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Few opinions on X-Plane 11, and PMDG products for XP11

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27 minutes ago, slavik35ua said:

No prob, the whole world can't live in harmony cuz there r always different opinions and that's okay, I do expect my opinion to be doubted/challenged and so do others(I hope), besides that, even if the FAA approves the "one entity" calculation system, would it be more precise to calculate the forces applied on the wings/vertical stab separately, than just calculating how a slight wind shear affected the whole planes tragectory? Or am I wrong? Would be more than pleased to hear your thoughts.

You create a whole aircraft flight model by analysing how the aircraft responds in flight to various inputs (control surface position, thrust, the aircraft's motion, etc). This results in a flight model which responds exactly as the aircraft would do to changes. You don't gain anything by analysing it at a lower level.

These days it's possible to predict to how a new aircraft will fly using CFD techniques, which is an even lower level of detail than X-Plane's blade elements. This is great for producing very accurate predicted performance and producing a very efficient aircraft designs. The calculations are complex, but don't need to be done in real time. Once you have flight test measurements to work with you don't need to have this highly detailed modelling to predict aircraft behaviour. You have the test results which tell you how the whole aircraft responds. Such a model produces exactly the same results as one based on CFD or X-Plane blade elements. Except you don't have to model the airflow over each of the thousands of polygons that make up the aircraft's 3D shape and then integrate all these forces to find the toal force on the aircaft. For a flight simulator these calculations must be in real time, So the whole aircraft model is more efficient in that respect.

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2 hours ago, kevinh said:

You create a whole aircraft flight model by analysing how the aircraft responds in flight to various inputs (control surface position, thrust, the aircraft's motion, etc). This results in a flight model which responds exactly as the aircraft would do to changes. You don't gain anything by analysing it at a lower level.

These days it's possible to predict to how a new aircraft will fly using CFD techniques, which is an even lower level of detail than X-Plane's blade elements. This is great for producing very accurate predicted performance and producing a very efficient aircraft designs. The calculations are complex, but don't need to be done in real time. Once you have flight test measurements to work with you don't need to have this highly detailed modelling to predict aircraft behaviour. You have the test results which tell you how the whole aircraft responds. Such a model produces exactly the same results as one based on CFD or X-Plane blade elements. Except you don't have to model the airflow over each of the thousands of polygons that make up the aircraft's 3D shape and then integrate all these forces to find the toal force on the aircaft. For a flight simulator these calculations must be in real time, So the whole aircraft model is more efficient in that respect.

That's a good lesson for me. Thanks a lot for the explanations.

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On 5/4/2017 at 7:43 AM, denthibbe said:

Although the topic has fallen into the "mine is better than yours" sphere I still wanted to add my honest thoughts about the matter.

Since my last post on this topic I still did not buy the QoTS V3 because I want to know what the possible 64bit upgrade of P3D will have to offer exactly and, yes, at some point I really would like to be able to tell a final goodbye to P3D. Why? simply because it's old, expensive and keeps you from updating very simple things like graphics card drivers or I will have to cope with showstoppers like VAS depletion. In a way XP11 is such a breath of fresh air. When preparing your trip you just fill in your flight plan and, if you just feel like it, enter both SID and STAR (including runways) even before starting your checklists... seems so obvious yet these are the things I never do since the last 3 years or so without keeping a stressed eye on my VAS counter for the next 30 minutes in order to check whether or not I triggered some unexplainable memory operation which basically ruins the whole experience.(sorry for the very long phrase !)

Do I think XP11 is perfect? Absolutely not. Actually I was surprised to see it being officially released so soon because I really thought it still needed a lot of polishing up. I think that even the most developers where a bit surprised because a lot of addons had to kind of push out patches really quickly to temporarily address only the most obvious glitches in their products.
The plugins philosophy is also something I am not that fond of. Coming from a P3D setup where everything (wxr engine, radio, IVAO client, etc...) is run on a networked PC, having to come back to a setup where everything has to run on the Simulator PC is actually very hard to accept... strangely enough.

Honestly it is very difficult to try and step away from a sim I have been using for 10 years now (I know that is not even that long...). I feel like I know it inside out (been through the whole FSX tweaking history).

Bottom line, the main reasons which made me look elsewhere where the many technical issues really feeding me up to a point where I wondered why I was still coping with it and most important of all, I was paying for it... imho XP11 really needs to evolve and I am still afraid that without a bigger user base (read "higher potential to attract more developers, bringing their creativity and know-how") it will never really get the chance to reach that point where I can really ditch P3D totally...

Again thoughts of a random customer

A nice day to all of you.

If the user-base was that small as you speculate, Laminar would have not hired two new programmers. Back in the XP9 days, I was taking some aviation classes at a community college. All of the instructors and students were using XP9 as a training sim. Not once in two years did I hear anybody recommend FSX, yet alone talk about it. So you can't speculate how big the user-base is by the Avsim forum alone.


AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, 6800XT, Ram - 32GB, 32" 4K Monitor, WIN 11, XP-12 !

Eric Escobar

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12 hours ago, strider1 said:

hired two new programmers

I couldn't resist this.... wow TWO programmers.  The big IT companies consider  programmers the lowest rung on the ladder, and lowest paid. True, it is a good sign that a small company is hiring a few folks but if you had said designers or engineers then your argument may have had more credibility.


Dan Downs KCRP

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7 hours ago, downscc said:

I couldn't resist this.... wow TWO programmers.  The big IT companies consider  programmers the lowest rung on the ladder, and lowest paid. True, it is a good sign that a small company is hiring a few folks but if you had said designers or engineers then your argument may have had more credibility.

It wasn't a argument !

Yes only two on top of the 5-12 other developers he has working for him. 

Correction "We’re looking to add two developers—one junior, one senior—to the Laminar Research team this spring". Designers, engineers, it's all semantics if you ask me.  Who cares, what matters is the end result and somebody has to do the coding !

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AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, 6800XT, Ram - 32GB, 32" 4K Monitor, WIN 11, XP-12 !

Eric Escobar

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On 2017-5-15 at 5:39 PM, downscc said:

I couldn't resist this.... wow TWO programmers.  The big IT companies consider  programmers the lowest rung on the ladder, and lowest paid. 

Without anyone to program how will anything get programmed though lol? If your statement is true it makes no sense to me :) 

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20 hours ago, Davidrebolton said:

Without anyone to program how will anything get programmed though lol? If your statement is true it makes no sense to me :) 

I think his point was that adding two developers isn't always the mark of success or huge growth.

I can definitely tell that his point wasn't that the number should be zero, though, so I'm not sure what your angle is here.

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Kyle Rodgers

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