Thinking of getting XP11

[CarlosF 1,234]

1 minute ago, ErichB said:

We support them by paying for their products.  Once you've paid for the product, you are entitled to an opinion about what the product should reasonably be able to do

Agreed!

[avgaskoolaid 292]

Out of all the weather addons I've used, xEnviro minimizes the sudden weather changes the most. While it isn't 100% perfect, a sudden weather change with xE is somewhat rare rather than a common occurrence as with other weather engines. You can get sudden changes when the weather updates, but you will rarely see sudden changes when moving between areas covered by a specific METAR because of the way xEnviro 'smooths' the weather, bypassing the XP system entirely. It's expensive, but not much more expensive than the next best weather addon, Skymaxxpro and Real Weather Connect (xEnviro comes with visual atmospherics and a weather engine built in, Skymaxxpro is just for visuals and RWC is the weather engine. Also, UltraweatherXP doesn't come with a weather engine). Also, the latest version is 1.07, but you can easily get the much better v1.06 on their website, which is what I'm using right now. Although the release of 1.08 has been delayed due to a personal tragedy, it will be a free update for all existing customers. The only other option at the moment is FSGRW, which I don't have much experience with and it is only a weather engine with no visual updates associated with it.

Finally, with regard to xE there are two big issues, one of which I actually don't see as much of a problem with. The first is that it is only somewhat compatible with weather radars and windshield rain effects for various addon planes. I think that it doesn't work with the A320's weather radar and the windshield rain effect only appears when the xE rain is very heavy. Hopefully, this will be fixed one day with the release of an SDK

The second major problem is that the weather may not always be 100% true to life. This is a serious issue if you're flying online. However, if you're flying solo, as a real pilot I don't see it as much of a problem. From my real world flying experience, the weather is never exactly what METARs and weather forecasts say it will be. Although you can count on getting a reasonable idea of what the weather will be, what it's actually like in the air might be somewhat different than what was reported, requiring you to exercise your pilot skills and adapt to a somewhat uncertain situation. xEnviro weather is just like that: 75% of the time it draws the weather exactly how it's displayed by the METAR, the other 25% of the time there might be variations in wind speed and velocity or cloud cover. This is absolutely a bug, but I like to see it as a feature because honestly it feels a little unrealistic when other weather engines represent sim weather precisely as reported, which simply doesn't happen sometimes in the real world. 

 I wouldn't recommend you wait for Activesky as we only have one very old announcement and absolutely nothing beyond that. If I had to guess they're waiting until XP moves to Vulkan some time later this year so they don't have to redevelop their entire weather engine as soon as its released. 

As for the A320, there isn't a turnaround state but it's very easy to get it going from cold and dark. IIRC the only addon with a 'turnaround' state ATM is the IXEG 737. 

[ErichB 3,638]

I've watched Matt Davies' Twitch streams of Xplane 11 of which he has done quite a few lately.  Knowing Matt, he'll always apply the best supporting software to any flight he is doing.(but perhaps it was just default in this case)  Well, the flight I was watching yesterday was an A330 (I think) long haul.  I only caught the wing views. 

From what I saw, the weather changes were abrupt and sudden(completely a deal breaker)  and the aircraft kept yawing to and fro - constantly. Not sure if that's the aircraft flight model or the weather or a bit of both.  But on both counts, that is not what I want to see on a long haul flight,

Edited April 9, 2018 by ErichB

[ErichB 3,638]

45 minutes ago, klamal said:

1 hour ago, jcomm said:

There's this recent thread at the .org: https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/146308-changing-daytime-causes-irs-lost/

Wow!  That is cool!

That is pretty cool. 

But why would they simulate GPS satellite positions/IRS alignment  and why would that be relevant in a desktop simulation.   There is no scenario in the real world where you would skip time (either forward or backwards),   As far as I'm aware PMDG has accurate IRS alignment modelled, but the IRS doesn't misalign if the time of day is changed.

Edited April 9, 2018 by ErichB

[jcomm 5,886]

1 hour ago, ErichB said:

I've watched Matt Davies' Twitch streams of Xplane 11 of which he has done quite a few lately.  Knowing Matt, he'll always apply the best supporting software to any flight he is doing.(but perhaps it was just default in this case)  Well, the flight I was watching yesterday was an A330 (I think) long haul.  I only caught the wing views. 

From what I saw, the weather changes were abrupt and sudden(completely a deal breaker)  and the aircraft kept yawing to and fro - constantly. Not sure if that's the aircraft flight model or the weather or a bit of both.  But on both counts, that is not what I want to see on a long haul flight,

I tend to believe this is more related to X-Plane's FDM than weather engine itself, although at higher levels we shouldn't find such fast changes in wind direction.

The more I try the FF A320, which uses it's own external FDM the more I'm tempted to believe that indeed, as Murmur for instance once also talked about, it can be related to the way X-Plane calculates some of it's parameters, namely weathervane stability, something we can't directly tweak through PM or Datarefs...

Then there's the rather hysterical way X-plane models turbulence around an aircraft...  All together, and at lower levels specially when the weather reports include variability fields, it's a Bomb! :-)

The FF A320 external FDM deals with this way better than other aircraft that "fly" directly on X-Plane's core FDM, and it's not just a matter of a good implementation of it's FBW / SAS...

Edited April 9, 2018 by jcomm
erroneously wrote "should" instead of "shouldn't"

[Murmur 3,941]

1 minute ago, ErichB said:

That is pretty cool. 

But why would they simulate GPS satellite positions/IRS alignment  and why would that be relevant in a desktop simulation.   There is no scenario in the real world where you would skip time (either forward or backwards), 

Maybe FF simulate satellite position depending on date/time, and the accuracy of the GPS signal based on that. So it should naturally follow that if you skip time in XP, the simulated satellites skip position as well and the simulated nav system will be influenced as well.

[jcomm 5,886]

Just now, Murmur said:

Maybe FF simulate satellite position depending on date/time, and the accuracy of the GPS signal based on that. So it should naturally follow that if you skip time in XP, the simulated satellites skip position as well and the simulated nav system will be influenced as well.

It does, and also affected by obstacles, like when flying bellow mountain tops in approaches through valleys :-)

[markk71 4]

14 hours ago, jcomm said:

It does, and also affected by obstacles, like when flying bellow mountain tops in approaches through valleys :-)

Well in contrast,   the performance of conventional radio navigational aids on the FF A320 don't seem to be influenced by obstacles like mountains or even the curvature of earth. 

[soaring_penguin 428]

On topic of weather updates: 

- it used to be if you entered a different weather station region, the weather would change abruptly, including visibility and cloud cover. My observation in XP11 is that this is not longer true. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I have been able to cloud surf on a weather front (going in and out of the clouds), this was not possible in XP10.

- every hour or so (you can change the time in the weather panel) the info from the weather stations is read in again. This sudden weather change is still occuring.

- I stopped using NOAA weather plugin for the previous reason: it would update the complete weather every 15 minutes or so, causing sudden weather changes.

- jcomm is the weather specialist on this forum, but I am not sure he still has x-plane installed during the last hour, maybe ask him again in 2 or 3... ;-) .

[jcomm 5,886]

1 hour ago, jh71 said:

- jcomm is the weather specialist on this forum, but I am not sure he still has x-plane installed during the last hour, maybe ask him again in 2 or 3... ;-) .

It's a record jh71, more than 15 days of continuous XP11 install !  Unique, and all thanks to the FF A320 and Toliss A319 ( in no particular order... ) :-)

[dmarques69 316]

On 4/9/2018 at 1:22 PM, klamal said:

Hello,

I am really thinking about buying XP11 and the FF A320.  I have a few questions though...

Can you save or does there already exist a "turnaround" state for the FF A320?  Everything I've seen on YT always goes from cold and dark.

And probably my biggest question...the weather in XP.  Is there anything, payware or freeware, that gets rid of sudden weather changes?  I've seen posts where some say this add on or that add on does remove the sudden changes and others where they say we are still stuck with sudden changes.

I would make use of Ortho4XP too.  I would keep this on an external USB drive.  I assume XP is totally fine with scenery existing on external drives?  No performance hit or anything, right?

What about AI traffic for flying online on Vatsim?

I think that's it for now.  I may think of some more later.  Thanks for your answers.

Dont think, get it!

Not going to give detailed explanations why, just going to give you my example, before XP11 and the FF a320 landed in my PC i had probably more than 1000 hours of P3D, since then, zero, nothing, nickles... only XP is being used... that bird is a beauty, and is not finished yet!

[Les Parson 99]

As a long time FSX/P3D user, I got XP11 yesterday and am amazed at the ease of setup and overall user-friendly menus, etc. I have a 3-monitor setup and XP11 adapted to it like a boll weevil in a cotton field. 

[zmak 331]

On 4/12/2018 at 8:02 PM, Les Parson said:

As a long time FSX/P3D user, I got XP11 yesterday and am amazed at the ease of setup and overall user-friendly menus, etc. I have a 3-monitor setup and XP11 adapted to it like a boll weevil in a cotton field. 

Same cotton field. Blown away by XP11 interface and how easy it is to maximize performance with a few simple steps and test. I have FSX SE running like a dream with many thousands of $$ in add ons and yet Im drawn to XP11 for the fluid aerodynamics and how good it looks out of the box but to be honest I also need to tinker and with FSX SE Im all tinkered out`.So much free scenery that looks amazing and I wish I had of discovered flight slimming today ,I would park my BUTT at XPLANE and start the journey.

Going heavy metal XPlane 64bit  and flying general aviation FSX SE 😊

Edited May 5, 2018 by zmak

[Anxu00 176]

On 4/9/2018 at 8:46 AM, ErichB said:

Sadly, the answer is still no

Isn't that Weather Connector app from XAviation for?  To smooth transition?

Edited May 5, 2018 by Anxu00

[nanosour 9]

I'll throw my $0.02 in here as a very experience pilot and XP simmer.  I have lived with both SkyMaxx Pro (all versions) and xEnviro for extended periods of simming.  Lately, I find that the current default weather is the best option of the three.  The default weather has gotten better that either payware weather generator at this time.  There is an occasional loading of new weather, but it hardly takes away from the incredible sim experience that is XPlane.  I actually feel sorry for anyone who wouldn't take this journey purely based on the weather engines.  Sure a inexpensive hobby for hours and hours of wondrous entertainment.  

My brother-in-law just bought a $45K Harley Davidson to feed his hobby needs.  I bought the Dreamfoil Bell 407 for $34.95.  And I don't have buy insurance for it.