Well, we have some catching up to do I guess.

 

Well, We in the Xplane world have been waiting for this event to take place and the time has arrived for the new sim to take center stage. It will take some time to unwrap the new sim and all the features that it brings with it. And I am sure that as your photos indicate,the new sim is going to be the top dog for now and into the future. But as things settle down  and all things get considered in the near future, will the new sim hold up and with XP12 warming up in the bullpen, can Austin answer the call and come up with an acceptable answer to the new sim with an even better version than XP11 was to XP10. We know the list well, lighting, atc, weather, etc. Competition is good. Skip

Hard to see the real details since those pics are tiny, but you will notice there is very little autogen beyond the airport! Does the scenery pop in as you are flying? The scenery looks very soft from the middle-ground to the horizon.

1 minute ago, strider1 said:

Hard to see the real details since those pics are tiny, but you will notice there is very little autogen beyond the airport! Does the scenery pop in as you are flying? The scenery looks very soft from the middle-ground to the horizon.

Yeah this looks like something XP handles better. Kinda logical if you consider the underlying tech.  But it may also be a thing of settings.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

The real eye opener will be getting close to the gates where the aircraft park. We have seen these exact pictures about a month ago already and they were discussed at length.

The verdict by "soon to be MSFS users" was mostly "Well, see how much better that golf-course looks in MSFS? Now THATS what I expect from my go-to flight simulator!"

 

The euphoria (it's getting rave reviews) will die down at some point, at least from a simmers perspective. The microstutters are horrible, worse than X-Plane has ever been. Also, as in the shot above, the scenery (on Ultra) becomes garbage at what's X-Plane's medium LOD setting (dataref since 11). There are a LOT positives, too, no doubt. Just about to do a maiden flight.

Edited August 17, 20205 yr by Colonel X

I did 2 flights today with MSFS and was not impressed at all, the weather looks better of course but the blurry mess in MSFS vs the crisp ortho zl17 with simheaven x europe 5 is a lot better. Stutters, weird ai traffic, flight model etc. nah its not a winner for now. 

One thing is for sure. As mindblowing it (sometimes) looks, it's microstutter purgatory.

50 minutes ago, Colonel X said:

One thing is for sure. As mindblowing it (sometimes) looks, it's microstutter purgatory.

The focus of XP towards smoothness and performance (Vulkan) for future development could be a good call by LM. Although I admit it's way too early to judge... MFS is basically still a beta, and in theory a year from now could be perfectly smooth.

On the other hand, I think it's a given that the new competitive landscape renders even more urgent improvements in lighting, scenery and weather for XP.

 

Tried it.

Visually stunning, but its more about the lightning and clouds.

Other than that, nothing special.

Bad performance, blurries and objects poping just like fsx.

It is funny that x-plane was KILLED by mainstream users for not having seasons, weird ai and weird atc, well..msfs has the exact same problem.

Looking forward for next updates, but more for a full vulkan x-plane era experiencr, hope v12 aint that far.

Edited August 18, 20205 yr by mtaxp

21 hours ago, Colonel X said:

Well, we have some catching up to do I guess.

First of all

tbh, from a flight simulation perspective, is there really that much difference between the msfs and xp orthophoto?

I hate the trees in all three shots

all three have identical "layout"

both look saturated/washed out.

In terms of 3D buildings, good looks are a hardware limitation rather than a software one.

But more importantly.

How easy is it to develop for

how is the aircraft flight model specified/modified

how easy is it to mod?

when will we see high quality freeware?

Best would be to include an offline generated scenery of MSFS in the comparison images. The problem here, or rather the great advantage for MSFS is the online streamed scenery and ground textures. No more generic repeated textures, but unique real textures.

 

Altough this can be fixed for generic scenerey with some clever texture overlays for future X-Plane products.

 

Edit: I`m enjoying right now some X-Plane videos on YouTube with custom scenery. Heck does it look beautiful. The last graphics I`ve seen was FSX in 2009. I know MSFS has better graphics, but there are some fantastic physics built in X-Plane. 

Edited August 18, 20205 yr by BigDee

You simply can't compare the scenery between the two, one is using "petabytes" of data and insane amounts of hardware to generate, the other fits the planet in around 80GB and uses the same generic repeating textures.

You absolutely can create highly detailed scenery in X-Plane: e.g. Here is an example shot that shows ZL17 orthos with per tree accuracy data (Trees and buildings height and colour matched) over a fairly boring area 🙂

 

However the limit is the sizes needed to store this locally on a users computer. A one degree tile at this level of detail can come in at around 10-12GB. Start bringing that up to country size levels and it becomes an issue. XP could start compressing this sort of data and make it more manageable, but since Austin doesn't like ortho imagery, I don't think it will happen anytime soon 🙂

 

 

4 minutes ago, tonywob said:

You simply can't compare the scenery between the two, one is using "petabytes" of data and insane amounts of hardware to generate, the other fits the planet in around 80GB and uses the same generic repeating textures.

 

 

X-plane's scenery engine as it is right now is capeable of a much more impressive version of it given good art works which it obviously lacks.

Hand-painted custom textures can be made to not look repetitive and generic, i saw some sceneries already do that in a beautifull manner without using any single magenta cloroed ortho.

Although trees need a new format, those quads need to die and reborn as a proper vegetation shaders or whatever.

4 minutes ago, tonywob said:

You simply can't compare the scenery between the two, one is using "petabytes" of data

size doesnt mean much.

when most of those "petabytes" is generating this total garbage

vs a few hundred megabytes for this.

 

12 minutes ago, tonywob said:

other fits the planet in around 80GB

In case anyone misunderstands you (I did on first reading) xp scenery is a lot more than 80gb for the world.

my XP scenery folder takes up about 1.5TB