Complete Newbie looking for advice

[mikevio 1]

Hi everyone!  Completely new to Flight Simulation!  Looking for advice on which flight simulator to buy.  Microsoft, Xplane?  I've been trying to read up as much as I can.

Anyway, does anyone have any advice on software to purchase or can you direct me to a beginners article.

 

Thank you!

Mike

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I recommend both P3DV4.4 and Xplane11.  Both have positive features and having both will broaden your sim experience.  Both have great default aircraft.  I feel Xplane11 has better default scenery, except for polar coverage.  P3D has better clouds and cloud shadows I feel and greater visibility options.  Which to buy first if you are on a budget?  Really tough call to make, I give the nod to P3D if you want payware add-on aircraft and payware photoreal scenery.  Xplane11 however offers free Ortho4XP for making your own Photoreal scenery.  P3DV4 offers free FSEarthTiles but making coastlines for P3D is challenging, I have only made inland areas.  My Colorado scenery, for FSX and P3D is free in Avsim's library if you want ample photoreal scenery to fly over.  I also have a freeware trike in Avsim library, which works best in P3D and I feel models slow flight the best of any flight model in a sim--made by a real world trike pilot, Me....

John

[mpw8679 428]

55 minutes ago, John_Cillis said:

I recommend both P3DV4.4 and Xplane11.  Both have positive features and having both will broaden your sim experience.  Both have great default aircraft.  I feel Xplane11 has better default scenery, except for polar coverage.  P3D has better clouds and cloud shadows I feel and greater visibility options.  Which to buy first if you are on a budget?  Really tough call to make, I give the nod to P3D if you want payware add-on aircraft and payware photoreal scenery.  Xplane11 however offers free Ortho4XP for making your own Photoreal scenery.  P3DV4 offers free FSEarthTiles but making coastlines for P3D is challenging, I have only made inland areas.  My Colorado scenery, for FSX and P3D is free in Avsim's library if you want ample photoreal scenery to fly over.  I also have a freeware trike in Avsim library, which works best in P3D and I feel models slow flight the best of any flight model in a sim--made by a real world trike pilot, Me....

John

I’m going to check out your Colorado scenery for sure.  I was looking into Mega but honestly I’m not to impressed with it.  

[mpw8679 428]

4 hours ago, mikevio said:

Hi everyone!  Completely new to Flight Simulation!  Looking for advice on which flight simulator to buy.  Microsoft, Xplane?  I've been trying to read up as much as I can.

Anyway, does anyone have any advice on software to purchase or can you direct me to a beginners article.

 

Thank you!

Mike

Tough decision.  Both have pluses and minuses.  My opinion on each.

XP11-  Better looking out of the box. Ortho4XP is a huge plus. Better flight modeling.  Much less payware addons. Cloud and sky modeling leaves a lot to be desired.  Default airports are much, much better looking.  AI traffic and ATC is lacking. 

P3D- Default scenery and most airports are very bland and ugly.  Much better weather, cloud, and sky modeling.  Much better selection of payware.  P3D in my opinion is superior but u have to fork out some serious cash to get it there.  

If I was on a limited budget it would be XP.  U can make very nice looking scenery for free using Ortho4XP.  Most of the default airports look much better. The default planes are better.  There is the Zibo mod 737 that rivals most payware and it is free.  If I was not on a budget it would P3D.  

[Adrian123 1,015]

It is an endless summer in Xplane. No seasons.

[Chock 17,769]

Cheapest option would be the Steam version of Microsoft Flight Simulator X, which was updated and recompiled to work a little better by Dovetail and is colloquially called FSX-SE (Steam Edition). It usually sells for around 20 quid, but can occasionally be found discounted to 7 quid.

A disadvantage of FSX-SE is that it is a 32 Bit application, whereas the current versions of P3D and XPlane are both 64 Bit applications. This means FSX-SE is limited to only being able to use a maximum of 4 Gigabytes of memory. This is not terrible news, after all, up until fairly recently it was what pretty much everyone used, and that limitation only really becomes problematic if you start using lots of fancy add-ons. So as an inexpensive introduction to flight dimming, it is still a good choice, but if you subsequently find that flight swimming is something you really want to get into, it is as well to be aware that FSX-SE is effectively now 'frozen in time' and will never be developed any further and will always therefore be subject to that 4Gb limitation. Because of this, more and more payware developers are moving away from it, but having said that, there are still quite a few add ons being made which work in both P3D and FSX-SE, so it is possible to 'dip your toe in the water' of flight simming with FSX-SE and still have some add-on purchases you might make be also viable for use with P3D if you later decided to get into it.

Up until fairly recently, it was reasonably fair to say that P3D lent itself best to airliner simulation and XPlane was better for simulating light aircraft, but that line is becoming increasingly blurred and they are now both good choices for either in most respects although there is still a little bit of truth in that distinction. 

Of the two, XPlane is a bit prettier out of the box so to speak, and P3D has perhaps more variety of add ons for it, but again they can both be changed and souped up by throwing a lot of add ons at them, so it is really down to personal preference in many respects.

If you want my recommendation though, I'd say get FSX-SE and see how you like it, since it is very similar to P3D but inexpensive to try out, and also try the freebie demo of XPlane. If FSX-SEfloats your boat, then consider P3D, if on the other hand you like XPlane from trying the demo, go for that.Or, you might decide to get all of them and enjoy all their various different merits.There is no rule which says you have to limit yourself to just one of them although it could potentially get expensive to indulge yourself with all of them. So take your time and spend economically until you are sure of what you like.

Most of all, have fun. :-)

[John_Cillis 2,406]

1 hour ago, Adrian123 said:

It is an endless summer in Xplane. No seasons.

Not quite true... There are free seasons available at Xplane.org but they do take up disk space....

I downloaded one to my download folder but cannot install it until I clear up some disk space.  There is a thread lower in this forum about it, or in the screenshots forum, cannot remember where it was posted but the shots looked great...

John

[Guest]

39 minutes ago, John_Cillis said:

There are free seasons available at Xplane.org

There are some pretty significant limitations to it's usage, I would NOT recommend this XP11 seasons hack to any users new to flight simulation.

7 hours ago, mikevio said:

Looking for advice on which flight simulator to buy.

Lockheed Martin's Prepar3D V4.4 and/or Laminar Research Xplane 11.  Do NOT waste your money on a dead end product like FSX/FSX-SE that has no future development work (aka no updates of any kind).  FSX/FSX-SE would NOT represent the best that flight simulation has to offer.

Cheers, Rob.

Edited January 13, 2019 by Guest

[mpw8679 428]

I’m not sure why Chock is recommending FSX SE except maybe from a price point of view but don’t buy it.  It will not give u a fair representation of what P3D offers.  FSX looks horrible compared to P3D v4.  

[Mikelab6 89]

What is your actual PC (CPU & GPU) and what kind of flying are you looking for ? Are you looking to fly low and slow or high and fast (airliners) ?

Mike

Edited January 13, 2019 by Mikelab6

[Chock 17,769]

I recommended FSX-SE because it can often be found discounted to less than the price of a couple of beers, and is broadly similar to P3D is capabilities, so if is an inexpensive way to determine if P3D would suit, since P3D is fairly expensive. XPlane on the other hand has a free demo. So buying FSX-SE for a fiver and trying the free demo of XPlane is the cheapest way to preview both options.

[fs4fun 366]

I believe P3D has a 60 day money back guarantee so if you're a noob and you don't know yet if you like flight sim you can try it without risk. As Chock mentioned XPlane has a free demo.

When I was a noob I found the FSX beginner missions and flying school to be very helpful, not sure if these other sims have a flying school. That might be a reason to go with FSX and FSX:SE is pretty cheap to dip a toe in, just don't invest in a lot of expensive addons unless they also include a P3D version. Otherwise there are loads of flying tutorials on YouTube.

Another thing to consider is a joystick. I got started with a $20 joystick and once I got seriously into it I bought TrackIR and eventually a yoke and rudder pedals. Some kind of controller is helpful for a beginner because you'll find it hard to handle the aircraft with just a keyboard/mouse.

[Paraffin 2,197]

3 hours ago, Chock said:

Up until fairly recently, it was reasonably fair to say that P3D lent itself best to airliner simulation and XPlane was better for simulating light aircraft, but that line is becoming increasingly blurred and they are now both good choices for either in most respects although there is still a little bit of truth in that distinction. 

I agree with that, especially in regard to programmed ATC and AI aircraft.

I would add one more difference, and that's helicopters. For anyone with an interest in civilian helicopters, I think the flight modeling in X-Plane is superior to anything except maybe DCS, a combat sim. There are a few failure modes that are either missing (mast bump) or not quite right yet (vortex ring state), but overall the modeling is very good. The new 11.30 update even includes separate modeling of the front and rear of the rotor disk in ground effect, to account for what happens when you approach an elevated helipad.

There isn't a huge selection of types compared to FSX, but the better ones like the payware Bell 412 and Bell 407 in X-Plane are excellent. And there is a wonderful free model in the Bell 429. More are in the works, like a Hughes 500.

2 hours ago, John_Cillis said:

Not quite true... There are free seasons available at Xplane.org but they do take up disk space....

There is also TerraMaxx payware, although it's designed more for "set and forget" when you're flying for an extended period in somewhere like Alaska, where you want more realistic snow cover. The loading is too slow for swapping out the textures if you're flying long-distance into different seasonal conditions.

20 minutes ago, fs4fun said:

Another thing to consider is a joystick. I got started with a $20 joystick and once I got seriously into it I bought TrackIR and eventually a yoke and rudder pedals. Some kind of controller is helpful for a beginner because you'll find it hard to handle the aircraft with just a keyboard/mouse.

Agreed, and go beyond a joystick into pedals if you want to learn how real aircraft are controlled. They're also practically mandatory for flying helicopters in full realism mode.

Edited January 13, 2019 by Paraffin

[Chock 17,769]

Whilst it is true that P3D does have a money back guarantee policy, you do need to spend the cash initially to be in that position lol. But beyond this and the other fairly sound reasons why it might be worth giving FSX-SE a shot, it is worth bearing in mind too that even if you decided you liked it and went for P3D as a result of this, even the small amount you'd spent on FSX-SE would not be a waste, since there are in fact quite a few very good simulator add-ons for it which you simply cannot get for P3D, and not only this, FSX add-ons are often cheaper than their P3D counterparts as well. Just off the top of my head, here's a few which you can get for FSX that are not available for P3D:

Simcheck Airbus A300-B4, Uiver Douglas DC-2, CS Weapon for FSX, Flight Keeper, Dodosim Bell 206 JetRanger, PMDG McDonnell Douglas MD-11, PMDG BAe JS4100 Jetstream.

Moreover, there are one or two FSX aeroplanes which, whilst they can be ported to P3D comparatively easily, actually will not install without the presence of FSX on your system. Now it is true that you can create a dummy FSX install to get around that if you know what you are doing, but it's really a lot simpler to buy FSX-SE for a fiver and have it anyway for the benefit of flying all of the above aeroplanes and such. I in fact made use of this yesterday, having bought a Vertigo Simulations boxed set which included the F9F Panther, F8F Bearcat, SBD Dauntless and the P36 Hawk, all for the princely sum of two quid, and the installer would only work with FSX installed on my system, so to get them to work in P3D V4.4, all I had to do was copy and paste the folders into P3D from that FSX-SE install and that was it, done. So it is certainly useful to have FSX-SE sat on your drive to facilitate such things.

Edited January 13, 2019 by Chock

[John_Cillis 2,406]

3 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

I agree with that, especially in regard to programmed ATC and AI aircraft.

I would add one more difference, and that's helicopters. For anyone with an interest in civilian helicopters, I think the flight modeling in X-Plane is superior to anything except maybe DCS, a combat sim. There are a few failure modes that are either missing (mast bump) or not quite right yet (vortex ring state), but overall the modeling is very good. The new 11.30 update even includes separate modeling of the front and rear of the rotor disk in ground effect, to account for what happens when you approach an elevated helipad.

There isn't a huge selection of types compared to FSX, but the better ones like the payware Bell 412 and Bell 407 in X-Plane are excellent. And there is a wonderful free model in the Bell 429. More are in the works, like a Hughes 500.

There is also TerraMaxx payware, although it's designed more for "set and forget" when you're flying for an extended period in somewhere like Alaska, where you want more realistic snow cover. The loading is too slow for swapping out the textures if you're flying long-distance into different seasonal conditions.

Agreed, and go beyond a joystick into pedals if you want to learn how real aircraft are controlled. They're also practically mandatory for flying helicopters in full realism mode.

If you do not have room or the right furniture for rudder pedals, I recommend the Logitech Extreme 3D pro with its twist rudder.  It is the ONLY joystick that has ever given me the nuances of rudder pedals I used in my real flight training especially on a Luscombe 8A Taildragger once about ten years ago..

Its rudder pedals and controls were perfectly harmonized, I was so content flying it, I only let go so the owner could land us due to some approaching embedded thunderstorms that aborted our flight early.  We both recognized a hidden flash and both agreed, flight over.   As we just touched down on a grass strip it started to pour but that lovely Luscombe held true and did not ground loop in the owners skilled yet gentle limbs.  A cub pilot friend of his could not get off the ground that day, he could not hand prop his Cub sadly, we tried to help him.  When the Luscombe's owner saw that I was comfortable trying the "Armstrong" starter, he let me start his aircraft for him, quite like the forger in the movie the Great Escape, but I turned the prop, not a crank and with just a smooth quarter turn I got the Luscombe smoothly started with my feet positioned to move backward like the owner taught me. 

There is an electric start stc now out for the Luscombe.  I would not buy a hand started one because law requires two persons to be present when starting a hand start aircraft at controlled airfields in the US.  A wise law because hand starting an aircraft improperly and alone, without ropes on the chocks can cause an aircraft to run away from you, and it takes a highly coordinated effort to do so alone==even at low idle aircraft can move, unlike in our sims, I have been there and done that in real life many times in my aborted lessons ten years ago...

John