xplane 11 on steam no way

[harrry 322]

You can use the steam supplied content legally on multiple computers but not at the same time.  

[Bjoern 1,153]

Another advantage of a direct purchase from Laminar: Total portability. My X-Plane installation is stored on a USB3 SSD. No extra programs or registry stuff necessary.

[zmak 331]

20 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

Another advantage of a direct purchase from Laminar: Total portability. My X-Plane installation is stored on a USB3 SSD. No extra programs or registry stuff necessary.

excuse my ignorance but in what way is it beneficial on a USB3 SD?

[harrry 322]

Individual copies of X-Plane are registered to one PC and validated.  Misuse will cause the sim to be locked,

 

[tonywob 4,768]

Well, more and more computers now don't ship with DVD drives, so for many, the only choice is a download option. My internet is pretty painful, and an 80GB image will take all night to download, so it's not quite instant gratification, but it's better than waiting for DVDs to be shipped out.

Whether you buy it through Steam or directly from LR, it still has to connect to the internet to validate itself. I think the native LR version does this once a week, so if you happen to not have Internet available at the time, then tough luck. This has happened to me with other software, e.g. I wanted to play a certain game whilst on a long haul flight, but it refused to start because I had no Internet for it to call home.

Steam does work offline for a certain period and you can play quite a few games offline (except for things like Elite Dangerous). X-Plane also does work offline. I personally like Steam, it's super convenient and lets me use my games on multiple computers and they self-update etc.. What I don't like are games that are deliberately designed to need a constant online connection for no other reason than to just validate the license, and for aircraft I just won't buy them if they need this. This sort of behaviour I think a few years ago killed some popular titles such as Simcity, and I do believe there is really no need for it with a flight simulator product (unless it's live weather)

 

 

[Andydigital 93]

19 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Another advantage of a direct purchase from Laminar: Total portability. My X-Plane installation is stored on a USB3 SSD. No extra programs or registry stuff necessary.

The whole of the steam folder can be moved anywhere you like and it works perfectly where ever you put it, there are no registry dependencies to make it function. I've had the same steam folder for 12 or 13 years now, its been on about 10 PC's in that time too.

Edited August 12, 2018 by Andydigital

[mike4 3]

3 hours ago, tonywob said:

offline. I personally like Steam, it's super convenient and lets me use my games on multiple computers and they self-update etc.. What I don't like are games that are deliberately designed to need a constant online connection for no other reason than to just validate the license, and for aircraft I just won't buy them if they need this. This sort of behaviour I think a few years ago killed some popular titles such as Simcity, and I do believe there is really no need for it with a flight simulator product (unless it's live weather)

 

 

Tony I don't think there's one single x-plane addon that needs a constant connection. What should that be, can you name some?

Many use a first start activation and I have no problem with that. I think I had once a ubisoft game that always wanted a connection but it was so bad I've trashed it.

I don't use steam for xplane but maybe might do for the next version. I wouldn't buy xplane addons from steam as I've heard some to use steam drm, hence you could not move away from steam later on. Steam, alike xplane.org etc. charge a hefty 25% which is to much but they have the traffic.

 

[188AHC 2,138]

I purchased X-Plane from Steam during one of their sales and have no problems with it at all. As for limited HD space, I have an SSD for my system, and both 1TB and 4TB drives. The majority of my Steam purchases are on the 1TB but due to size, I put X-Plane on the 4TB. Painless.  A major benefit to me is that if I have a problem with any program I can verify the files and am good to go again. You can opt in or out of beta's also. They are not mandatory.

This whole discussion, in my opinion, is the old "Tomato/Tomato" situation. Do what makes you happy and don't worry about what the other guy does.  Each method has its' benefits and faults.

 

[tonywob 4,768]

4 minutes ago, mike4 said:

Tony I don't think there's one single x-plane addon that needs a constant connection. What should that be, can you name some?

xEnviro is one. Without it, you can't set your own weather and basically it just gives you clear blue skies, it requires an active internet connection to generate weather, even if you set your own. AFAIK, there aren't any planes that require it, but I could be wrong, I actually don't have that many in my virtual hangar anymore. Don't the XAviation products require an internet connection every so often to validate?

Ubisoft, yes, made the same mistake 🙂. I've bought other games as well that cease to function when you're offline

 

 

 

[Bjoern 1,153]

On 8/11/2018 at 4:02 PM, zmak said:

excuse my ignorance but in what way is it beneficial on a USB3 SD?

I'm not at home on workdays, so an external drive allows me to use XP on my laptop without too much tedious file syncing (apart from preferences) and wasting disk space on two devices.

 

7 hours ago, Andydigital said:

The whole of the steam folder can be moved anywhere you like and it works perfectly where ever you put it, there are no registry dependencies to make it function. I've had the same steam folder for 12 or 13 years now, its been on about 10 PC's in that time too.

Steam is always running in the background though.

[Paraffin 2,197]

9 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Steam is always running in the background though.

It doesn't have to auto-load on startup. You can set it so that it only launches when you click a Steam game, or if you launch the overlay manually.

That's how my system is set up, so I'm always booting into a minimal Win10 desktop. And it's easy to kill Steam after launching a game, Click on "hidden icons" in the task bar, find Steam, then right-click and Exit.

Edited August 13, 2018 by Paraffin

[Bjoern 1,153]

3 hours ago, Paraffin said:

It doesn't have to auto-load on startup. You can set it so that it only launches when you click a Steam game, or if you launch the overlay manually.

That's how my system is set up, so I'm always booting into a minimal Win10 desktop. And it's easy to kill Steam after launching a game, Click on "hidden icons" in the task bar, find Steam, then right-click and Exit.

Before and after isn't an issue, it's the "during".

[Swe_Richard 1,172]

12 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

Before and after isn't an issue, it's the "during".

What issue do you have during? 

[Andydigital 93]

10 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

Before and after isn't an issue, it's the "during".

Why whats the issue, I've got over 100 processes running in the background according to task manager when I fly but I still get buttery smooth frame rates in X-Plane 11 most of the time. This isn't FSX or P3D where you need every morsel of spare processing power to even start getting stutter free FPS. 

[soaring_penguin 428]

Someone here has no clue how the Steam service works... It puts itself on hold during a game, and there is hardly, if any, processing power required. Modern PCs are designed to run parallel tasks in an efficiently. The time where one thread would hold up the complete pc is long time ago. 

If you happen to have the browser open in the background while you play/sim, now that takes away, both in terms of processing power and memory (depending on the number of opened tabs and webcontent playing).

And if you wanted to run VR with the HTC Vive or other WMD, then Steam is one of the requirements.

So nothing against Steam, only I prefer to buy directly from Laminar, because they get more of the money that way.
I would not be surprised that for some (mainly Indie) game developers it makes more sense to publish exclusively on Steam, because maintaining a download/publishing service costs a lot of money also. And then I mean a lot ... .