2 hours ago, lzamm said:

As others have pointed out there's a slight difference between the two and your trying to obfuscate the matter doesn't help your credibility.  I'm just saying that the X-plane take on orthos isn't for everybody, and for those it isn't the comparison down low is quite stark.  In my opinion x-plane is better served by playing to its strengths - and it has many - rather than being touted as what, for most people, it'll never be.

Of course XP12 isn't for everybody, all of the time.  I myself have 1700 hours in MSFS and think it quite a brilliant flight simulator.  I post the images as many will just see some silly videos like 'MSFS v XP12 'out the box'.  XP12 with very little effort can be much more that's 'in the box'.  I do agree the better quality orthos available for XP12 isn't for everybody.  If a simmer want to explore many different parts of the world without any additional effort will find MSFS ideal, and I would recommend it to them.  For those that don't mind a little extra effort, XP12 as a base, offers many options to fine tune the experience.  

37 minutes ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

effort can be much more that's 'in the box'.

the way Ive described it for a while, is xplane is a multi million dollar flight simulator, delivered in 50 boxes for $60.

It is best not to compare that with products aimed at people who get confused by ikea build instructions, else you will get people who are confused by ikea build instructions trying to argue with you.

48 minutes ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

If a simmer want to explore many different parts of the world without any additional effort will find MSFS ideal, and I would recommend it to them.  For those that don't mind a little extra effort, XP12 as a base, offers many options to fine tune the experience.  

This, just this. The target audience is just different. One is built to run on an xbox, the other is built to run on massive million dollar sims, certified training devices, and home sims built by people as passionate about aviation as the people who write xp. The only thing between them that is in the same ballpark is the price.

XP itself has been highly realistic since at least late 2017

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/136225-xplane-1111r1-realism/

Now its realistic _and_ beautiful.

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

One is built to run on an xbox, the other is built to run on massive million dollar sims, certified training devices,

No it's not, it's built to run on home PC's, hence in the recent beta post by Ben he was discussing people that don't have beefy GPUS such as 3080 and 3090 or lot of VRAM, they are trying to optimise it as much a possible. It is advertised all over Twitter by X-Plane themselves towards the home consumer. 

PS the Xbox is more powerful and optimised that half of the peoples PC's here in these forums....

If X-plane were only for commercial members, they wouldn't bother even releasing it to us lowly lot. 

Edited September 14, 20223 yr by Ianrivaldosmith

6 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

I find your comments quite odd because MSFS doesn't come with ortho 'out the box' either, it is downloaded every time you use it. 

At this point it's really getting absurd 😄

 

8 hours ago, rka said:

The above point cannot be emphasized enough. This is not XP12 realism. It's XP12 with Ortho and XEurope realism and this added realism, that XP does not deliver itself, comes at a hefty fps cost (not counting the time to make ortho and the money for something to store it).

Threads like this are misleading uninformed customers.

You are right; users must create their orthos. But many people are doing that and is not that difficult. It‘s free and only needs harddisk-space (cheap). You won‘t get the whole world but i think 90% of people fly around the same areas, for ex. the most in Europe and USA.

Technically, MSFS does also add orthos. They are being streamed and is very convenient i agree. But we could debate as this can be seen as default, since you need a good internet connection and have to download thousands of Gigabytes. As soon as the server has an issue you loose the ability to get these datas.

I am nitpicking but what i want to say is that for heavy-simmers, they will spend a few days installing their orthos. It will be worth for the hundreds of flights they will do. And so the big advantage of MSFS disappears, now that in XP12 the lighting is excellent and clouds partially also look very good (although they need some fine-tuning and have bugs). At the end there isn‘t really any big advantage of using MSFs, even more when knowing that XP does a few thinks already better (camera, replay, runway effects, runway-lights etc.).

24 minutes ago, rka said:

At this point it's really getting absurd 😄

 

3 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

If a simmer want to explore many different parts of the world without any additional effort will find MSFS ideal, and I would recommend it to them.  For those that don't mind a little extra effort, XP12 as a base, offers many options to fine tune the experience.  

Yes that‘s true. This is for sure an advantage of MSFS at the end for people who don‘t want to spend  time on installing orthos and/or don‘t fly often

4 minutes ago, Franz007 said:

And so the big advantage of MSFS disappears,

No it doesn’t, it’s NOT just ortho. It’s also AI and autogen all placed together. I can go and whip a ortho together for my local area now and place it in XP12. The overlying autogen is still awful. 

I took this one from Reddit. So please don't hate me but even if you can get good screenshot of XP12 in specific condition. Other condition are absolutely dreadful

8 hours ago, PDX Flyer said:

XP will probably never look as good as MSF

That‘s what i would have say a few weeks ago as well. I have been using exclusive MSFS for the last 6 months. But XP12 blew me away with the lighting and clouds and i didn’t expect it to be such a game-changer compared to XP11. I agree that in general MSFS still has an advantage when talking about visuals. But i could find some situations (depending on the weather, time and surrounding topography) where XP clearly looked better. For example when in short approach during bad weather, the immersion is better. The approach lights are not that overdone as in MSFS, the colours look more natural and combined with the excellent runway textures that may also have some puddles on it, it seriously looks better and is more immersive. Thats at least my opinion.

1 minute ago, fogboundturtle said:

I took this one from Reddit. So please don't hate me but even if you can get good screenshot of XP12 in specific condition. Other condition are absolutely dreadful

Uh yeah reddit screenshot of Xplane 12 from your favorite sub. You seem to be on a mission lately.

3 minutes ago, Franz007 said:

You are right; users must create their orthos. But many people are doing that and is not that difficult. It‘s free and only needs harddisk-space (cheap). You won‘t get the whole world but i think 90% of people fly around the same areas, for ex. the most in Europe and USA.

Technically, MSFS does also add orthos. They are being streamed and is very convenient i agree. But we could debate as this can be seen as default, since you need a good internet connection and have to download thousands of Gigabytes. As soon as the server has an issue you loose the ability to get these datas.

I am nitpicking but what i want to say is that for heavy-simmers, they will spend a few days installing their orthos. It will be worth for the hundreds of flights they will do. And so the big advantage of MSFS disappears, now that in XP12 the lighting is excellent and clouds partially also look very good (although they need some fine-tuning and have bugs). At the end there isn‘t really any big advantage of using MSFs, even more when knowing that XP does a few thinks already better (camera, replay, runway effects, runway-lights etc.).

I absolutely agree with your first two paragraphs. I have several TB of ortho myself. I dread the process of creating it though, and not because I find it difficult, but because it's stupid work. A machine should do it. XP does not do it, Oscar Pilote, the map provider and you/I do it. That's not a problem in itself, but it relieves the actual vendor of the task. Same goes for XEurope. I guess maintaining that is a lot of work Simheaven does.

LR don't do it and including something like XEurope would be absolutely feasible. They outsource the work to volunteers though and therefor should not be credited for it as is happening here.

The advantage of the other sim is that it relieves you of all these tasks and runs and looks different than XP12.

2 minutes ago, Baber20 said:

Uh yeah reddit screenshot of Xplane 12 from your favorite sub. You seem to be on a mission lately.

I am trying to say that , it still need a lot of work in terms of lighting. Even if it's an improvement over XP11, it's easy to hide all the things it does bad.  Like the example I gave you, I didn't take this. Someone else did.  It's just to show you that, yes under specific condition, XP12 will look great but it's far from being everywhere all of the time. If you want I can show you at night screenshot I took and you can see how one is still very much unchanged from XP11 compare to the competitor. We are here to talk about how realistic XP12 looks. 

Edited September 14, 20223 yr by fogboundturtle

14 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

No it doesn’t, it’s NOT just ortho. It’s also AI and autogen all placed together. I can go and whip a ortho together for my local area now and place it in XP12. The overlying autogen is still awful. 

I disagree. With X-Europe installed it looks quite similar. I am not talking about photogrammetry that i deactivated in MSFS (although having a high-end PC) but when talking about „awful“: the photogrammetry is such a mess when not flying very low right over the city: you see it building up from the distance, buildings popping up, some still melted down, a grey mass that is blurry and doesn’t look at all natural etc. Its really not an advantage in my eyes. Just a technical nice thing and nice to navigate over cities with a drone-camera (not really what i want to do in a flightsim). But i agree that if its what you like to do, there is no city in XP that looks as good as photogrammetry in MSFS.

Edited September 14, 20223 yr by Franz007

1 minute ago, Franz007 said:

I disagree. With X-Europe installed it looks quite similar. I am not talking about photogrammetry that i deactivated in MSFS (although having a high-end PC) but when talking about „awful“: the photogrammetry is such a mess when not flying very low right over the city: you see it building up from the distance, buildings popping up, some still melted down, a grey mass that is blurry snd doesn’t look at all natural etc. Its really not an advantage in my eyes. Just a technical nice thing and nice to navigate over cities with a drone-camera (not really what i want to do in a flightsim).

it doesn't at all. Not every remotely close but it's "good enough" for some Please don't try to compare , this is not even a fair fight and this will turn into another MSFS trolls are here to tell cause trouble. Please don't. You think Ortho is good enough for you...fine but don't even try to compare it to way the competition generate scenery because it is not.