Feeling bad for Laminar and others

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

KSGU had the same problem with buildings looking like they were from 1995, there are several airports I've seen with the problem, not just a handful.

 

[GCBraun 2,392]

1 minute ago, SceneryFX said:

It wasn't cherry picked, someone told me to try it yesterday from this very thread (err cannot win in here)...

Per your screens, they are showing off Ortho vs. No Ortho more than the differences of the airport, and the trees of course.

You said the airport looked awful from all perspectives. All I did was post some perspectives of the airport on both sims. Things look even worse for XP11 when you are parked at the GA patio, so I think those are enough.

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

It does look bad from all perspectives, the buildings look horrible. Those screenshots hide some of the problems because of being zoomed way out. Try taking off from the airport. 

Since when does zooming out and putting an emphasis on the Trees count as the Airport?

Your screenshots are showing the annoying default color of that airport in XP 11, but not the actual airport itself which is much better. That is why all of use addons or ortho in XP 11.

 

Edited August 23, 2020 by SceneryFX

[GCBraun 2,392]

4 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

It does look bad from all perspectives, the buildings look horrible. Those screenshots hide some of the problems because of being zoomed way out. Try taking off from the airport. 

Since when does zooming out and putting an emphasis on the Trees count as the Airport?

Your screenshots are showing the annoying default color of that airport in XP 11, but not the actual airport itself which is much better. That is why all of use addons or ortho in XP 11.

 

Listen, I have been using XP11 for years  and there might be areas where one may argue it is superior to MSFS. Default scenery, being it terrain or airports (with very few exceptions) is not one of them.
 

XP11’s default tarmac or grass runway textures look abhorrent. I am currently on my 11th. Leg of a world tour landing mostly on remote airports and the difference between the sims is night and day, sorry. 
 

I hope it survives for competition’s sake, though. 

[OzWhitey 3,353]

48 minutes ago, GCBraun said:

Nice job cherry-picking one airport building and some photogrammetry anomalies.

Here is a fairer comparison:

 

Vanilla XP11:

 

It's not unfair to compare with X-Plane + Ortho, GC (surely your VR X-plane hours weren't over Austin's "plausible world". Please tell me they weren't!).😧

I don't get why people keep complaining and deflecting when we show the comparisons with the scenery we actually use. Sure, let's show X-Plane or P3D with the default scenery because it's somehow "fair" (according to which rules??), even though almost none of us have ever flown like that.

It's not like making that ortho is expensive (it's free), and the disk space is not even very pricey these days.

This thread subject is actually pretty silly. Neither X-Plane or P3D users are asking MSFS to feel sorry for us!

The last six days have been MSFS days for me. Today is P3D day. Who knows what tomorrow will be! 🙂

(just another random pic, north of spain near LEAS)

 

Edited August 23, 2020 by OzWhitey

[High_Alpha 42]

4 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

It's not unfair to compare with X-Plane + Ortho, GC (and you know that!).

I don't get why people keep complaining when we show the comparisons with the scenery we actually use. Sure, let's show X-Plane or P3D with the default scenery because it's somehow "fair" (according to which rules??), even though almost none of us have ever flown like that.

Apples to oranges... How is comparing a simulator that is literally less than a month into sales and post release development to something that has been available for around 4 years and had plenty of time for third party add-ons to be refined an accurate comparison? Sure x-plane with mods is good, what do you think MSFS will look like in that same time frame? Also how does x-plane look when you fly out of the boundaries of pre-downloaded scenery? No MSFS isn't perfect regardless of where you fly, it will probably still be far better than what x-plane can offer after it has had equal time for developers to figure things out. If you have already invested time and money into another platform there's nothing wrong with using it until it actually becomes obsolete, but if you were to pick a sim to start building on now I don't think x-plane is the better choice, just my opinion of course.

[OzWhitey 3,353]

4 minutes ago, High_Alpha said:

Apples to oranges... How is comparing a simulator that is literally less than a month into sales and post release development to something that has been available for around 4 years and had plenty of time for third party add-ons to be refined an accurate comparison? Sure x-plane with mods is good, what do you think MSFS will look like in that same time frame? Also how does x-plane look when you fly out of the boundaries of pre-downloaded scenery? No MSFS isn't perfect regardless of where you fly, it will probably still be far better than what x-plane can offer after it has had equal time for developers to figure things out. If you have already invested time and money into another platform there's nothing wrong with using it until it actually becomes obsolete, but if you were to pick a sim to start building on now I don't think x-plane is the better choice, just my opinion of course.

It's apples to apples - how the sims look in typical use on 24th August 2020. The topic of this thread is that MSFS users should perhaps feel sad for XP/P3D users. I think what a couple of us are trying to point out is "no you don't".

I have literally never flown over P3D v5 default - I installed (free) addon scenery before my first flight. Don't know what it looks like, don't care what it looks like because I'll never see it.

Btw, my pic is P3Dv5 not XP, though I fly both. P3D v5 has been around less time than MSFS was in alpha/beta, and the key new feature - EA - is still in beta. But it doesn't matter, because the only practical comparison that is useful is what you can fly right now.

In four years time, maybe MSFS will look awesome, or maybe the servers will be turned off and  we'll be sadly reminiscing about the sim like we did for MS Flight. Nobody knows, the future is a mystery, but we can compare what's in front of us if someone really wants to (I didn't start this thread!)

P.S. to answer your question, the boundaries of my scenery are continent-size, so when you fly outside their boundaries you see ocean! 🙂

 

 

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

6 minutes ago, High_Alpha said:

Apples to oranges... How is comparing a simulator that is literally less than a month into sales and post release development to something that has been available for around 4 years and had plenty of time for third party add-ons to be refined an accurate comparison?

Relevant might be a better word than accurate. It's a relevant comparison because nobody making decisions about where to spend their flying time and their payware money in the coming weeks and months, is going to be doing that based on a bare-bones installation of P3D or XP. 

We can nod to the fact that these older sims have more options at the moment with aircraft models and higher-res ortho and mesh scenery because they've been around for a while. But that's still irrelevant to discussing the differences. Because this is what we're actually flying.

[High_Alpha 42]

9 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

Relevant might be a better word than accurate. It's a relevant comparison because nobody making decisions about where to spend their flying time and their payware money in the coming weeks and months, is going to be doing that based on a bare-bones installation of P3D or XP. 

We can nod to the fact that these older sims have more options at the moment with aircraft models and higher-res ortho and mesh scenery because they've been around for a while. But that's still irrelevant to discussing the differences. Because this is what we're actually flying.

Fair enough, you've both changed my opinion. Personally I still don't see myself spending any time or money in the other platforms although your mileage may vary. I'd rather look at the long term potential (even with the uncertainty) than the short term usefulness of which simulator is best, but I understand that is quite vague at this point. I guess it all currently depends on use case.

Edited August 23, 2020 by High_Alpha

[Baber20 1,438]

One thing where msfs is just miles and miles ahead of xplane is its ability to render insane number of polygons without taking a performance hit. And I am talking about CGI level polygons. Even Robert from PMDG praised the sim for this (go read his post on the development of 737 for msfs). 

Asobo's rendering engine is truly next gen.

[Paraffin 2,197]

32 minutes ago, Baber20 said:

One thing where msfs is just miles and miles ahead of xplane is its ability to render insane number of polygons without taking a performance hit. And I am talking about CGI level polygons. Even Robert from PMDG praised the sim for this (go read his post on the development of 737 for msfs). 

Asobo's rendering engine is truly next gen.

It is in many respects, but the current release is also running with no overhead from 3rd party utilities and plugins that will cause additional CPU, GPU, and RAM load. 

XP can't do that photogrammetry trick, but I can generate a huge number of polygons and an insane frame rate if I just strip out all my add-ons and plugins, and just fly the most basic aircraft with no deep systems modeling. 

Without deprecating Asobo's achievement at all, I suspect we'll see a performance hit once the 3rd party products arrive on the scene.

Edited August 23, 2020 by Paraffin

[strider1 575]

4 hours ago, boshar said:

As I said from a normal sightseeing flying height it looks great. I hope they can fine tune  their algorithm or maybe do a better cross check with other data sources.

At some point you have to takeoff, land or fly at the pattern altitude. Even at sightseeing height it still looks bad.

All of my local airports are suffering from this nuclear meltdown look. Somebody is going to have manually edit these airports to get it fixed, and there are probably thousands. The million dollar question is who is going to fix it? Asobo or 3P-Devs...

You top all that off with the stone trees that are now morphing in autogen trees in the near foreground, essentially covering the photogrammetry buildings, defeating the whole point.

Photogrammetry is more of a tech demo in my opinion.    

 

Edited August 23, 2020 by strider1

[Alpine Scenery 1,609]

Either way, I am having more fun arguing about things than playing the sim. So there is that 🙂

 

[strider1 575]

I do not feel bad for Laminar, especially with what I am viewing out the windshield!

[DaWu 779]

Comparing XP with FS2020 visually is like comparing Witcher3 with Tomb Raider 1. it’s dead. The xp word not allowed here are hilarious. I hope you are getting paid at least from XP devs for making yourself a clown