Yep. XP weather and clouds situation is abysmal. 

XPlane is going to be fine for many people, but it doesn't meet my needs.  I can't do the type if flying I do, even with Orbx.  

In my thread about what flights I already have planned, I've done ALL those things in FSX and P3D.  I could only do a couple of them in XPlane.  This isn't an indictment of XPlane as I'm sure not everyone will be interested in visiting Stonehenge, for example.  I have no doubt that for airliners, XPlane is good and probably even superior in some respects.  The closest I usually get to an airliner is a DC-3, although I recently bought the A2A Constellation, mostly for over water flights where little of this matters:  Don't need ATC or seasonal textures flying in the tropics.

Hook

5 minutes ago, irrics said:

Well to be fair, you could do it in any Sim with ortho scenery.

It’s not like OrbX is modeling your house, so it’s either flat photo scenery by itself or with an autogen building on top.

And not the "right" autogen either, and I'm skeptical the new MSFS could do much better unless they have height data or angled airphotos like that Tampa + FSX video demo. Few places will have that.

Speaking of flying over your house... I just bought the new Orbx TE Washington scenery, which includes my small town.

Of course the first thing I had to do was jump in a helicopter at the nearby GA airport and fly over my house. Well, my neighborhood of autogen houses sitting on a combined low-res ortho and landclass texture looks okay if you don't get too close. But the houses aren't the right architectural style, too many of them are two-story in a town where that's rare, and the houses are not placed accurately on the lots between vector streets. There isn't a specific autogen house I could point to and say "mine." But then I wasn't expecting that. 

What did impress me is that Orbx included three local landmarks, one of which is even a custom model for the town. It's a historic and tourist town, so not every area will get that treatment I expect, but then I just got the scenery and I'm still poking around to see what's there. 

If the new MSFS can do anything like this on a streaming basis, it would sure be better than the 15 hours it took to download the scenery package, then another 3 hours to unpack and install it, along with 40 GB on my hard drive. For just one state in the USA.

18 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

What did impress me is that Orbx included three local landmarks, one of which is even a custom model for the town. It's a historic and tourist town, so not every area will get that treatment I expect, but then I just got the scenery and I'm still poking around to see what's there. 

I remember JV running a thread asking for suggestions on landmarks they should model - makes sense.

Appreciate the "low level" report.  

About what I expected, despite all the people jumping for joy with every X-Vision doctored up screenshot from 8,000 AGL.

 

Don't get me wrong, it's a great step forward for XP scenery in particular - but, as with MSFS 2020, some measured caution and tempered enthusiasm may be warranted in places.

17 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

If the new MSFS can do anything like this on a streaming basis, it would sure be better than the 15 hours it took to download the scenery package, then another 3 hours to unpack and install it, along with 40 GB on my hard drive. For just one state in the USA.

Just thinking about that makes my head hurt!! MSFS may be able to stream it to us all but I will have to see it to believe it. It it comes to pass I am pretty sure AT&T will ask us all to please go to some other provider. In my town they have not figured out how to do email on a regular basis. LOL!!

42 minutes ago, irrics said:

Depending upon where one lives and the data quality there, this upcoming sim may be the first chance at truly seeing “ones house”, somewhat accurately, in the Sim. 

@irrics I love your optimism. Hope you are not disappointed.

Regards,

Mike

4 minutes ago, Cruachan said:

@irrics I love your optimism. Hope you are not disappointed.

Regards,

Mike

Notice I said:

 

”depending upon”

”may be”

”somewhat”

 

lol

The one thing I haven't seen brought up is the fact that Lockheed Martin is an Azure client. It's pure speculation but given the relationship between Microsoft and LM they may well be working together in secret so that MSFS and P3DV5 will share common feature sets like the scenery streaming.

18 hours ago, ricka47 said:

He seems, at best, to run the company based on only what he wants and not so much on what the consumer wants

Yeah, that's pretty common knowledge. When Austin gets into something new in real-world aviation, it's a safe bet that's gonna be the next thing to show up in Xplane.

But I don't think Austin cares about making Xplane a huge commercial success. This is his personal obsession, and if some people want to toss some money his way to mess with his creation that's great, but he's not going to alter the way he creates it in the name of money.

In the music industry, that's called not being a sellout (and it's also called not being a mega-rich pop star 😉 ) but speaking personally I wouldn't mind if Austin were to sell out just a little bit.

 

How could we abandon our existing sim platforms now, there isn't anything for us to abandon them for yet! Like anything, the proof of pudding shall be in the eating.

I’m hoping for missions like we’ve had in FSX. Thats where MSFS stands apart from the rest imo. The immersion, the voices, the scenarios. The multiplayer life and community it creates...FSX multiplayer ATCs, formation teams,VAs still continue to breath and thrive from the 13 year old sim. I’m still actively enjoying FSX everyday.

Xplane11 and P3D are great for what they are but they could never top being as fruitful as FSX in impact and duration.

I’m praying for

in depth systems

Complex and very immersive missions

even smoother multiplayer network code

solid optimization on modern hardware(even though i find cfg tweaking interesting and fun would be nice for others not to have to worry about any)

optimized VR capability of course

the same open ended software freedom as FSX(doubtful if its gonna be under windows games store..those titles are drm layered and restricted as ft knox)

open world features such as first person avatars, operable ground vehicles, actual smoothed ground road/pavement elevation, non clipping through static bridges etc etc 

 

Realistically we aren't gonna abandon them even if 2020 comes out and is amazing. It's still going to take the 3rd party devs time to get their stuff into the new sim, and there's no way MS is going to have, for instance, a 747, 737, 777, DC-9, etc, all at the same level as Leonardo/PMDG have them currently. No one with the 747 is going to want to give it up until there's a viable replacement in the new sim.

I remember doing the same thing when FS5 came out. Compared to FS4, it was photo-real. Absolutely beautiful to fly around in, but after awhile flying the Cessna around Meigs got a little boring, and I still spent a lot of time in FS4 flying all the different planes I had there.

It's been a long time since I looked at either, but I don't think I ever fully transitioned away from 4 until FS95 or 98 came out (can't remember which now - that was a long time ago!)

 

22 hours ago, ricka47 said:

I use XP11 exclusively now after switching from P3D about 18 months ago.  I really like it and it looks very good.  It is much less "cartoonish" than P3D which always bothered me.  But, too much is still missing from it that we had even back in FSX.

There is a video of Austin trying the new xEnviro 1.10 weather plug in on XP11 and some of his comments about XP11's default clouds and how things work in his own product in general are disconcerting.

Well there are reasons why he is the owner but not the lead developer of Laminar. And in his other opinion that Microsoft simply went to a different contion he is quite right.Microsoft simply sees a different market for its product  Microsoft made a very important move and it was immdiatley successfull many people are now waiting for Microsoft and simply left their old simulators. For AFS 2 and some other smaller products,this means Danger level. For P3D it simply might spell trouble if Microsoft would demand a higher levelo for their academic license. For X-Plane the effect is rather limited since they are making a switch anyway.They had to make a s6top for Bug Fixes anyway since they have now the chance to fix some of their unwanted effects of the deferred lighting. Deferred lighting and OpenGL was always a problem.

But if I rerad the expectatiions that some people have for Microsoft, sorry but they can't achieve such a level.That's a problem of such trailers, they sometimes cause expectations that are unrealistic. In the market and in their marketing team.

Everyone realizes that this is a thread about the new Microsoft Flight Simulator don't you?

Let's get off the XPlane discussions as they have nothing to do with this.

If we don't have anything else to discuss pertaining to the topic heading then we have no need to keep the topic open.

 

7 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

If anyone is interested the Google data in the video I made streamed at about 14 FPS and the LOD for hi res detail was about 2-3 nm.  My ISP tested bandwidth to local servers was 768 Mbps down and 41 Mbps up (we pay for 1Gbps service).

I’m cautiously optimistic, but I think some here are building themselves some unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved.

I wouldn’t abandon your sim platform(s) of choice just yet until there is more valid information and a working Preview/Trial that real end users can try.

Either way, we’re still going to need to use a blind eye to ignore the warts that all sims have.  Hopefully we all have enough imagination to fill in the gaps ... imagination does seem to be a precious commodity these days.

Cheers, Rob.

 

In other words you want people to stay where you can make money.

If MS delivers what I think they will I will deinstall P3D the Second its released.