen (roads in tunnels or on massive concrete bridges for no reason etc.)

 

Some major issues and missing features go unacknowledged by the X-Plane developers for months or even years - torque bug, 25-storey apartment blocks in towns of 2,000 people, no seasonal textures, user interface looks like it was made in 1996, no native 8-way hat switch support etc.

 

The sim is "work in progress" - things continuously change, break, get fixed etc. I don't know whether this is actually a good thing. It does mean the sim is "alive" and actively developed, but it can be a bit of a pain sometimes

 

Some of those can probably be explained by the fact that the X-Plane dev team is very small, but some of those features/fixes would be very quick to implement. For some other issues/missing features, we just need to have more third party developers jump on board.

[Superdelphinus 718]

Just bought skymaxx and have to say I'm a bit disappointed in it :( doesn't really look an awful lot better than the original (though it is better), has loads of popping issues and whole swathes of clouds disappearing when you change view and just generally feels a bit patchy and 'freeware'.

 

It seems to have massively glowing reviews everywhere though so maybe I'm doing something wrong, my expectations are too high coming from things like active sky next and rex (but those things aren't much more, or any different in terms of price)

 

Another thing I bought was the carenado pa46 which is fabulous