• Having seasons represented in terrain textures worldwide
• Having similar numbers of airports in similar detail to default FSX
• Having default or 3rd party ATC
• Having a utility similar to FSPax if you're familiar

I'm a P3D user which is great for what it is but w/o any real projections about where it's going other than it's a product whose audience is allegedly oriented exclusively towards training I'm losing interest in it at the moment.   Plus, I can't see it handling really complex planes very well at all in dense metropolitan areas, at least when ORBX FTX scenery is involved.  IMO it has stalled in its development enough, that combined w/ virtually no published plans about its future, that it has left me willing to look elsewhere.

 

Comments re the above questions would be much appreciated.  Of note, I installed 10.1 or something along those lines and while I really didn't give it much of a chance it wasn't particularly impressed coming from P3D.

 

Cheers

First of all 10.31 is a very different sim to 10.1, there have been many upagrades to textures, flight modelling and of course its now 64bit.

 

In terms of your specific questions you may be disappointed, but if you go beyond that, you may be wonderfully surprised.

 

There are no season textures implimented although there are a couple of third part work arounds that you can read about in this forum.

 

There is now around 700-800 lego brick airports, all of which look significantly better than FSX default airports in my opinion. On top of that, the quality and quantity of freeware and payware airports at places like x-plane.org has significantly improved

 

No default ATC improvements although again there was a work around to using an FSX based ATC on X-Plane, cannot remember which one but think it was talked about here.

 

Don't know about FSPax so cannot answer that one

 

There are some excellent tubeliners available, some of them getting close to PMDG levels, andseveral in development. One of those may well redefine all simulated aircraft in any sim, the IGEX 737 Classic.

 

With the addition of some freeware hd mesh and OSM and photo sceneries, X-Plane can look visually stunning

There's actually a thread on X-pilot from a guy who's working on a very promising addon called X-passengers, which should fill the niche for a passenger simulation program. There is a pack of textures called Winter World that I believe you can download from X-plane.org which serves as a good alternative. It's easy to use. You drag and drop the replacement textures into the X-plane folder whenever you want to have snowy ground cover and then take it out again to remove them. You just have to remeber to back-up you originals.  

HD Mesh and OSM from Alpilot and Simheaven, airports and cities from X-plane.org, payware addon aircraft, and Xplane 10.31 and you have pure flight simulation bliss IMHO.

 

P.S. Winter World has been updated and is now available from X-pilot.com as Winter_Package 1.1

P.S. Winter World has been updated and is now available from X-pilot.com as Winter_Package 1.1

... Sorry, but this a bit misleading information (please read other threads more carefully, because spreading halfway correct information does not help anybody)

1. A package namd Winter World was only available for X-Plane 9, and it was from the guy at http://www.scenery4xp.com
2. (one of) The new package is Winter_Package 1.1 (there is another one from Russian user(s) ) and it is from Albert Laubi (the guy who made almost all default textures in X-Plane 10 and with whom I worked a lot together)
3. Its available at X-Plane.org and not x-pilot.com
4. And no, at the moment its not easily installable, as it needs to change a lot of folder spread across the XP10 installation ... but some others are working on it to ease this issue via some simple scripts (or even use the SimpleSeason script ... available at X-Plane.org too).

It was all mentioned here: http://forum.avsim.net/topic/456590-winter-package-11-from-albert-laubi-available/

From these comments it sounds like the ball has been moved forward and also that XP still requires a lot of enhancements to meet some of the basics I've requested information about.  So a brief foray into the demo is likely not going to stick any more than the last time I checked in, but if there is interest on my part to take on a new hobby, learning about all of the idiosyncrasies of XP and it's 3PD associates it might be worth it.

 

For those familiar w/ FSX or P3D, comments re performance?  My machine is 1.4y/o but still is strong relatively speaking I'm pretty sure.

 

Thanks   :rolleyes:

 

 

IMO it has stalled in its development enough,

 

Except that they recently released their third version in the last year.

 

 

that combined w/ virtually no published plans about its future

 

Other than stating on their forum that 64bit is in developement

• Having default or 3rd party ATC   http://www.pilot2atc.com/ is a voice communication ATC and some people found a work around to make Pro Flight Emulator works in X plane (Main functions seems to work but not AI recognition)

 

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/456674-xpx-1031-pfe-atcanimations-movie/

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/454433-pro-flight-emulator-atc-works-in-x-plane-10-check-this-video/

• Having a utility similar to FSPax if you're familiar (X Passengers is a freeware http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=18692

X passengers is plugin scores your flying based on some specific rules that can affect the satisfaction of your passengers.These rules are presently: G forces, roll angles, pitch angles, vertical speeds, landing and taking off. It also gives extra points for serving food, drinks or showing a movie to the passengers.

 

 

 

and i would like to add:

Plane command wihich allows you to control your plane with your voice-add on https://planecommand.com/

 

 

Oooooooh... Plane Command looks interesting... thanks for the heads up I will have to have a play with.

Could be useful for Vatsim too, an invisible copilot to tune the radios.

 

 

Plane command wihich allows you to control your plane with your voice-add on https://planecommand.com/

 

This looks great, only problem is that my simming time generally is the time everyone else in the house is in bed ;-)

Except that they recently released their third version in the last year.

 

 

 

Other than stating on their forum that 64bit is in developement

You can release 10 versions this year and still not make enough meaningful progress--the number of releases doesn't mean much by itself.  Yes, the associated moderator leaked something a commitment to 64bit.  Did he or a responding LM staff provide an ETA for an initial release?  If so, great. 

 

Since 2.2 here's what I've seen:

1. No change to water texture quality--frequently complained about by more than me
2. No improvement in AA
3. No change to the ATC window which has been requested to allow for some transparency and maybe resizing.
4. Vertical clouds sprites for some users
5. No meaningful improvement in dawn/dusk cloud shadow deterioration in frame performance.
6. No published success in collaboration w/ nVidia for development of optimized SLI and AA support.
7. Arguably weak performance in dense metropolitan areas and larger terminals where there is any significant amount of commercial air traffic, and often when there isn't.
8. No restoration of the arguably (many users complained about this early on) overly dampened cloud lighting contrast.

IMO, yes MO, 2.3 and beyond was a real bust, perhaps addressing some more critical incompatibilities or failure prone conditions, not sure.  But substantial changes that I care about--pretty much nothing meaningful.  

This looks great, only problem is that my simming time generally is the time everyone else in the house is in bed ;-)

 

PlaneCommand author here: my girlfriend does complain of being woken up in the middle of the night to me saying "Flaps down" or "Set COM1 to 121.4" when debugging PlaneCommand.

 

I would love to add voice control of ATC to PlaneCommand, but plugins do not have access to the built in ATC system as far as I can tell.

PlaneCommand author here: my girlfriend does complain of being woken up in the middle of the night to me saying "Flaps down" or "Set COM1 to 121.4" when debugging PlaneCommand.

 

I would love to add voice control of ATC to PlaneCommand, but plugins do not have access to the built in ATC system as far as I can tell.

 

Nice job Lee, I got the premium version. Will you be adding addition commands (e.g. autopilot heading hold, nav hold, alt hold etc)?

 

Many thanks

PlaneCommand author here: my girlfriend does complain of being woken up in the middle of the night to me saying "Flaps down" or "Set COM1 to 121.4" when debugging PlaneCommand.

 

I would love to add voice control of ATC to PlaneCommand, but plugins do not have access to the built in ATC system as far as I can tell.

You might want to request commercial identification here on Avsim before the moderators scoop in.

The problem is that LR may not look at ATC / AI / Seasons. 

 

Because seasons is given now by the community developers.

 

If there is a 3rd party ATC / AI LR will not bother making a better one for XPX.

 

The same way airport gateway is.

 

I want certain enhancements but this is IMO.

I agree with the others that development of P3D seems to have "stalled" at the moment. I hope the developers are working away in the background, but from their lack of communication you would think that they've simply given up. Also, 2.3 and 2.4 actually introduced a number of new issues, while not really fixing much. At this point, a combination of FSX and X-Plane 10 is probably the best choice.

 

X-Plane 10 is not without problems of its own, and sometimes development seems to be very slow. However the core simulation is very robust. Crashes are very rare and can usually be traced to a malfunctioning add-on (no inexplicable CTD's or OOM's or g3d.dll crashes). The "lego brick" airports (which over time will get merged into the core X-Plane installation) and the freeware at X-Plane.org and others is usually enough to have a good experience. It's not OrbX-quality but certainly functional. There's some amazing payware available as well, the selection is much smaller than for FSX/P3D.

 

Performance is great on my system (i7 4770K @ 4.5 GHz, 8GB RAM, GTX 670 2GB) - usually 45 - 60 FPS, with dips to the low 20's over some urban areas. You'll have to play with some of the settings, but you don't have to resort to the black magic of .cfg editing...

 

Lack of seasons and ATC/AI traffic are some of the biggest letdowns. I'm doubtful we'll see any meaningful improvements there before X-Plane 11 unfortunately.