1 hour ago, abrams_tank said:

The problem with XPlane and P3D are that they sat there for 10 years without advancing the genre of flight simulators.

I have said it again and again.  MSFS was like when IPhone was released in 2007.  XPlane and P3D were the Blackberry and Nokia back in 2007.  Yeah, Blackberry and Nokia would survive a few more years after the IPhone release, but the writing was on the wall for Blackberry and Nokia.  If XPlane and P3D don't up their game and make drastic improvements over the next 2 years, my guess is XPlane and P3D will eventually become obsolete just like Blackberry and Nokia.

Yup, very astute observations, as human nature is complacency. They were too busy enjoying the fruits of their success flying their real planes, rather than focusing on the business. It's hard to be motivated when you get a few million in the bank.

P3D is done for IMO, it cannot process things fast enough unless they rewrite the game engine, but Xplane can, that is the big difference. Xplane has a modern game engine with poor environmental lighting, bad water effects, and rather ugly looking trees. However, it can for the most part do what MSFS can, except process clouds correctly, but it can do everything else similarly relatively speaking. Hence, you can make an airport in Xplane look basically identical to MSFS, but need some plugins and environmental shaders to counter the bad lighting too. Well, there is actually a relatively new FREE mod for Xplane 11 that can do clouds very well which came out in the past year, but you need a GTX 3080 or greater to really run it, even to get 30+ FPS, at least that was my finding but I didn't try optimizing it that much. The clouds looked somewhat similar to MSFS with this new freeware mod, but the performance hit was way too high for my lowly RTX 2060 Super.

I would like to see 2 simulators survive at least into the future, not one, and I think Xplane will survive, though they better get cracking on up'n the visuals a bit.


 

Edited May 15, 20215 yr by Alpine Scenery

4 hours ago, Bobsk8 said:

It started Yesterday afternoon. Launch MSFS 2020, and within a minute a AMD Driver timeout, which crashed MSFS. Happened everytime. Swapped out GPU, same thing. Got tech support on the line, he remote connected to PC, tried everything for about 1 1/2 hours, and finally said, I better ship it back to them, something major wrong with it. 

was it a WattMan error that was dropping the system?

Graham

3 minutes ago, Moria15 said:

was it a WattMan error that was dropping the system?

Graham

AMD Driver Timeout, a problem that many AMD owners have. 

 

4 hours ago, DJJose said:

This is a good example of why we should all have a back up plan.

MSFS is a beautiful sim, but it's a monthly work in progress and whatever could go wrong will go wrong. I settled on X-Plane 11 as my primary sim and MSFS as a nice VFR option.

The problem is XPlane11 looks like word not allowed also now by comparison.  ATC, live weather, and global scenery are a no go in XPlane11 leaving it as nothing more than a limited area visual/flight dynamics simulator.

You have to mod the heck out of Xplane, but it doesn't look bad after you get the mods all working, it's not MSFS quality, but not so far behind at times. There are solutions for ATC and weather in XP11, but the clouds are ugly unless you want to do that super duper framerate killer mod. Downloading all the ortho is a pain, but it is interesting to have choices of which Ortho for which areas. The Great Britain stuff by Orbx is also pretty good in XP 11, and looks better than MSFS in some ways.

For some really poor looking Ortho areas in MSFS, Xplane can beat it if you change the provider download in Ortho4XP to Google instead of Bing or whatever.

 

Edited May 15, 20215 yr by Alpine Scenery

27 minutes ago, Alpine Scenery said:

I would like to see 2 simulators survive at least into the future, not one, and I think Xplane will survive, though they better get cracking on up'n the visuals a bit.

Very good overall assessment.

In my mind, X-Plane would be best served if they don't try to copy the MSFS approach but place as an alternative, based on their strengths, which are certainly their flight models, avionics, Vulcan, and others.

Sometimes I hear they should team up with Google but I doubt this will be the way to go. A lean, performant framework, perhaps being based on good procedural scenery, may well serve as an alternative. Procedural scenery as it's done now by XP and P3D is probably a thing of the past, but developments by Outerra, Unreal and the likes show what can be done without swapping Terrabytes of data. It just was never seriously merried with the flight simulation aspect, so just crying to team up.

Kind regards, Michael

That might be the way to go, it's a tough decision. Procedural scenery is difficult from a 3D graphics skill level, it's a very unique talent that not too many 3D developers are good at creating. It's hard to find people that can create nice looking procedural landscapes in a way that is optimized and can interact with mountains, but they are out there. Aerial imagery is much easier of course since it's like pre-fab vs. custom. LR is a small company, but I heard they do have some new 3D artists working on it, but IMO they are being way too slow. They need to show progress or eventually they will be in trouble.
 

3 hours ago, Dillon said:

The problem is XPlane11 looks like word not allowed also now by comparison.  ATC, live weather, and global scenery are a no go in XPlane11 leaving it as nothing more than a limited area visual/flight dynamics simulator.

All of the issues have been addressed. You need to do some research because XP 11 is not the same sim that it was 6 months ago.

6 hours ago, DJJose said:

All of the issues have been addressed. You need to do some research because XP 11 is not the same sim that it was 6 months ago.

Oh, didn't know there's now default ATC, live weather, and global scenery in XPlane11.  Guess I'll take a look when I get some time.

10 hours ago, Alpine Scenery said:

P3D is done for IMO, it cannot process things fast enough unless they rewrite the game engine, but Xplane can, that is the big difference.

So funny ! For years upon years, the X-Planers have come to FSX and P3D forums to preach (yes, preach 😁! ) that their favorite sim was so much better than the sim we, the crowd of the ill-washed, were flying and that XP would soon triumph because of of its marvelous flight modeling. It never happened. The FS family of sims has been ruling the virtual skies without blinking.

Now that it seems many fled to MFS in drove they cannot but still predict the end of times for P3D, with a twist, the XP Second Coming.

Is it a sense of guilt to have left the fold ?  🤣

PS excuse me, my friend, I couldn’t help. No offence intended. Just a bit of tongue-in-cheek teasing. 

16 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

So funny ! For years upon years, the X-Planers have come to FSX and P3D forums to preach (yes, preach 😁! ) that their favorite sim was so much better than the sim we, the crowd of the ill-washed, were flying and that XP would soon triumph because of of its marvelous flight modeling. It never happened. The FS family of sims has been ruling the virtual skies without blinking.

Now that it seems many fled to MFS in drove they cannot but still predict the end of times for P3D, with a twist, the XP Second Coming.

Is it a sense of guilt to have left the fold ?  🤣

PS excuse me, my friend, I couldn’t help. No offence intended. Just a bit of tongue-in-cheek teasing. 

No problem, well the highlight is fairly simple, Xplane has Ortho4XP and P3D doesn't process ortho-imagery very well. Even the same Orbx sceneries run much smoother on Xplane. 

I've had all of the Sims, and also owned many of the great planes in FSX/P3d (v4). P3D feels ancient compared to Xplane, in Xplane you got the whole aerial world FREE at your fingertips just like MSFS, though you do have to WAIT a long time to download it, but it's there.

To me, Xplane does not feel ancient to MSFS, it just feels slightly behind (mainly with clouds and water). It has some things that are more advanced than MSFS, like REPLAYS, better working avionics, more mods, better performance (well sometimes, depends), and gives you a choice on which aerial provider you want to use, plus it has way better selection of free planes, of which MSFS has mainly the default stuff and a few oddities over at Flightsim.to.

The cockpit text tends to be a bit higher resolution in MSFS in most planes, but that is not the fault of Xplane but the fault of the cockpit developers. Yes, the MSFS exterior models look better than MOST Xplane models, but not by that much. As far as default airports go, Xplane's default airports are better than MSFS in many ways, including being more accurate to the real airport, but of course MSFS gives you many many highly detailed airports even for free. That said, even though I'm not a huge fan of the Xplane scenery gateway airports, they still beat most of the MSFS default airports.

Xplane 11 isn't for everyone, I agree, but the Zibo mod is amazing freeware, better than the airliners in MSFS. MSFS has the CJ4 and Longitude, which IMO are more fun than even the Zibo, but even that fun wears out after a while. Nothing will match the fun I had in P3D with the Majestic Dash8-Q400 and a few different KingAirs (and the A2A stuff), but there are also brilliantly done planes in XPlane if you want to spend that kind of money. The TBM Hotstart 900 by Takecommand comes to mind, though I owned this one and did fly it quite a bit, the larger turboprops are more fun to me (ATR's, Q400's, etc...).

That is the main thing we are missing in MSFS right now I feel, a large commuter Turboprop.

 

 

Edited May 16, 20215 yr by Alpine Scenery

My point was not about the relative merits of both but about the ongoing XPlaners prediction, for about twenty-five years, that the FS sims were done for. It is a recurrent prediction that has fallen on its behind with a clockwork regularity.

I am convinced that MS will enter someday the pro market including the military and that Lockheed Martin has indeed to do some serious rehab for P3D . They have all the knowledge and means necessary. 

 

11 minutes ago, Dominique_K said:

My point was not about the relative merits of both but about the ongoing XPlaners prediction, for about twenty-five years, that the FS sims were done for. It is a recurrent prediction that has fallen on its behind with a clockwork regularity.

I am convinced that MS will enter someday the pro market including the military and that Lockheed Martin has indeed to do some serious rehab for P3D . They have all the knowledge and means necessary. 

 

Oh, I see what you are saying. Well that might be, but P3D isn't going to be able to be rehabilitated unfortunately, the inner workings of the engine prevent it, they'd have to rewrite it which would be just as monumental of a task as creating MSFS from scratch. So I don't see it happening. 

Xplane's engine, on the other hand, can handle polygon counts and textures similarly to MSFS. They are both modern game engines. The reason it was easier for Xplane to switch engines than say P3D is a bit complicated, but mainly because P3D has too much legacy code that was written so many years ago by a different team, whereas Xplane kept slowly updating their engine to full modern style coding until they eventually added Vulkan. It's two different types of problems. The design of P3D is just not easily compatible to be converted to a modern game engine. That is why Asobo started over with the engine mechanics itself, they knew the old legacy FSX engine was hopeless. Sure, there is a lot of legacy code from FSX even in MSFS, but it's mostly XML junk, there is nothing when it comes to graphics processing.

P3D did mod the engine quite a bit, but it's still very limited compared to Xplane and MSFS when it comes to handling poly counts and textures.
 

Edited May 16, 20215 yr by Alpine Scenery

6 hours ago, Dillon said:

Oh, didn't know there's now default ATC, live weather, and global scenery in XPlane11.  Guess I'll take a look when I get some time.

Like every other sim, X-Plane 11 requires add-ons to shine.

X-Plane 11.53 Vulkan is a solid "reliable" platform worthy of further research.

6 hours ago, Alpine Scenery said:

No problem, well the highlight is fairly simple, Xplane has Ortho4XP and P3D doesn't process ortho-imagery very well. Even the same Orbx sceneries run much smoother on Xplane. 

I've had all of the Sims, and also owned many of the great planes in FSX/P3d (v4). P3D feels ancient compared to Xplane, in Xplane you got the whole aerial world FREE at your fingertips just like MSFS, though you do have to WAIT a long time to download it, but it's there.

To me, Xplane does not feel ancient to MSFS, it just feels slightly behind (mainly with clouds and water). It has some things that are more advanced than MSFS, like REPLAYS, better working avionics, more mods, better performance (well sometimes, depends), and gives you a choice on which aerial provider you want to use, plus it has way better selection of free planes, of which MSFS has mainly the default stuff and a few oddities over at Flightsim.to.

The cockpit text tends to be a bit higher resolution in MSFS in most planes, but that is not the fault of Xplane but the fault of the cockpit developers. Yes, the MSFS exterior models look better than MOST Xplane models, but not by that much. As far as default airports go, Xplane's default airports are better than MSFS in many ways, including being more accurate to the real airport, but of course MSFS gives you many many highly detailed airports even for free. That said, even though I'm not a huge fan of the Xplane scenery gateway airports, they still beat most of the MSFS default airports.

Xplane 11 isn't for everyone, I agree, but the Zibo mod is amazing freeware, better than the airliners in MSFS. MSFS has the CJ4 and Longitude, which IMO are more fun than even the Zibo, but even that fun wears out after a while. Nothing will match the fun I had in P3D with the Majestic Dash8-Q400 and a few different KingAirs (and the A2A stuff), but there are also brilliantly done planes in XPlane if you want to spend that kind of money. The TBM Hotstart 900 by Takecommand comes to mind, though I owned this one and did fly it quite a bit, the larger turboprops are more fun to me (ATR's, Q400's, etc...).

That is the main thing we are missing in MSFS right now I feel, a large commuter Turboprop.

Thank you for explaining this to the community. I've NEVER really been a fan of X-Plane. After six months of MSFS, out of desperation, I decided to try XP 11 again and I'm so glad that I did. Now I share my enthusiasm knowing that MSFS is still the future, but no where near of what it will be.

This does not mean that I can't enjoy MSFS for what it does well. What it offers right now, it does it better than any other sim.