180 hours on Steam for XP11 alone. Yet never flew XP11 ever....

6 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

180 hours on Steam for XP11 alone. Yet never flew XP11 ever....

Then why do you state that default airports are just runways with no buildings?

Do you want to post a screenshot of the default EGLL? Or KJFK? Or KLAX? Or is my english too bad to understand this sentence:

"Seriously. If you don't have a freeware or payware airport in XP11, they looks like lonely runways in the middle of nowhere with no building. "

Can you maybe elaborate on this statement for this non-native speaker?

54 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

because I took the (freeware) typhoon for a spin in VR when we were talking about it.

Out of topic, but you got me curious trying this one in VR too!

Can you post a link to it please?

@RXP  I never posted this comment. Where did you get this. Maybe you quote the wrong person ?

7 minutes ago, Janov said:

Then why do you state that default airports are just runways with no buildings?

Do you want to post a screenshot of the default EGLL? Or KJFK? Or KLAX? Or is my english too bad to understand this sentence:

"Seriously. If you don't have a freeware or payware airport in XP11, they looks like lonely runways in the middle of nowhere with no building. "

Can you maybe elaborate on this statement for this non-native speaker?

I am at work right now. I will post some screenshot of what I am talking about later. Sorry if I am not fast enough for you.

1 minute ago, fogboundturtle said:

I will post some screenshot of what I am talking about later.

I think I know what you were getting at. Here, let me amend your statement a bit for you and then see if thats what you meant?

"Seriously. If you don´t have a freeware or payware airport for them, SOME airports in X-Plane 11 look like lonely runways sitting in the middle of nowhere with no buildings".

Is that what you were saying? Because what you wrote indicated that ALL airports are like that, and you know that this is a false statement.

You say that you are interested in a fair comparison, and I applaud that. It is super easy to pick an airport that looks great in one simulator and bad in the other. It works both ways.

I think the issue here is with time. MSFS has been out for eight months and XP has been out for years and years. I don't want to stir the pot but the better MSFS freeware airports beat anything XP has to offer, even payware, hands down. Check out Gatwick and Helsinki. And the best payware MSFS airports leave XP for dust imo.

XP11 Chilliwack 

MSFS Chilliwack

 

I pick an airport that wasn't even really good in MSFS.  It's an airport close to where I I live, I have Ortho L17 everywhere in XP11, Airport HD addons , HD tree addons  etc....

36 minutes ago, RXP said:

Out of topic, but you got me curious trying this one in VR too!

Can you post a link to it please?

http://www.dmax3d.com/dmax3d/eurofighter.html

24 minutes ago, Janov said:

and you know that this is a false statement.

well, not necessarily.

If global airports ends up in the wrong place in the scenery ini this is fairly common. I know, because I only got round to fixing it [again] a couple of days ago, easy to not notice if only flying to airports with custom scenery, must be 2 months flying since the last time I touched my scenery (likely just after that nyc vid) and only noticed when I found egcc devoid of buildings talking about it in this thread.

9 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

XP11 Chilliwack 

MSFS Chilliwack

 

I pick an airport that wasn't even really good in MSFS.  It's an airport close to where I I live, I have Ortho L17 everywhere in XP11, Airport HD addons , HD tree addons  etc....

Pure default CYCW

That 747 clearly looks out of place.

Looks like a low "number of world objects" setting (and not ortho).

Edited March 31, 20215 yr by mSparks

I am using medium for world object. This is when I am flying settings. Not I want to look good and don't care about frame settings.

Edited March 31, 20215 yr by fogboundturtle

@mSparks thank you for the link

@fogboundturtle I might have indeed quoted the quote in your post, instead of quoting the original post!

I sometimes get confused when posts mostly consists in quoting an entire post with pictures and my screen can't show the post in its entirety. I don't know if there is way to configure this forum to automatically display the quoted posts in a collapsed manner, or to quote someone and post the quote collapsed by default?!

Edited March 31, 20215 yr by RXP
clarity

To get back to the topic - instead of the intricacies of correct quoting 🙄...

 

Thanks for those pictures, Fogboundturtle. I agree that this is a fair comparison.

The XP11 Gateway airport was made in 2018 by a volunteer "regularly skilled" Gateway artist. You can see some "artistic liberty" that would not happen to someone more seasoned (like picking yellow outlines for the taxiway edges, when there clearly aren´t any in the sat picture). Also a huge swath of autogen was killed outside the airport, probably by a carelessly placed exclusion zone...EDIT: Just read that you are using "medium" settings for your scenery, that would explain the many houses missing... I run my XP on maximum settings and generally get framerates in the 50s (11.53) EDIT: At Chilliwack I get 80+ fps in 4K.

However the artist did not go so far as to place a huge airport beacon smack in the middle of the taxiway - does that not bother you when operating at the airport in MSFS? This shows the limitation of "machine learned" automated airport making, simple knowledge that airport beacons do never belong on airplane movement surfaces.

The colours, textures and surrounding terrain look a lot better in MSFS, I think everyone in his right mind will not deny that.

 

Edited March 31, 20215 yr by Janov

I'm a long time owner of xEnviro (day one I think) and had seldom used it up until recently; especially after the implementation of 3D clouds due to performance issues.  However, with the latest 1.16 update, my performance has drastically improved after messing with the latest settings.  I found by far the biggest impact to performance is the moving cloud quality setting (can't remember the exact name).  There is a tradeoff in cloud quality when panning the camera but I have been able to live with that due to the quality of the other aspects of the program.

First it is a one stop shop for the following elements:

Actual volumetric clouds, clouds all the way out to the horizon, no drastic weather transitions, beautiful shader implementation during all hours (I actually have to use the X-Plane sunglasses feature or plane's sunshade when flying into rising/setting sun), turbulence (including CAT) is very well done, visibility implementation including fog; and wind shear implementation is very immersive and will make you need to change your pants.  Also, it uses shaders to depict snow on the ground at airports (runways, buildings, etc.) and on top of ortho scenery and trees which alone is worth a lot to me.at.

Is it perfect? No. Are there still issues? Yes. The clouds while volumetric and out to the horizon still need a lot of work.  They do not look as good as MSFS clouds but are not far behind.  There are still ugly artifacts from time to time and they can get pixelated depending on settings (which will depend on your hardware).  Progress is slow but they are continuing to improve the product. 

After the latest update I had been using Vulkan with ASXP getting upwards of 50 FPS.  While the latest version of xEnviro is compatible with Vulkan it certainly is not optimized for it.  I get a smooth 30 to 35 FPS in openGL with xEnviro and even using the FF A320.  I get about the same FPS in Vulkan; however, there is a weird lag whenever you pan around with the mouse.  I'm not sure how to describe it other than there is a slight delay from when you click and move the mouse until the time the camera moves. It jarring and I couldn't deal with it.  Hopefully they will further optimize for Vulkan.  I accepted the FPS tradeoff because of the smoothness in openGL.  It is ridiculously smooth.

Considering the smoothness I get in the latest XP version with openGL, can still have the amazing ski windshield rain on the Zibo and windshield effects at all on the FF A320, I have been flying exclusively with this combination for the past couple months. 

I feel I am finally getting my monies worth out of xEnviro here something like 4 or 5 years later lol.

PC Specs: i5 4670k 5 ghz, GTX 2080 stock, 32GB Ram

 

6 minutes ago, Janov said:

To get back to the topic - instead of the intricacies of correct quoting 🙄...

 

Thanks for those pictures, Fogboundturtle. I agree that this is a fair comparison.

The XP11 Gateway airport was made in 2018 by a volunteer "regularly skilled" Gateway artist. You can see some "artistic liberty" that would not happen to someone more seasoned (like picking yellow outlines for the taxiway edges, when there clearly aren´t any in the sat picture). Also a huge swath of autogen was killed outside the airport, probably by a carelessly placed exclusion zone...EDIT: Just read that you are using "medium" settings for your scenery, that would explain the many houses missing... I run my XP on maximum settings and generally get framerates in the 50s (11.53).

However the artist did not go so far as to place a huge airport beacon smack in the middle of the taxiway - does that not bother you when operating at the airport in MSFS? This shows the limitation of "machine learned" automated airport making, simple knowledge that airport beacons do never belong on airplane movement surfaces.

The colours, textures and surrounding terrain look a lot better in MSFS, I think everyone in his right mind will not deny that.

 

I can see if I can crank up the world object level. I was trying to be fair in my comparison. People are a little bit too much on the defense at time. Yes, some MSFS are not that great. I pick that one knowing it wasn't a well craft airport so that we give a fair review.