p3d 3.4 v xplane 11 pros and cons

[pilot83 387]

Each simmer to fly the platform they like the most!  All platforms have strengths and weaknesses! Competition will only push developers to do better which is great for flight simulation!

 

Personally i like to see a non ESP developer moving a 64 bit platform forward and i invested in them all (FSX, P3DV3, xp10 and xp11) , my main concern is to take advantage of my hardware resources, RAMs, Cpu and graphics card, and to fly fluidly in a world that loads smoothly because for me this is the main factor of immersion, and worst thing happened to me was when i invested in lots of add ons and i could not fly them fluidly and use them all together because of FPS and VAS limitations.

[JacquesBrel 639]

Flight simulation involves many aspects of aviation, and there's not a simulator that does everything right. And what aspects of flight simulation that each of us enjoys is of course an individual thing.

 

I got started in flight simulation around 3 years ago simply because  X-Plane was 66% off during one of the regular Steam sales. I didn't know anything about it, and I thought I'd just try it for fun for a few hours. My main simulator hobby then - and now - is racing sims, so I didn't plan to get a second hobby back then (sim racing is an expensive hobby already...) According to Steam, I ended up spending 120 hours in X-Plane. But I eventually switched to Prepar3D.

 

X-Plane was great for just flying a plane. But after a while I wanted to do more than just that. I wanted to navigate a plane in a somewhat believable weather environment and traffic environment, and X-Plane was really lacking in those areas. It was especially watching videos and reading reviews about Active Sky Next that made me leave X-Plane behind.

 

I am sometimes a bit displeased by the performance and memory limitations of P3D, but it still gives me the aviation sensation that I want from it (and its many addons), and I can't see any other sim on the market that would do the same for me.

[ryanbatc 12,775]

I totally disagree about realistic flight in XP. Never flew a 172 that flew like the 172's I tried in X plane. Fly into a small airport with a 4,00o foot runway and see a 747 parked at the ramp. realism, more like science fiction. The day that XP comes out with aircraft like A2A with accusim, I might consider trying it again, although I always wind up quickly disappointed with just about everything except the night lighting, but then I rarely fly at night both in real life and on my sim. BTW, I have never had a "registry hassle", but then I have only been simming for a bit less than 30 years.

The stock Cessnas on both FSX and XP are terrible

 

Once you fly the addons for the respective sim (A2A and AirfoilLabs) it's much more competitive.

[sizziano 172]

The stock Cessnas on both FSX and XP are terrible

 

Once you fly the addons for the respective sim (A2A and AirfoilLabs) it's much more competitive.

 

The stock XP 172 is definitely not terrible, but no A2A or Airfoil Labs.

[Urshult Haze 4]

Went back to X Plane again after using P3D for about 2 years.
Realized that I wasn't doing much flying... Tweaking, reinstalling, configuring, testing, fixing things... and when flying almost never landing because off OOM or some other crash.
I failed to fix the blurriness and the stuttering.
I failed to find my home-town... Well, yes it is small. Tried every add-on available... but no, not even a road there... just forest!
Half the roads that exist in real life do not exist in P3D but there seems to be a lot of roads there that does not exist in real life!?
Half of the smallest airports are missing too. Very noticeable when flying in Iceland for example.
Now I'm completely hooked on Ortho4Xp generated scenery. I don't like to fly anywhere without photo-scenery any-more. I can see my house, car, count the beehives in the garden... Don't try it! It's very addictive... I just bought 2 new harddrives, 8 TB each! :wink:
I think X Plane is amazing for GA and VFR flying. Especially if you fly where the OSM coverage is good and using World2xp scenery. I guess all this makes me more like a tourist than a pilot :wink:  But from my very small real life flying experience I do think X Plane feel more like the real deal. I like it a lot more... the way it feels to fly in X plane compared to P3D.

So the problems then:
ATC: fixed with Pilot2ATC (amazing program)
AI: fixed with World traffic.
Weather: OK with SkyMaxPro, Real Weather Connector and NOAA plug-in.
Only two small problems left... just joking... huge problems!
Very few really good air-crafts. No military air-crafts worth mentioning... No A2A Spitfire. No VRS Superbug. No RealAir Duke. The list is endless!
Very few really good airports. No ORBX. No FlyTampa. Not much Aerosoft and... The list is endless here too!
I wish I could have a combination!
Photo Scenery in a 64 bit P3D or all the P3D add-ons available for X Plane.
 

[simmerhead 885]

To me it boils down to scenery. Whichever platform gives me the most realistic view out the window of the AC I'm flying I'll be using. Basically I'm still waiting for FS11

[Longranger 148]

The stock XP 172 is definitely not terrible, but no A2A or Airfoil Labs.

It depends on the time. One of the big problems when X-Plane 10 was released:

It wasn´t really ready. It more or less took from 10.03 to 10.1 till X-Plane 10 really stabilized.

The default 172 was very well known to be unstable. A bit of crosswind and it was difficult to start it.

The plane was really bad. But in later versions it was replaced with an improved version.

 

And the 172 in X-Plane 11 is simply a complete new plane. There is a reason why it is the only version with the new FMOD sound engine. This will be the sound engine of X-Plane 11. All other default planes use the old default sound system.

Nearly all payware planes in X-Plane 10 brought their own sond engines with them. This was the first reason why they started to use SASL.Later Gizmo got Sound Support andf Dreamfoil distributed their Dreamengine.

 

For X-Plane 10 they had to drop a lot of tools and systems, that were used in X-Plane 9 but the tools were simply not ready when they had to releas X-Plane 10. Now the situation is totally different. A lot of changes that happened in the last year in X-Plane 10 will became active in X-plane 11.

I think the current Beta of X-Plane 11 is at least as stable as the final version of X-Plane 10.03.

But a lot of people bought first version of X-Plane 10 tried it for a week and deleted it. One of the main reasons why I stayed: I was never satisfied with the local roads in FSX. I started X-Plane and every road was in the correct location. And even more amazing: At this time there was a major highway conversion in my place. They had to reroute the whole traffic multiple times. When I got X-Plane 10 it had the correct route that I had to drive for the last 6 months. They only switched 5 days before I got X-Plane 10.

[tonywob 4,768]

Two things that make X-Plane attractive for me are:

 

1) X-Plane runs on my Apple computers and is nice and portable. The sim can be moved around, placed onto external drives, and it's even possible if you want to move the install to a Windows machine, run the updater to download some files, and it will also run under Windows. Using Windows 10 feels like a chore, it's clunky and slow and I really don't like that system, so much so that it stops be spending much time in P3D. This may seem like a strange reason, but this is what is important to me, ie. ease of access and the development tools available.

 

2) X-Plane seems to attract freeware developers and has an opensource community feel to it (Although the sim itself isn't opensource). I have no doubt it would be possible to write something similar to Ortho4XP and World2XPlane for P3D and I'm curious why nobody has done this (There are companies who charge for OSM scenery and orthos from free sources). At one point in the past FS9/FSX was like this, but it seems to have died out.

[wiler 394]

A new vid from "squirrel" on youtube. thx!

[ryanbatc 12,775]

The stock XP 172 is definitely not terrible, but no A2A or Airfoil Labs.

It's terrible. Visually and flight modelling...

 

Same as FSX though

[Bobsk8 12,512]

I guess I wonder why these "How good is X Plane threads always pop up on the P3D forums, yet you never see the opposite, where how good is P3D pop up on X Plane groups. Of course, we all know the answer to that question.  :wink:

[sizziano 172]

I guess I wonder why these "How good is X Plane threads always pop up on the P3D forums, yet you never see the opposite, where how good is P3D pop up on X Plane groups. Of course, we all know the answer to that question.  :wink:

 

I don't. what is it?

[Bobsk8 12,512]

I don't. what is it?

 

If you don't know, you haven't been around sims very long. 

[sizziano 172]

If you don't know, you haven't been around sims very long. 

 

Going on 17 years, all in XP. Let's see:

 

A. XP users could care less about P3D or FSX so don't ask about it.

 

B. XP users are all already using P3D.

 

Both are absurd. Which one is it?

[red259 31]

People can't really compare at this point since XP11 has not come out yet. I was thinking about going from FSX-SE with the DX10 fixer to P3d. I am now strongly considering waiting. I have many addons for fsx (I have since stopped purchasing addons unless they will work on both fsx and p3d), but the biggest problem for me is VAS which makes a lot of the airport addons basically unusable. I'm not going to pay for p3d only to experience the same problems. FSX's days are certainly numbered given its limitations. What keeps me there is my addons especially my pmdg and FSLabs planes. If developers start developing high end aircraft for XP-11 and everything is realistic then I will just skip p3d all together and move to xp11. I'm not going to do that though until there are actually high end aircraft I can use and all the bugs post release have been sorted out.