For people that use both P3D and X-Plane, questions

[Lenny777 299]

Used it already. Not very satisfactory. In fact then you have the jarring change when you want to transition to spring. At the pace they stated they are working on their ATC (it's been years) don't have much realistic anticipation for what you indicated.

[Paraffin 2,197]

1 hour ago, Lenny777 said:

Used it already. Not very satisfactory. In fact then you have the jarring change when you want to transition to spring. At the pace they stated they are working on their ATC (it's been years) don't have much realistic anticipation for what you indicated.

I sympathize with the frustration, because I do a lot of sim flying up in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and it would be NICE to see some proper winter snow in these areas, instead of summer all the time. 

On the other hand, what Austin has talked about wanting to do -- procedural weather, with leaves changing color and falling off trees,  snow as particle effects blowing across the runway, etc. -- would be a major step forward in world simulation for a flight sim. He doesn't want to just use the old "throw a texture on the ground" method.

So I have to admire the ambition, even if I'm frustrated at having to wait for it. If Laminar can pull this off, it will put every other flight sim's depiction of seasons to shame. 

[Lenny777 299]

26 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

I sympathize with the frustration, because I do a lot of sim flying up in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and it would be NICE to see some proper winter snow in these areas, instead of summer all the time. 

On the other hand, what Austin has talked about wanting to do -- procedural weather, with leaves changing color and falling off trees,  snow as particle effects blowing across the runway, etc. -- would be a major step forward in world simulation for a flight sim. He doesn't want to just use the old "throw a texture on the ground" method.

So I have to admire the ambition, even if I'm frustrated at having to wait for it. If Laminar can pull this off, it will put every other flight sim's depiction of seasons to shame. 

If he can pull that off it's a great for sure.

[Murmur 3,940]

8 hours ago, Paraffin said:

So I have to admire the ambition, even if I'm frustrated at having to wait for it. If Laminar can pull this off, it will put every other flight sim's depiction of seasons to shame. 

But that won't happen at least until X-Plane 12 (and still not certain).

Meanwhile, FSW is doing great strides in improving the environmental visuals: It already has the most realistic rain and snow depiction, and the new cloud engine is already showing incredible visuals.

The procedural season concept will surely be interesting and I look forward to it, but usually in a flight simulator you're not going to stand there in a place, waiting for the ground to be covered by snow, or watching the leaves going brown.

My point is that improvements in rain and snow depiction are as important as seasons, and I hope we'll see them improved before they implement seasons (because that's gonna take some years at least). I wonder if the competition from FSW will make LR update their roadmap, but I'm not particularly optimistic.

 

[vortex681 806]

12 hours ago, Paraffin said:

On the other hand, what Austin has talked about wanting to do -- procedural weather, with leaves changing color and falling off trees,  snow as particle effects blowing across the runway, etc. -- would be a major step forward in world simulation for a flight sim. He doesn't want to just use the old "throw a texture on the ground" method.

But hasn't he already been talking about seasons and better ATC for years now and neither have appeared or even look close. I think most users would be more than happy for the time being with the old "throw a texture on the ground" method. The fancy stuff can come later (if ever).

[Paraffin 2,197]

5 hours ago, Murmur said:

But that won't happen at least until X-Plane 12 (and still not certain).

Meanwhile, FSW is doing great strides in improving the environmental visuals: It already has the most realistic rain and snow depiction, and the new cloud engine is already showing incredible visuals.

FSW doesn't look that impressive to me. The new clouds look cartoonish, and they still haven't solved the problem of pop-in and blurry horizon LOD compared to X-Plane's fantastic terrain detail in the distance. As a bush pilot in the sim who is often searching for a small airstrip in the boonies, distant terrain detail is a huge part of the environmental visuals for me.

I'm also not convinced that the rain effect is so great. There are sims in X-Plane that include rain on the windscreen (the upcoming A320 has it, I think?), and it needs to track airspeed better. And then there's the way FSW looks at night, with no dynamic lighting (so far). Considering how limited the dynamic lighting is in the new 16-bit P3Dv4, this shared sim engine may not be able to do what XP does with night lighting.

Anyway, I'm glad FSW is out there as competition and incentive for improvement, to the extent it actually does do anything better. For me, That isn't happening yet except for seasons, and that's been in FSX/P3D for a long time. 

 

2 hours ago, vortex681 said:

But hasn't he already been talking about seasons and better ATC for years now and neither have appeared or even look close. I think most users would be more than happy for the time being with the old "throw a texture on the ground" method. The fancy stuff can come later (if ever).

We can hope, and I sure wouldn't mind seeing that. But from what I remember of Austin talking about this, he's adamant about not using textures for snow. It's in the same vein as his dislike of orthophotos as a scenery base. The sim already uses procedural generation for landclass terrain and OSM roads and buildings. Procedural seasons is a natural extension of that concept. So I doubt we'll see snow textures from Laminar as an interim approach.

In the meantime, maybe another 3rd party developer will release something better than what's currently available as a texture package.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

2 hours ago, Paraffin said:

FSW doesn't look that impressive to me. The new clouds look cartoonish,

After putting aside XP11 for a few weeks and using FSW for GA flying, I have to agree with you on the clouds. I think that the initial response was positive to the TrueSky 3D clouds, just like it was when people realized that P3d V4 was using 3D SpeedTrees for autogen trees. But then reality set in. No one has the hardware to run 3D trees in P3d and also use both a lot of detailed scenery add-ons and a complex aircraft. And the FSW clouds must be dumbed down by DTG in some fashion, probably to give the average FSW user decent performance. All in all, FSW is still in last place in the Great Flight Sim Race of 2017 (not a war), even behind FSX-SE, IMO. Even though I don't have a copy of Aerofly FS2, I have to give it points for effort, since everyone who does have it, remarks how well the VR is integrated in AFS2.

[mazelda 124]

I've tried on several occasions to like xp11 and still use it,I think the scenery out of the box is streets ahead of p3d even with Orbx installed

I've bought a couple of payware addons for xplane, the a350 and the ff767 both in themselves pretty good but my real turn off that takes me back to p3d is the ai aircraft.

As I fly mostly airliners my experience is totally killed by the poor ai 

There are some great freeware airports out there ,mister x springs to mind  but to then see the likes of an Alitalia dc9 at a gate in Boston kills it.

I then go back to p3d and using my aig plans i go to airports of the same quality as mister x but with realistic ai aircraft that are very easy to add to in p3d that dont require the hours of playing around that a couple of the ai programs in xplane requires

I do like xp11 and think its the best version yet but from the ai point of view has a massively long way to go yet

[strider1 575]

On 8/17/2017 at 7:55 AM, Murmur said:

The flight model has improved somewhat compared to previous versions (9 and 10). It's less twitchy in general, although you'll find better and worse aircrafts (in terms of flight model) depending on the skill of the author. Default aircrafts have now acceptable flight models.

Some annoying bugs have been removed (like the old "propeller torque bug"), but most aircrafts have unrealistic weathervaning tendency in crosswind operations.

Also, to date I don't know any aircraft for X-P that spins 100% realistically.

Regarding the air movements (and in reference to your other post on P3D and FSW turbulence), X-Plane has a "smoother" modeling of turbulence. You can actually visualize the air vectors and turbulence moving in real time around the aircrafts when using the appropriate option ("show flight model"). Max turbulence in X-P makes the control of the aircraft very hard or impossible.

On the other hand, I've seen some pilots on these forums complain that the turbulence in X-Plane is too "persistent" or "continuous", compared to real life.

Persistent vertical air movements (e.g. downdrafts) are absent in X-Plane, except for a simplified and random modeling of thermals.

Seaplane ops are possible, but water physics are imperfect. Austin Meyer recently said that he's working on improving them for the near future.

The available demo offers all the features of the full version, except for the limited scenery area around Seattle, and a limited time of 15 minutes for each run, so you can use it to evaluate.

 

I hate the turbulence in XP it's to continuous, it feels more like sitting on a sailboat in the ocean. Turbulence should be more bumpy and should fluctuate !

By the way Murmur I think your help is being requested subconsciously at the org !

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/137784-cessna-172-vs-quest-kodiak-ground-effect/

"If the past is anything to go by, that one time Laminar left the torque effect being counted twice (once for the shaft and once for the prop), leading to many years of complaints, until someone actually took the time to analyze the problem and pinpoint where the bug had been introduced, makes me assume that this ground effect bug will be no different.  I think it'll really take someone going full zombie mode on this, until the problem is pinpointed." 

"So: it'd be really good if some end-users who know what they're doing with PlaneMaker, AirfoilMaker, etc. could help us play detective on this issue. Even just spending some time on this collecting data points on the issue might end up helping formulating a response for Laminar that they could actually see themselves do something concrete about."

 

[Murmur 3,940]

10 hours ago, strider1 said:

By the way Murmur I think your help is being requested subconsciously at the org !

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/137784-cessna-172-vs-quest-kodiak-ground-effect/

Thank you, interesting thread.

 

[jcomm 5,880]

The ground effect, and the propwash, reynolds, etc... modelling probably require fine tuning, and for sure require aircraft designers to adapt their models to these new features.

I've recently tried a ww2 warbird available from the org store, and adapted to these new features, and I am really enjoying it, including ground effect.

I have to confess a terrible thing :-/ , particularly terrible since I am a glider pilot IRL - ground effect is the kind of stuff I only feel really well in flight simulators :-)

IRL, ground effect is evident if I decide to make a low pass over the runway, or am told, on short final ( well, in gliders it is always kinda shorty anyway... ) to bring the glider to the opposite threshold,  and then I retract spoilers, and "float" as much as I can and as clean as possible ... Other than that, my landings have always been ( since 37 yrs ) pretty much ground effect less :-)

[Murmur 3,940]

3 hours ago, jcomm said:

IRL, ground effect is evident if I decide to make a low pass over the runway, or am told, on short final ( well, in gliders it is always kinda shorty anyway... ) to bring the glider to the opposite threshold,  and then I retract spoilers, and "float" as much as I can and as clean as possible ... Other than that, my landings have always been ( since 37 yrs ) pretty much ground effect less :-)

That's consistent with the fact that gliders have a very high aspect ratio and wingspan. In this case, the trailing vortices are already well spaced, and have little effect on most of the wing, so whether they're reflected or not by the ground has little consequence.

An aircraft with infinite wingspan, would theoretically have no spanwise-dominated ground effect, just chordwise-dominated ground effect, but that is usually of lower magnitude and only manifesting when the wing is much closer to the ground. :-)

 

[danklaue 65]

Well, I don't know if I was sub-consciously requesting Murmur's help... it's just that that's what it took to get Austin to actually do something about the torque.  

 

But you may be interested in the results of some testing we did, which I did a quick write-up on on the Just Flight support thread on the .org forums:

 

Quote

I can clearly see this phenomenon in the default Cessna.  Presumably, depending on the aircraft's configuration, this effect may be more pronounced.  To confirm what we are seeing, here are the steps to reproduce:

1. Load the default Cessna (or any other default aircraft... the larger the sampling of default aircraft that present this phenomenon, the better the data set for Laminar to be able to pinpoint what's going on).

2. Set up the plane to do a 3NM final approach to any runway. Take your time to trim out the plane (both roll and pitch) and adjust the throttle so that it maintains a stable glideslope towards the runway, without using Autopilot.

3. Let it approach the landing strip with as close to NO elevator, throttle, or trim adjustments by the pilot.

4. Take note that around 30-40 feet off the ground, the nose of the plane starts pitching down, with no input from the pilot. This seems to be purely an aerodynamic effect at close proximity to the ground... but it seems reverse from what it is expected to be.

 

With more confirmations of this phenomenon by end-users, using a wider range of sample data using default aircraft, it should become clear if Laminar manages to pinpoint the bug, and hopefully make some sort of statement about their intentions. This, in turn, will give us as add-on developers some clarity as to whether or not we need to do anything to our planes, or just wait for Laminar to fix the issue.  Of course our hope would be that we wouldn't be required to do anything, but that would mean that end-users would have to wait for the X-plane update.

 

[Murmur 3,940]

1 hour ago, danklaue said:

But you may be interested in the results of some testing we did, which I did a quick write-up on on the Just Flight support thread on the .org forums:

Hi Dan,

interesting experiment. As far as I know, the nose down tendency is predicted by aerodynamics theory. The explanation (in layman terms) is because the ground partially blocks the wing downwash over stabilizer, hence a nose down moment.

So, the behaviour of XP seems to be in the correct direction. The problem is that, from what I read, pilots do not report noticing this nose down tendency when entering ground effect.

My hypothesis (as I wrote in the .org thread) is that XP is underestimating the increase of wing lift due to ground (the "cushioning" effect). Probably in real life that effect is prevalent over any nose down tendency. Moreover, an increase in wing lift should cause a momentary decrease in AoA, and hence a momentary nose up moment. Maybe that also contributes to nullifying the nose down moment I previously talked about.

In summary, my "hunch" (I could be wrong) is that XP is underestimating the increase in wing lift due to ground effect, and the nose down moment is a consequence of this.

 

[Murmur 3,940]

Answered on the .org thread. Apparently, the increase in wing lift due to ground effect is completely missing.