Yes it's a personal thing if you want eye candy or not, I am all for eye candy because I only fly GA's / Helis specially attitude flying else in IFR i will only go in circles. Eye candy for both aircrafts and the virtual world

 

Probably simmers using tubes won't be bothered about the eye candy except when departing or arriving at an airport unlike the GA / heli flyers.

 

No sim will give you everything at once, they all have to earn for a long term. 

No sim will give you everything at once, they all have to earn for a long term. 

 

But ... 

 

Regarding this eye candy thingy: I for myself rate smoothness over eye candy - means, if (too much) eye candy leads to stuttering, nah ... leave it away.

 

Austin also said something in the Q&A part of the presentation in direction to professional use of the sim (namely FAA and stuff), that it has to be 100.00% stutter free. Many people don't understand, that X-Plane is not only aimed to the home user, but also for professional users. These have (partly) completely different needs. We home users are not on an isolated island, there is much more out there ... :wink:.

and LM is also now in the professional users business. So Laminar needed to step up a bit and be more user friendly. maybe LM used to be a Laminar client.

 

 

The impression is that this time they're really aiming to be a prime actor in the flight simulator market, and this of course means more users, more addons, more resources for further development...

 

Spot on!!

But ... 

 

Regarding this eye candy thingy: I for myself rate smoothness over eye candy - means, if (too much) eye candy leads to stuttering, nah ... leave it away.

 

Austin also said something in the Q&A part of the presentation in direction to professional use of the sim (namely FAA and stuff), that it has to be 100.00% stutter free. Many people don't understand, that X-Plane is not only aimed to the home user, but also for professional users. These have (partly) completely different needs. We home users are not on an isolated island, there is much more out there ... :wink:.

 

Totally Agree , but why I said eye candy is needed  because till date I have never suffered from a stutter in Xplane and flying VFR without eye candy is a NONO for me, I am on a 2nd generation laptop which is an i5 2430m + 8 GB + 1 GB Nvidia GT525m , now I do agree that some real good stuff of Xplane I have to disable like HDR + and no shadows above Overlay , my settings are just a tad below EXTREME for Objects / Trees / Roads , the road traffic is the extreme with water to the highest ,  texture to very high and of course clouds are just 10%. I use my own mesh with W2XP for India and it's just super smooth , I fly with my own mesh in the Alps with the W2XP stuff amazing,  I am not saying I get 30 fps all the way NO it will go down to 15 but it feels smooth and no stutters. I fly the AS350 and the Carenado's. , I stopped chasing fps , I also fly with 10 fps now that is in Canada but does it stutter NOP. Yeah maybe sometime it does but that's like 4-5 times of a 50 flight depending also on the region due to the low system.

 

Now 98% of the simmers would at least have a good system running and I think XP does a wonderful job even if cannot use SLI / Xfire.  But there are limitations on how much one can increase / decrease stuff in the sim and still be happy. I am limited due to the GPU so no HDR which eats the performance for me and I am still OK not having HDR at least that resource is allocated to something else .  Tall buildings and clouds for me are bad.

Agreed on both trees and coastlines. The trees don't bother me too much, because I understand the performance trade-offs. It's only really immersion-killing in some areas that should have very dense, continuous forest canopies like the Amazon basin. I've flown over many Tropical forests like that at low level in real life (years ago) and it really does look like a solid sea of green. There are conifer forests almost that dense and interlocked in the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and similar areas.

 

You should definitely try Andras Dense Forest files because -  pretty or not - X-Planes forests can be rather dense. I would almost go as far as to call it a "solid sea of green".

 

 

Totally Agree , but why I said eye candy is needed  because ...

<snip>

...all buildings and clouds for me are bad.

 

My previous posting wasn't meant especially on you, but generally speaking. What I wanted to say: if I have to choose between eye candy and fluidity - my choice is clear. If I can have both ... .

 

You should definitely try Andras Dense Forest files because -  pretty or not - X-Planes forests can be rather dense. I would almost go as far as to call it a "solid sea of green".

 

But ... if you pause the sim ... zoom in ... and look very close to the the trees, you can still see the billboards . Seriously ... is this the sense of a flight simulator?

 

The below is also a simulation (namely something for CFD):

 

 

It isn't eye candy at all, and for the majority possibly even abhorrent, but for others very "sexy" , because a quite exact simulation.

 

 

aa

You should definitely try Andras Dense Forest files because -  pretty or not - X-Planes forests can be rather dense. I would almost go as far as to call it a "solid sea of green".

 

 

That looks pretty good, thanks for the link! I'll check it out.

 

 

Regarding this eye candy thingy: I for myself rate smoothness over eye candy - means, if (too much) eye candy leads to stuttering, nah ... leave it away.

 

You could give me the most amazing aircraft simulation with a realistic 3D cockpit, working circuit breakers and a toilet door that opens and sounds like the real one, but if the view out the window is bad, I'll switch off. I find eye candy a huge part of the sim experience for me which is why I'm happy with the rendering improvements in v11 and can live with 15-25fps if I get a better view. 

Well said Tony!  I also find eye candy a huge part of the sim and am looking forward to the visual improvements in X-Plane 11.

You could give me the most amazing aircraft simulation with a realistic 3D cockpit, working circuit breakers and a toilet door that opens and sounds like the real one, but if the view out the window is bad, I'll switch off. I find eye candy a huge part of the sim experience for me which is why I'm happy with the rendering improvements in v11 and can live with 15-25fps if I get a better view. 

 

Bummer, right now that I was about to offer you a copy of Aerowinx PSX :-/

 

 

Bummer, right now that I was about to offer you a copy of Aerowinx PSX :-/

 

 Didn't you use this with Google Earth at some point? 

Forgive me if this has been answered before, but will X-Plane 11 break add-on compatibility for software such as IXEG 737, FF767, SkyMaxx Pro etc?

It was said at the presentation that aircraft and scenery addons which work in 10.50 are supposed to keep on working in 11.00

But even if some things break, you can usually expect fixes from active developers (or LR, if it's a problem on their side) in a timely manner.

Not everyone goes to Facebook, but Laminar Posted some new pictures of the new C172 running in X-Plane 11 ... wow, just wow!