6 minutes ago, CarlosF said:

Beating the dead horse again and again ...

Alas! I thought, the facts are on the table, but ... 😪

10 minutes ago, Janov said:

I just hope he will quit posting "beautiful" screenshots to convince us at some point in time 😅

Not so much the collective 'us', but you said it yourself here with this comment:  "you will notice that the only one that will allow himself to get drawn into the "which one looks better, MSFS or XP11?" is mSparks 😉"  So I thought I might as well play along to see how far he would go with this fascinating orientation strapped with contrarian views and guaranteed to evoke a response, like this choice pearl, "Biggest lie about ms streaming is that is the quality they offer. MS cant even do OrbX quality...."  I fell for it hook, line and sinker and had a nice holiday, thank you Ray I understand, my bad for not seeing what was happening.  He is very aware of his own role in these exchanges, and in fact he freely admitted he has this effect on people with this comment, "If every person I triggered got banned there would be no one at all left. I just seem to have that effect on people...."   My bad for falling for Spark's triggering comments.

10 minutes ago, Janov said:

Noel, your simulator looks better (except for the airports)! The world´s scenery in it is more realistic (except for the airports)! The lighting (except at the airports) and the clouds are better! ... but it still is not the simulator I prefer

I completely appreciate why you feel the way you do and always did.   I will be picking up XP-12 if MSFS does not mature more in the areas that matter to me, though even now I'd still keep and use it because despite its shortcomings it still offers an incredible experience--and it's in state of constant development and likely will be some time.   I'd like to see the flight model improved, cloud depiction needs considerable work in terms of morphology and IQ/resolution, the arrival of more study-level planes esp from PMDG, and last but not least better accuracy in airport accuracy in the areas you mentioned.  It needs a lot of work!

I'm out of here for now and hope I have not offended anyone, if so I apologize.  Thanks all for the insights and here's to a very successful XP-12 launch.  🍻

 

1 hour ago, uwespeed said:

Good, you're asking for it:
As my example with the Potemnkin Village obviously wasn't understood completely: imagine, you bought a new car, and now are proudly presenting it to the audience. "Look, it has a very nice paint, and spoilers in the front and rear. Additionally wide base tires, and a leather steering wheel. And leather seats." Etc. Some people are very impressed, but someone asks you: "Ok, admittedly, it looks nice. But ... aren't you aware, that behind the leather steering wheel there is no power steering? And the leather seats aren't adjustable. Apart from that, it hasn't a fuel tank and the engine is a 2 stroke engine, which you have to start with the crank handle. You can't see this from the outside, however, it's a huge limitation."
You get the point? Until the basics aren't good, or even not existing - what does it help to have such a nice looking car?

 

THIS!
There are lots of videos like this (Landing in XYZ. Ultra Realism! 4K! Wing View!) polluting 😆 the internet. And yet the comments 🤦‍♂️: "Super!" "Great!" "Astounding!" "Fantastic!" I wonder what those people bought their sim for (purposely not written FLIGHT sim 😅). This nuisance came up with FSX, as far as I remember. But ... isn't a flight sim for pilots? And usually these are sitting in the cockpit. Only passengers are sitting in the cabin near the wings 🙃. Sure, I understand MS wanted to get higher sales, and for that they had to attract ... "passengers flying to their vacation", who aren't interested in the operation of flight. However, FSX died after some time, as we all know. And can we be sure, MSFS 202x will live "forever"?

 

FSX never really died. after MS dumped it. the developers having a nice stable platform started doing wonders with it.  Even with P3D it hung in there.

5 hours ago, Noel said:

"Biggest lie about ms streaming is that is the quality they offer. MS cant even do OrbX quality...."

It can't, it takes many hours to download OrbX quality for a small portion of the UK that you can cover in 15 minutes in a Typhoon.

e.g. 27GB download, 129GB extracted

https://orbxdirect.com/product/gbr-south-xp11

MSFS streamed quality is lower and takes longer to load than XP11 default scenery. MROC is a good example, never flown South America before, so I installed it, took about 2 minutes

Then recorded a "first visit to MROC in XP11" for you, this is all default - even the clouds. Nothing cut, Its what you get for the $30 XP11 currently costs.

It's plainly obvious to anyone MSFS is not close to matching that experience yet. Its clouds look worse, its airport scenery is much lower quality, it wastes an age to do anything and once it doesn't have its superior lighting to fall back on it has no safety net, because everything else is objectively worse than XP11, and XP12 upgrades pretty much everything, not just clouds and lighting.

Edited December 21, 20214 yr by mSparks

9 hours ago, Noel said:

Thanks all for the insights and here's to a very successful XP-12 launch.  🍻

Thanks, Noel - I am sorry if I came down on you a bit hard, I was not aware of the back-and-forth you must have had with mSparks, that is the downside of reading along in a forum where you ignore content of some users.

I do want to further understanding between all users of flightsimulation software, it is important to keep an open mind and to realize that the term means different things to different folks.

All the best with MSFS, Jan

 

Edited December 21, 20214 yr by Janov

9 hours ago, mjrhealth said:

FSX never really died. after MS dumped it. the developers having a nice stable platform started doing wonders with it.  Even with P3D it hung in there.

Indeed, you're right. FSX survived (mainly) in P3D. However, my original intent was to tell that MS backed off and left/sold (?) the code to LM for P3D. And it worked. OTOH, as I wrote above, we can't be sure that MS will back off again at some time, as flight simulation isn't their business case. And to whom shall they sell the rest? The main object and attraction currently is the landscape with photogrammetry and orthophotos by Bing, as we have seen in the discussions above 😊. But no one will be able to afford buying all that. However, we will see, and I'm now out regarding this topic.

On 12/21/2021 at 1:38 AM, mSparks said:

Its what you get for the $30 XP11 currently costs.

I could swear I paid £59 for it. Why the price cut?

2 hours ago, jarmstro said:

I could swear I paid £59 for it. Why the price cut?

It ships with 5 year old artwork and aircraft and will be superseeded by something better soon.

Price will likely go back up once XP12 is in public beta.

Edited December 22, 20214 yr by mSparks

2 hours ago, jarmstro said:

I could swear I paid £59 for it. Why the price cut?

They're selling so many copies, they don't need the full price. Superiority pays off.

6 hours ago, mSparks said:

It ships with 5 year old artwork and aircraft and will be superseeded by something better soon.

Price will likely go back up once XP12 is in public beta.

At last! You confirm that you accept that it is out of date. Roll on XP12!😀

3 hours ago, jarmstro said:

At last! You confirm that you accept that it is out of date. Roll on XP12!😀

Are you conflating my opinion that XP11 is less out of date than the competition with me thinking XP11 isnt out of date? 

Do you think Im happy the clouds of the current next best alternative are this bad?

After flight model, clouds and visibility are next on my list of "must haves", XP11 does visibility very well, clouds not so much (flying VFR around clouds should be like a game of pacman).

 

Edited December 22, 20214 yr by mSparks

11 hours ago, jarmstro said:

I could swear I paid £59 for it. Why the price cut?

Only on Steam and because Christmas is coming up.

Here's MROC to MMNU in the default 787X modded by HD.  This was simultaneously captured while flying by NVidia Shadowplay--pretty remarkable to do on one machine I didn't know it was possible today. 

I included some initial steps for uxespeed who posted a silly video of MSFS around KDEN from passenger's POV, with of course the implication that must be all there is to do in MSFS, which of course is silly. I'm sorry but I mean come on just why did you post that link?  Once again, everyone knows MSFS lacks plenty, but it's still very functional despite its shortcomings.  So the fancy car shell analogy is for another show--this discussion has never been about the completeness of MSFS, only what role the scenery/atmosphere/lighting play in the entire experience of flight simulation--and it's a big part else we would have zero need to produce new versions of XP/P3D because the basics have been there for several versions, and we would be less likely to install addon content.  Better artwork, volumetric clouds, etc those are attributes in the scenery/lighting/atmospheric side of 'flight simulation', versus the physics, cockpit modeling pieces and SDK.  But those things really will be moving forward as we move into the new year.  Next sim update is dedicated to global bug fixes and I expect this will ease some of the frustration MSFS users experience, plus they have publicly stated 2022 focus is on stability and separation of previously combined core sim updates w/ world scenery updates.  They have PMDG tugging at them to get to this level of stability and continue the SDK as the are ready to deliver the 737NG3 as soon as these issues are solved.  And their DC-6 was a smash hit already in MSFS.

Do view it in YT's 4K option to be in the ballpark for what I'm seeing.  And ignore the visual artifacts that are a function of the current state of simultaneous software video capture at 3440x1440--shimmering on the taxiway I noticed when turning and a few other aberrations stemming from same.  Plus I'm sure the PC was on the edge at times doing this.

Spark's comparable MROC video is exactly what I saw in P3D w/ Orbx for many years, and for what it was, it was good.  But it's lacking by what comes from the highest end ortho because I guess of the subtleties of everything--color changes, how one object blends with another, the distribution of trees and so forth.  MSFS' scenery has a much more organic feel to it to me, whereas XP/FSX/P3D have an artificial feel to them--I would never be fooled into believing I was looking at a photograph in that type of scenery engine it's too easy to tell it's not real.  This being said, it looks like True Earth changes that from what I see.  So at this in time, it's a waiting game to see which comes first, a giant part of the planet at a cost I would pay for, for TrueEarth, or MSFS continues marching towards maturity, which I feel is not that far down the road.  Right now TrueEarth is $50 per third of the UK, which is a small country.  And then the storage.  Might as well build the entire database in TrueEarth detail and stream it.  Oh, that's right that kind of thing has already happened for $59 for the entire planet.  

Janov sorry but this is not a screenshot so enjoy...

 

Ohh, great, more MSFS footage from Noel! Who knows, keep it coming, you may convince me to try it eventually.... NOT 🤣

PS: I had the urge to take in the beauty around MROC today. Fired up google earth and wow, that is such a nice place! 😁

PSS: Who puts blue taxiway lights right on the taxiway at MROC in MSFS? Is that the way they build their airports down there? I couldnt quite confirm it on google earth, but yeah, its possible, I guess... Just have to taxi around them carefully, maybe?

And what about that huge "hold short" line on the taxiway at 8:30?? Really? You call that a flight simulator? 🤣

PSS: Here is another nice video of San Jose, Puerto Rico - the quality is even better than yours!

 

Edited December 22, 20214 yr by Janov

11 minutes ago, Janov said:

Ohh, great, more MSFS footage from Noel! Who knows, keep it coming, you may convince me to try it eventually.... NOT 🤣

I find absolutely funny that @Noel is WASTING HOURS of his life to write long posts like the one above which are totally USELESS to convince anyone of us... 🤣

Don't know if he needs to convince himself instead, or what... 🤷‍♂️