1 minute ago, reignman40 said:

Are you from southwest Utah?? I grew up in St George and now live in Hurricane.

Nope, but I absolutely love that area. I want to move there, hoping to move about 20 miles north of St George around Pintura. Hoping that St George keeps growing kind of north. The weather around Pintura, spectacular --- Cedar City is nice but too cold for my old reptilian blood, STG a bit too hot. Not much there yet, but there are a few neighborhoods.

 

 

13 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

... and much of Arizona isn't much better.
 

Yesterday, I flew from Gateway to Superior, to Globe, and finished in Show Low.  Salt River Canyon was cool. Also, did another flight from Gateway to Luke, flew over Sky Harbor.  My very first flight with FS2020 was Flagstaff to Sedona.  All of it looked great, via the XCub. 😀

Oh yeah I know where Pintura is. St George seems to be growing to the south 🤣 Tons of homes going up all over actually.. Cedar is to cold in the winter time for me, although I don't mind snow.  I'm already blow away by the scenery in MSFS for this area considering it's kind of out of the way compared to other major cities and airports. 

2 minutes ago, javelina said:

Yesterday, I flew from Gateway to Superior, to Globe, and finished in Show Low.  Salt River Canyon was cool. Also, did another flight from Gateway to Luke, flew over Sky Harbor.  My very first flight with FS2020 was Flagstaff to Sedona.  All of it looked great, via the XCub. 😀

I guess it's a matter of perspective, didn't try that part of AZ, but compared to say the Aspen area or Seattle, it's not quite up to the same level of fidelity, but I'll try Flagstaff. Sedona had too much bland coloring and too many shadowy cliffs. I know some of that is due to the geography conflicting with the ortho, but it's a weakness of orthoimagery, especially at this low resolution.

Another place that does look spectacular though is northern Idaho, fly around c53 (lower loon creek), now the detail texture MSFS created blends absolutely perfectly with those green fields. Hats off to them for that area.

 

9 minutes ago, reignman40 said:

Oh yeah I know where Pintura is. St George seems to be growing to the south 🤣 Tons of homes going up all over actually.. Cedar is to cold in the winter time for me, although I don't mind snow.  I'm already blow away by the scenery in MSFS for this area considering it's kind of out of the way compared to other major cities and airports. 

I guess it's because I spent a lot of time self-correcting my own ortho for that area that I don't appreciate it in MSFS as much.

Here is a comparison if I'm allowed to post. 

FS 2020

Xplane 11

 

Edited August 22, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

8 minutes ago, SceneryFX said:

...Another place that does look spectacular though is northern Idaho, fly around c53 (lower loon creek), now the detail texture MSFS created blends absolutely perfectly with those green fields. Hats off to them for that area.

 

Cool, I'll check that out! 

Dont feel bad for LM . Fornyears i had known the guys from the other side. And by that I mean the ones who paid an ARM and a LEG to use P3D for training. 
Listen guys you can quote me all you want but with the Money LM has they should off HAD FS2020 like software years ago . 
I enjoyed P3D like everyone else did but knowing who was using the software on the other end and paying big money made me mad all the time and wondered .why is this not in a better state ??? We basically paid them to use and give feedback on software thats was later sold for Alot more to the other side with a TON of money 💰. Imagine if you paid MS 10$ to be a beta tester for software thats gona sell for 10k$ to someone else ??? And i use 10k$ Just as an example. 
PLEASE DONT FEEL BAD..

Those kind of topics should be opened in x-plane and p3d forums as lots false information is running around here mainly due to folks who don't use x-plane/p3d.

On x-plane, and note this is MY opinion, but some stuff are obvious to happen and some teased.

First of all saying that MSFS achieved what x-plane has been trying to for 20+ years is a pure BS. It's assuming this technology was mainstream back then and no progress at all was made in general in hardware etc..MSFS weather and lightning are not new tech.

V11 is a long Vulkan implemntation run, and 11.50 was never meant to be a graphical update rather make a fast performance modern engine (which eats MSFS's alive in most cases and is able to render at a 2x distance of MSFS's BTW).

Now what happens after Vulkan? A rewrite of the graphical engine ,as LR already stated. This means, lightning, clouds, atmosphere, new scenery (they are working with an external company).. X-plane NG they call it, and we also haven't seen any of it yet but they are deeply working on it already, as Ben supnik said they already have code for the next x-plane.

So in conclusion, thinking that MSFS is the end of technology and others cant step up is really unrealistic compared to what actually happens in the industry; sorry, MSFS scenery is low quality compared to tech available for open-world engines, and lots of this graphical tech can and should make it to flight simulation engines, obviously, x-plane is going towards that direction with Vulkan which opens the doors to achieve an even better looking simulator. My opinion you folks are gonna be really surprised by what x-plane vulkan can do in 2021.

3 hours ago, SceneryFX said:

Xplane 11 has a good rendering engine and can make things look as good as MSFS for the most part, there are a few things it won't do as good, but it's not the engine it's that Asobo has better graphics designers and spent more time on graphics.

There is one major weakness in the current XP11 engine, and that's the lack of an ephemeris for the sun and moon track. The sun moves directly overhead no matter where you are in the world and what month it is, because there is no internal calendar in the sim. 

It's one of the subtle reasons why so many of the MSFS screen shots look spectacular. People are able to choose time of year in high and low latitude locations where the sun is at a low angle during the daytime, so you can control the reflection angle on water and through the clouds. This is something I never knew I missed in XP until I flew the first MSFS Alphas. .

Edited August 22, 20205 yr by Paraffin

44 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

It also wouldn't be impossible for Laminar to massively improve the weather representation and accuracy in XP either. It's been something of a blind spot for Austin, and maybe MSFS will be a kick in the butt to get that project moving for XP12.

New weather engine and rendering is already confirmed by Austin himself in a recent post about the new xavion 3d matrix which is the data x-plane is gonna render in "next-generation weather" for "next generation x-plane".

6 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

There is one major weakness in the current XP11 engine, and that's the lack of an ephemeris for the sun and moon track. The sun moves directly overhead no matter where you are in the world and what month it is, because there is no internal calendar in the sim. 

It's one of the subtle reasons why so many of the MSFS screen shots look spectacular. People are able to choose time of year in high and low latitude locations where the sun is at a low angle during the daytime, so you can control the reflection angle on water and through the clouds. This is something I never new I missed in XP until I flew the first MSFS Alphas. .

True, and there are some others like Trees being 2d old school on that X-Y plane of flat image simulating a 3D tree.

The clouds in MSFS are nothing to brag about as some are bragging, the best clouds I've seen (haven't used every engine) was still old school Rex 4 Essentials (the version before soft clouds). They weren't truly volumetric and it still had that spinning cloud bug in FSX, but overall they looked much higher resolution than the clouds in MSFS. Xplane's current default clouds are even worse though, but after an addon it's almost a wash really on the clouds, excluding the weather.

However, if they can just improve the trees, water, and some things a little, it would be a lot closer than it is now. The biggest difference is still just the trees and the detail texture overlays at airports, MSFS absolutely destroys Xplane 11 in that area. As far as lighting, well yah I suppose, but IMO Xplane also has some lighting advantages over MSFS (night lighting looks better to me in Xplane 11 personally, but I haven't flown at night that much in MSFS so I could be wrong).

Also, the MSFS weather engine still has a huge problem in not producing rain properly where it should be, even though it usually gets the cloud cover close enough to accurate.

 

Edited August 22, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

I shouldn’t be surprised that there’s still so much denial here — it’s just about the most predictable thing in the world — but I admit that I still am. 

Go ahead and keep using P3D and XP if that’s your thing. It’s clear that there are things that MSFS still doesn’t do quite right, and I get it. I can’t see myself going back to P3D, personally, but I can understand it.

But that’s separate from the reality that the addon market for those sims is effectively dead as of this week. Anyone who thinks I’m wrong: check in with me in six months and let’s see who turned out to be right.

As someone said further up: whether or not it’s a good thing, MSFS has just captured the overwhelming majority of this market. After the sim was announced, it was never likely that anything else would happen; it probably would have taken a complete disaster of a release as opposed to just the half disaster we got instead.

Even with the extremely bumpy launch and ongoing issues, it’s over. It just is. Go ahead and deny it. Let’s see where we are in six months.

James

Meanwhile in reality, x-plane sales in steam is growing.

Just got an ad from X-Plane.org.  The opening line from the ad: "Why spend 15 hours to download a VFR sim? Flight Simmers still want planes that fly correctly and with proper systems. Do not worry, we got you covered..."

John Cottreau

40 minutes ago, javelina said:

Cool, I'll check that out! 

Sorry, it wasn't Loon Creek I was thinking of, but rather Salmon Idaho area.

Specifically, the scenery around Lemhi County Airport looks good (KSMN).