Xplane and my simming future

[CarlosF 1,234]

From what I have seen in videos, AF2 is a flat world, yes is does depict buildings but it's just a fraction of them, no weather and who knows what else it does not offer out of the box, no wonder people praise its performance. Again apples vs oranges.

No IA or traffic either AFAIK..

Edited April 6, 2018 by CarlosF

[pmb 5,137]

23 minutes ago, CarlosF said:

From what I have seen in videos, AF2 is a flat world, yes is does depict buildings but it's just a fraction of them, no weather and who knows what else it does not offer out of the box, no wonder people praise its performance. Again apples vs oranges.

No IA or traffic either AFAIK..

Eagle county, which is available from ORBX, is all but flat. It overall looks much more natural than the corresponding ORBX Prepar3d representation (I own both). And it still runs with 120 fps flying the Learjet. The same goes for LOWI, which even has running trains and stuff within the ORBX area.

Kind regards, Michael

[tonywob 4,768]

Yep. I've thrown scenery at it in my experiments (I made a small region in England). It screams in performance, even in VR. It might not do as much as the other sims, but put a VR headset on and that all changes

[Paraffin 2,197]

11 hours ago, tonywob said:

xEnviro badly needs custom weather themes instead of real weather. This is a huge limiting factor for me who likes to fly GA and helis in places like the UK (where the weather is always rubbish) and I don't understand why they haven't implemented this yet. 

That's why I don't use XEnviro even though I bought it shortly after it came out. I do a lot of my flying in the Pacific Northwest, similar weather to the UK. We get some real monster storms rolling in off the Pacific Ocean. Real weather injection, without enough control, means I couldn't fly for 5 months out of the year in light GA planes and helicopters. And that's all I fly in X-Plane.

The dev posts I've read indicate that XEnviro will never be updated for full manual adjustment, due to the way the weather effects are assembled on their server and then downloaded to XP. 

It's the opposite of "download the METAR and then assemble the effects locally", like default XP weather, NOAA plugin, or SkyMaxx Pro. Which is why we can adjust things manually on those systems, after pulling down real weather data.

The devs have mentioned adding a "historical" weather feature, or maybe themes? But for me that isn't good enough. I don't want to time-travel to a date in the past, or set something like the weather themes in XP default weather panel. I want the current weather, with a few tweaks to make it flyable with the aircraft I'm using. I can get that with default XP weather or SkyMaxx Pro.

[pmb 5,137]

8 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

That's why I don't use XEnviro even though I bought it shortly after it came out.

I am in the same boat as you and Tony. I don't fly XP that much, but bought Xenviro and it looks good indeed. But as a VFR flyer I have to rely on VFR-enabled weather. So it's sitting on the virtual shelf for some time now.

I mostly use presets in Prepar3d as well, except when I am out for a challenge when I start AS.

Kind regards, Michael

[CarlosF 1,234]

4 hours ago, pmb said:

Eagle county, which is available from ORBX is all but flat

I was referring to Out-of-the-box scenery, not addons.

[Guest]

10 hours ago, CarlosF said:

I was referring to Out-of-the-box scenery, not addons.

Sorry, but this reply is a bit odd. You said performance is high because a.o. the scenery is flat and empty, In other words: if the scenery would NOT be flat and empty performance would certainly drop to XP levels. It doesn't. Even WITH addons and very detailed scenery performance stays extremely good. A LOT better than XP (or P3D). It doesn't come close! So saying you were referring to out of the box scenery doesn't make any sense at all.

Of course AFS2 misses a lot of features and it has to be seen how the sim will perform with AI, weather, etc. but there is so much headroom that I do believe AFS will stay the best performing sim. The focus of the developers also is on performance.

Edited April 7, 2018 by Guest

[CarlosF 1,234]

4 hours ago, J van E said:

the scenery is flat and empty

It is. 

Maybe Im wrong but from what I can see watching AF2 videos, all scenery seems to be static, there is no autogen which is culprit of performance degradation in both XP and P3D. If XP and P3D had the world full of static scenery, there wold not be any performance penalty for sure.

Having said that, if all the scenery is in fact generated/placed on the fly then never mind my comments, but I highly doubt it due to the fact that AF2 scenery is quite detailed.

Edited April 7, 2018 by CarlosF

[Guest]

4 hours ago, CarlosF said:

If XP and P3D had the world full of static scenery, there wold not be any performance penalty for sure.

I seriously doubt that... Take any addon with lots of static buildings, like New York, and performance usually drops like a bomb. Not so in AFS2. Besides, Orbx added thousands of 'autogen' buildings to Chicago (they are called 'cultivation' in AFS2) and performance stays way above the 100 anyway. Here is a shot of Chicago, looking at the city centre from a distance and fps is 180 here. Try that in XP or P3D. (BTW I usually fly with vsync on so fps is always 60 on my PC: needless to say it ALWAYS is 60. )

http://www.fsfiles.org/flightsimshotsv2/images/2018/04/08/20180407204500_1.jpg

But anyway, this is getting off topic and I am not defending AFS2 as if it is the best sim around: for me it is a nice sim for a short and relaxing sunday afternoon flight: for serious simming I'll have to use P3D. But AFS2 has a lot of potential, that's for sure.

Edited April 7, 2018 by Guest

[jcomm 5,882]

AEFS2 is, indeed, the Master of Performance, and particularly for those lucky word not alloweds with VR sets to profit even more from it :-)

Problem is, it's philosophy is one of coding every system, aircraft and probably in the future others like traffic, atc, weather, inside of it's own simulation cycle, creating the necessary hooks, and avoiding external code interpreters or linking ... That's in good part a requisite for performance. How it'll cope with 3pd projects in the future I really don't know, because for instance, creating an aircraft with it's own avionics / instruments, etc... can't be done right now unless their code is already available in the core sim.

Edited April 7, 2018 by jcomm

[soaring_penguin 428]

6 pages of comparing sims, weather systems, preferred add-ons, and we are keeping it still civilized. There is hope for humanity after all !

[jcomm 5,882]

40 minutes ago, jh71 said:

6 pages of comparing sims, weather systems, preferred add-ons, and we are keeping it still civilized. There is hope for humanity after all !

Ok, ya asked for it.... Here it goes :  Me  Uninstall em all !!!! Now !!!! All piece of c@€p 

Best sim is ELITE !

Other are toys, for ya simmer boys... 

[Back to controlled mode]: I am having a great time again with XP11, but only using two add-ons, two Airbuses that together have given me the best experience ever for a simulation of the type since my good old PSS A32x :-( which I miss so much, not because of being better than these, but because they were a major breakthrough back in the times of fs9... )

But while we're here in the X-plane forums, many of us actually also love FSX / P3D, an there I have a great, not at all inferior if we take into account all details, Airbus simulation - FSlabs A320.

Both masterpieces, each on it's own platform. 

I just want the devs on both platforms to continue - we now need a 330, 340, 350 ... 380 !  Yes Portugal is getting it's first A380 by the hands of HiFly !!!!

 

Edited April 8, 2018 by jcomm

[tonywob 4,768]

José, my sim is better than yours . *sticks tongue out and makes childish noises*

2 hours ago, jcomm said:

Yes Portugal is getting it's first A380 by the hands of HiFly !!!!

 

I had the pleasure of flying on the emirates A380 last year to New Zealand. Beautiful aircraft and the A320 looks like a piper cub sat next to this thing. However economy class is still economy class, and I was not in a good state upon arrival :)