What can X-Plane 10 offer if I already have FSX,P3D2

[mwilk 1,106]

Is this better than RC4?

Ian, PFE has many more voices than RC4. If you travel from one region to the other the accents change. It does a pretty good job with ATC. It is a little more labor intensive than RC4 when it comes to setting up a flight. I'ved used both RC4 and PFE in X-Plane. I prefer PFE.

[alpha12125 213]

What is DSF ? I went to the X-plane website and noticed that they listed 16-20 Gb RAM as recommended system requirement. As far as I know 20 Gb RAM isn't possible at least not on my mobo. It would have to be 16 or 32 Gb RAM. It sounds a little strange that 20 Gb should be needed and 16 Gb be to little.

What kind of problem would surface if you have less than the required RAM available ?

 

I'll try to explain it in  a short (and probably wrong ) way:

 

The DSF is the Distribution Scenery Format.

 

X-Plane and fsx/p3d handle scenery very differently:

FSX loads continuosly scenery around you. Advantage is that you load the flight very fast and do not use alot of RAM, however you see scenery "popping" into exsistance on the horizon. X-Plane loads complete tiles of scenery into the RAM. Advantage is that the whole scenery is loaded in tiles and once the tile is loaded you will not see sceney popping in. Downside is that you require more ram (not a real problem as you have 64bit) and that the inital loading time is longer.

 

One DSF tile is 1 degree long x 1 degree lat, and x-plane used to load 3x2 tiles around you. This however created a problem at high altitudes. Basically at 30k+ feet and clear skies you could see further than the tiles loaded and you had a blurry mess at the horizon. With the 10.4 update Laminar added the extended DSF function into x-plane. Basically now it is possible to load 4x3 tiles into the game and gives you full visibility until the horizon

 

No extended DSF :

 

 

Extendend DSF:

 

 

Ok so how does this whole RAM thing come into play ?

 

Each tile gets loaded into the RAM, with 3x2 it is 6 tiles. The extended DSF is 4x3, so 12 tiles. That is double the amount of RAM that is required. Now in order to understand how those huge numbers happen you have to realize that pretty much everyone uses HD Meshes or maybe even the UHD Meshes.  Extended DSF with the out of the box scenery is easily doable with 8gigs of RAM. HD Meshes are alot more detailed and as such load alot more into the RAM. 8 gigs may work in some areas and 16 gigs is recommended. Now come the UHD Meshes and their insane details. Running those under 16gigs in extended DSF can work but your milage will vary and more RAM is not the worst idea.

 

As to what will happen when you run out of RAM? Well basically one of the two scenarios: You will get an OOM since you are out of memory or if you have a pagefile setup, your system will come to crippling 2 fps while your RAM is swapping with the HDD. The good thing is though that the OOM is actually fixable as you simply need more RAM and not a limit by the 32bit application

[G550flyer 1,010]

One thing I like about Xplane is the flight model. From a real world viewpoint, the aircraft responds to the environment. Those disturbances you feel in real world are there in xplane. The plane actually has that flying through air feel to it. The ground effect is where it should be. Xplane will make you flare, unlike in FSX where you barely flare and get stuck in ground effect. The 2 to 3 degree flare in the real aircraft just diminish the sink but in FSX will send you floating. The thing i don't like is the over sensitive twitchy feel of xplane. In the real aircraft, there are feel springs and artificial feel systems that make the yoke rigid in the pitch and roll axis. These systems give you the resistance up to 50 pounds at full deflection in pitch depending on the aircraft. This allows you to fly the aircraft smoothly and prevents over controlling. Another reason you trim a lot in the real aircraft. Adjustments in the settings along with a well designed aircraft makes for perfect feel. I have found that putting all sliders for the pitch full right in the control response sections give me the feel that I get when I fly jets real world. Unless you spend 2000 bucks on a yoke for simulation, you won't get that heavy rigid yoke you find in jet aircraft. The FlyJ 727 and 737 along with the flight factor aircraft works perfect with this setting in x plane    

[LAdamson 240]

 

 

The 2 to 3 degree flare in the real aircraft just diminish the sink but in FSX will send you floating.

 

I remember the RealAir Spitifire for FS9/FSX. A very good example of using some power for the landing, or keeping the descent steep enough..............to not fall through the flare. It didn't float, and had nice feel of power to weight. Suppose it all depends on the designer.

[tonywob 4,768]

A major limitation (in my opinion) of the DSF format is the 1x1 degree tile limit. This means that a vendor can only provide mesh (or photoimagery) on a 1x1 degree tile basis, so for example if you wanted to do a highres photoimagery for Spain, you'd have problems when it comes to the Spain/Portugal or Spain/France border because you'd have to provide part of the mesh/photoimagery for portugal as well. It's not possible to just provide small parts of the mesh (e.g. Around an airport). 

 

I had this problem with Manchester. They modified the mesh around the airport so the tile was flatter, but this also meant that any other meshes (or photoimagery) for other airports nearby, e.g. EGGP (Liverpool) wouldn't work, and of course the entire photoimagery for the 1x1 tile also didn't work. I feel this is one the main reasons why we don't see more commercial providers of photoimagery for X-Plane. The photoimagery for GB is a good case, because it's an island which doesn't conflict with nearby countries (except for a very small part of France)

[Longranger 148]

Well the RAM questiopn isn´t such a big problem as it sounds. When they prepared the extended DSF loading Laminar feared that most of the scenery data would stay in the RAM. In reaity todays Operating systems can handle this situation pretty well. The computers don´t load the complete tiles, instead they look into the tiles and give every object space in their virtual address space. Since we are working with real 64 bits this space is huge. Compared to our real RAM more or less unlimited. It only needs memory for the areas that you really see. So in reality 16 GB of memory are at the moment more than enough. Everything else is already allocated in the virtual address space, while it is still on the HD. If you get nearer to these locations it loads this data into the RAM, while opther areas, that are no longer visible drop out of it. This works rather smoothly in the background since the computer can predict which areas it will probably need in the next few seconds.

[jason74 133]

I have FSX, P3Dv3 and X-plane 10 on my PC and one of the best things about X-Plane 10 is Night flying FSX and P3D  don,t even come close.  I find it so realistic! And so many realy good free airports and scenery that are just as good as FSX/P3D Payware.On the Downside Most off the Payware Aircraft are Crap,overpriced unfinished Products..  But there still are some Great Payware aircraft just very limited. I can tell you now if X-Plane 10 had A2A ,PMDG and,Majestic aircraft with Active sky Next Id never fly FSX or P3D again.  I Personally think X-Plane is the flight sim of the future. Just need  more Good aircraft. Cant wait for the IXEG 737

[jcomm 5,890]

There are some wind variation ( variable winds, shear, micro-burst,...) and turbulence modeling aspects of X-Plane 10 that, IMO, put it ahead of FSX / P3D in terms of realism, under most circumstances, but can also, sometimes, cause weird effects...

 

Those weather effects, which one can also have in MSFS / P3D when using a good weather injector like ASN, MSFS / P3D wind and turbulence effects and a well designed aircraft can provide you with the same ( feel of being there flying through a non stable airmass... ) that most users mistakenly identify as a "flying on rails due to the flight dynamics model..."

 

X-Plane 10 aircraft, specially now that the torque effect has been fixed, can feel so on-rails as any MSFS / P3D similar if you set, fr instance, CAVOK in the weather menu, or under most circumstances where a weather injector is being used for X-Plane ( because at least those weather injectors I have used fail to use the proper wind variation and turbulence settings that we can manually set on X-plane's weather menu, or by using the "paint the weather" option...).

 

Terrain effects on winds and turbulence can also be enhanced to the level we get ( and even further ) in default X-plane 10 when using ASN, or other add-ons, but in X-Plane 10 they're included by default, so, we don't have to spend further amounts for the fine tuning...

 

Then, as most have already mentioned, I could never find, in graphical terms, anything for X-plane that satisfactorily approaches what I could get in MSFS / P3D. Not even products like SMP can get near what I had in MSFS / P3D visually speaking, particularly when comparing to P3D.

 

Regarding flight dynamics modeling, while X-Plane follows a completely different approach from MSFS / P3D, their strong and also weak points can make add-ons for both sims shine here and there. Other simulators, namely the two I now use ( DCS World, Condorsoaring ( since 2006 ), and also IL-2 Battle of Stalingrad ), but also FU II and FU III, follow flight modeling approaches of the same type used by X-plane, where the aircraft are decomposed into a "network" of lift and drag generation surfaces, as well as thrust sources. 

 

The approach followed by X-Plane is generic, compared to specific flight models like those that make part of DCS World and IL-2 BoS aircraft modules, which are developed meticulously based on RW sources and tweaked to approach, as much as possible, their RW counterparts flight characteristics. When using Plane-Maker a user can't expect to have the same results, because as much as it offers a long list of variables and combinations, as well as artificial stability and other sophisticated systems, as well as specific wing design, the fine tuning is difficult to achieve to the level provided by an aircraft module in those other two sims, and, in the end, the developer probably has to sacrifice some realistic values to better adapt the outcome to reality, just as the best developers for MSFS have been doing for years...

 

There is an area where without any doubt X-Plane is ahead of anything that can be achieved in MSFS, unless a totally external FDM is used ( like ELITE Helicopter FNPTs do with ESP which is used for the visuals, or Aerowinx PSX users do when using MSFS or P3D for the visuals of their simulation of a Boeing 744 ) - rotary wing!  These can be created with much more realism for X-Plane than for MSFS / P3D.

 

After years using both lines of flight simulators, if I was asked to pick one only it would be difficult, because I still do not have for XP10 a PMDG 777 running like it did on my last P3D3 install, with weather fed by that mighty ASN, but I also can't have the realism of night scenery, and even some day scenery like that provided by freeware products like World2XP, or an helicopter like those I had for X.-plane in MSFS / P3D... but my ultimate choice in terms of flight dynamics modeling would be X-plane because I still believe it has more potential than the GREAT, but more limited platform we have at the core of MSFS and P3D.

[warbirds 555]

I have all three and fly P3D and X-Plane the most often.

Some things I like about X-Plane;
1. Night flying
2. Rain on windows
3. Amazing free airports (thank you MrX)
4. Flying feels a bit more realistic to me
5. Night flying (deserves another mention)

Some things I do not like about X-Plane;
1. Cannot just put a gps popup in any plane (probably why you will never see the GTN 750 come to X-Plane).
2. Stormy weather cloud pop up - stalls and stutters when they do.
3. Again, weather
4. Cannot save a flight and have it start exactly as you left it (FSX can save a situation to resume)
5. Keeps asking for my serial number about every 5th time I start the sim.

All in all I am very happy with X-Plane and it is my go to sim for night flying.

[uwespeed 497]

Talking about stability in the air - definitely planes and cars have a certain amount of self stability, but ... for those who aren’t real world pilots: imagine you drive with a car on a perfect even and straight road and release the centered steering wheel for, say 5 minutes. Would you dare to close your eyes during this period (provided that there aren’t other cars driving around you)? Probably not, because the car will drift away with time. And … don’t forget … this road has a hard surface and you have only 2 dimensions.

 

In the air, it is more complicated: the air isn’t hard, but soft and additionally you have 3 dimensions. Would you dare to close your eyes for 5 minutes with a centered yoke/stick (of course, again provided that there aren’t other planes flying around you)?