Request Comparison shots from MSFS & XP12?

[kananesgi 6]

31 minutes ago, ryanbatc said:

Pretty well actually - with medium settings you can do fine and the looks are decent.

Trying it now. Just realized I can sort of get a demo of MSFS via Xbox Game Pass. Probably won't be done downloading until tomorrow or Thursday (my internet sucks), but we'll see how it goes. If it goes well, I'll probably use the Game Pass discount to get the deluxe edition this weekend.

[ryanbatc 13,026]

8 minutes ago, kananesgi said:

Trying it now. Just realized I can sort of get a demo of MSFS via Xbox Game Pass. Probably won't be done downloading until tomorrow or Thursday (my internet sucks), but we'll see how it goes. If it goes well, I'll probably use the Game Pass discount to get the deluxe edition this weekend.

What speed do you have for down?  Since MSFS is streaming that could be an issue if it's really slow.  I think a connect of 100 mbps is just fine.  40 or so is probably min.

[spearmint_flyer 579]

On 11/20/2022 at 5:39 PM, kananesgi said:

Honestly, they both look good here, but this is what I was trying to avoid. Shots like these are all I ever find, and I have no idea what this place looks like in reality, and it's a popular photo spot, so of course they are going to spend extra time making it look great. I want to see just basic scenery that a VFR pilot flies over every day, the mundane small town in Oklahoma or Texas or Kansas. Things that the devs aren't trying to showcase, and see how good those things look. 

ryanbatc hit it on the head with his shots, and now I see that MSFS might just be living up to the hype, at least in the scenery department.

I mean, okay I guess. I would have thought seeing what “the best and more attention to detail they put in” would be a good comparison. From my perspective the Gibraltar at XP12 looks pretty bad imo compared to MSFS. But, I got ya. 

[kananesgi 6]

ugh, leave it to one of the biggest tech companies in the world to have the slowest servers imaginable. It's probably not going to be playable for me. I've downloaded larger games than this from Steam and GOG and got the download done in a few hours. This is going to take days. Heck, the XP12 demo was about half this size and it downloaded in less than an hour. I normally get download speeds here between 20-40 Mbits, but this is downloading at between 0.6-1.5 Mbits, with random moments at the lightning speed of 2.5 Mbps. Atrocious!

I'll try taking the computer down the road to get a better signal this afternoon, but depending on how much of the sim is streamed, this is a bad joke.

[kananesgi 6]

19 hours ago, spearmint_flyer said:

I mean, okay I guess. I would have thought seeing what “the best and more attention to detail they put in” would be a good comparison. From my perspective the Gibraltar at XP12 looks pretty bad imo compared to MSFS. But, I got ya. 

Yes, there is a method to that thought. Seeing the best they can do is impressive, but what I'm more interested in is what the software is able to do with the areas that they aren't concerned with making look the best. In other words, what is the typical "autogen" scenery look like, since that is what you see 99.9% of the time (or at least what I see, since I don't fly around LA, New York, Gibraltar, etc, very often.)

[kananesgi 6]

Well, I gave up. The internal downloader in MSFS is a joke. I took the computer down to the cell tower, sitting about a quarter mile away. At that location I get 250+ Mbps download speeds. MSFS was downloading at 15-20 Mbps. Sat there for an hour and barely managed to clear 1Gb download. As a test, I loaded Steam and downloaded ARK: Survival Evolved, which is a 50Gb download (170Gb of disk needed, though), and had it done in ten minutes. Obviously MSFS is not going to be usable, so I'll just stick with XP12. I think it's the superior sim in every respect except the world modeling, so I'm fine with that. 

[Steve Dra 7,605]

9 hours ago, kananesgi said:

Well, I gave up. The internal downloader in MSFS is a joke. I took the computer down to the cell tower, sitting about a quarter mile away. At that location I get 250+ Mbps download speeds. MSFS was downloading at 15-20 Mbps. Sat there for an hour and barely managed to clear 1Gb download. As a test, I loaded Steam and downloaded ARK: Survival Evolved, which is a 50Gb download (170Gb of disk needed, though), and had it done in ten minutes. Obviously MSFS is not going to be usable, so I'll just stick with XP12. I think it's the superior sim in every respect except the world modeling, so I'm fine with that. 

Its a shame that you can't get a good download speed to try out MSFS.  Yeah their servers are particularly having issues since SU11, but generally when it's not a big update day (or day after)...the servers are mostly ok.

Since you stated you like to fly VFR and navigate by landmarks..."From what I've been told by others, MSFS might actually have the ability to generate somewhat accurate representations of random buildings, more-so than previous auto-gen stuff that usually didn't resemble reality in the slightest, beyond being a building (and even that sometimes doesn't jive)."

Well....it doesn't get quite more accurate representations than seeing the house you grew up in...and you're best friend's house and the pool in his backyard where we'd spend summers swimming all day!

I navigated here using roads from KORL which was the nearest airfield from my childhood home...following roads I drove on many times. (mind you I lived here in the late 70s...so trying to remember where it was took a bit...but thanks to the amazing detail in MSFS, I was able to recognize old landmarks I did remember, even all these years (decades) later!

MSFS is hands down built for the kind of flying you want to do...and this is out of the box....no endless gigabytes of "ortho" downloads to configure and maintain.  In XP (I don't have it)...I'm sure out of the box, would be a few random roads and a couple of random boxes representing houses. 🤔

Oh..and since I've lived in many places in the world thanks to my Dad being in the Navy, then I as well....here is the Drive-in theater I used to go to as a young teen at the Navy base in Rota, Spain....yep...I was there in 1974-77, but I was able to find it in MSFS...and its EXACTLY how I remember!

And when I when to the 2019 Flightsim Expo in Orlando...here s where it was....out-of-the-box scenery in MSFS...my room faced Sea World. 🙂 

Edit:  Forgot this pic....this is what I used to Navigate to my childhood home...from KORL...went straight up Highway 50 (off my left wingtip), and I did remember Lake Downey was a perfect circle (pretty easy to see a round lake navigating VFR, lol)...and I lived off Dean road. That intersection of 50 and Dean is just under the lake, and I lived to the right of the pic, off screen.  I played Little League Baseball at those fields off the C-172's nose. 🙂 

 

 

 

 

Edited November 24, 2022 by Steve Dra

[kananesgi 6]

Yep, I'm betting I could do the same with some of the places I've lived or visited. I admit, MS has outdone themselves on the world side of the sim. I've heard some complaints regarding the flight physics not being as realistic, but I could overlook those as the type of flying I do is generally modeled well enough. Unfortunately, I'll likely never be able to run it since it's not possible to get true high speed internet out here where I live, and it's not likely to be possible (affordably so, at least) anytime soon.

From what I experienced, even with the near gigabit cable service I had before I finally left that awful city life, the sim would still struggle to run. However, I guess they royally messed something up with the SU11 rollout as I've read a number of complaints about terrible download speeds since then. I've also read plenty of complaints from before that, though, so I think it's just MS (I'm not a fan of MS, if you haven't been able to tell already).

[MrBitstFlyer 3,896]

On 11/20/2022 at 10:27 PM, pmb said:

This looks great (as all scenes from SamScene3D do), but I feel the only fair comparison would be between naked simulators, as @ryanbatc suggests.

Kind regards, Michael

Personally I wouldn't think that fair as MSFS will look better in a lot of cases because it has ortho by default.  I have a lot of Ortho for X-Plane 12 which is higher quality than MSFS default (and indeed higher quality than the google map addon). A potential flight sim user should be able to see what the possibilities are.  If they decide they want worldwide ortho out the box, they can use MSFS.

[MrBitstFlyer 3,896]

On 11/24/2022 at 12:50 PM, Steve Dra said:

I'm sure out of the box, would be a few random roads and a couple of random boxes representing houses. 

You are very wrong with that assumption. Granted there are addons to add more autogen buildings - X-World contains 1.5 billion building footprints, including those from MSFS itself.  As far as roads are concerned, X-Plane 12 has every road. I prefer to use ortho with the autogen roads turned off, so I see the roads as I would from the air.

If a simmer wants worldwide ortho out the box, I would certainly recommend MSFS.  However, for those that don't mind downloading ortho for X-Plane 12 you get three major advantages...

1. No download issues while flying,  because you have it local.
2. You get to choose the quality of the ortho by selecting zoom levels. I use ZL17 everywhere with ZL18 around airports - much better quality than MSFS in most areas.
3. No problems with different shades on the ground as each ortho tile can mix scenery from different providers.

In my case I love both simulators and use both, and I don't feel the need to use only one sim and poke fun at the other.  Here are som shots from X-Plane 12 - as you can see it is worth a bit of effort.

 

[pmb 5,138]

13 minutes ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

Personally I wouldn't think that fair as MSFS will look better in a lot of cases because it has ortho by default.  I have a lot of Ortho for X-Plane 12 which is higher quality than MSFS default (and indeed higher quality than the google map addon). A potential flight sim user should be able to see what the possibilities are.  If they decide they want worldwide ortho out the box, they can use MSFS.

I've done this for X-Plane (and AeroflyFS, and even a few for Prepar3d), but I never made friends with the process. I don't so much speak about storage space which is cheap those days, but the process is tedious, needs quite a lot of experience to get it really right and the time subtracts from flying. Even if it runs in the background, I was tempted to look now and then if it actually progresses or needs intervention.

Moreover, I never got the ideal correspondence between ground imagery and structures above (autogen, or whater you call it) being based on the fact both have been basically created out of the same source in MSFS. Notably in AeroflyFS2 with its limited Cultivation, and to a lesser extent in XP the autogen always revelaed being superimposed on imagery.

I say this from the perspective of a pure VFR and sightseeing pilot. Pure airliner Captains may feel this point less significant.

Kind regards, Michael

[MrBitstFlyer 3,896]

4 minutes ago, pmb said:

I've done this for X-Plane (and AeroflyFS, and even a few for Prepar3d), but I never made friends with the process. I don't so much speak about storage space which is cheap those days, but the process is tedious, needs quite a lot of experience to get it really right and the time subtracts from flying. Even if it runs in the background, I was tempted to look now and then if it actually progresses or needs intervention.

Moreover, I never got the ideal correspondence between ground imagery and structures above (autogen, or whater you call it) being based on the fact both have been basically created out of the same source in MSFS. Notably in AeroflyFS2 with its limited Cultivation, and to a lesser extent in XP the autogen always revelaed being superimposed on imagery.

I say this from the perspective of a pure VFR and sightseeing pilot. Pure airliner Captains may feel this point less significant.

Kind regards, Michael

I don't find the process tedious, or lose flying time,  because I download the ortho while I'm asleep or doing something else🙂.  I did find Ortho4XP daunting at first, but didn't take long to understand its features.  This is the choice somebody can make - use MSFS and get ortho out the box or use XP12 and download higher quality ortho for those places you mostly fly.  I have the whole of the USA and Europe where I fly all the time.  I can always load up MSFS if I want to fly a random flight elsewhere.

As far as the correspondence between ortho and structures is concerned, I would agree X-Plane 11 and early beta versions of XP12 weren't good in this respect. The buildings would appear to float over the ortho.  XP12 beta 14 has added some really nice ambient occlusion to the structures so they appear connected to the ground now.

I am mostly GA like yourself.  I did some airliner flying in MSFS, but the ortho quality is so good in XP12 I do all my GA flying in it.

[MrBitstFlyer 3,896]

On 11/20/2022 at 11:34 PM, kananesgi said:

I can recognize and pick out a number of structures in the MSFS shots, while the XP12 shots are missing massive landmarks (like "where's the racetrack", lol)

SimHeaven adds 1.5 billion building footprints, including those from MSFS, for free!  Ortho scenery and Simheaven are both free products and transforms XP12 into a sim that can easily match MSFS.  However, if you like photogrammetry, then clearly MSFS is the way to go.  I personally hate photogrammetry so XP12 with some tweaking gives me a great sim for GA flying.

[kananesgi 6]

6 hours ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

SimHeaven adds 1.5 billion building footprints, including those from MSFS, for free!  Ortho scenery and Simheaven are both free products and transforms XP12 into a sim that can easily match MSFS.  However, if you like photogrammetry, then clearly MSFS is the way to go.  I personally hate photogrammetry so XP12 with some tweaking gives me a great sim for GA flying.

Honestly, I'm unsure what the difference is between photogrammetry and ortho. I've used plenty of ortho sceneries in the past, though I haven't delved into it for XP11 yet (looking into it now, since I don't have XP12 yet). Photogrammetry isn't something I'm familiar with.

I'm currently downloading Ortho4XP, SimHeaven X-America and VFR-Landmarks, and thinking about the alpilotx HD mesh. First, do I need all of those or is there overlap here (I think simHeaven said something about including a mesh). Also, can you tell me if any of these are compatible with XP12 when I upgrade to it, or will I have to download them all over again (they are pretty dang big downloads).

[MrBitstFlyer 3,896]

1 hour ago, kananesgi said:

Honestly, I'm unsure what the difference is between photogrammetry and ortho. I've used plenty of ortho sceneries in the past, though I haven't delved into it for XP11 yet (looking into it now, since I don't have XP12 yet). Photogrammetry isn't something I'm familiar with.

I'm currently downloading Ortho4XP, SimHeaven X-America and VFR-Landmarks, and thinking about the alpilotx HD mesh. First, do I need all of those or is there overlap here (I think simHeaven said something about including a mesh). Also, can you tell me if any of these are compatible with XP12 when I upgrade to it, or will I have to download them all over again (they are pretty dang big downloads).

You don't need the mesh as that is included with ortho4xp - you get to choose the complexity of the mesh.  Ortho is X-Plane speak for satellite scenery, where photogrammetry is a technique for displaying photo real buildings in MSFS (autogen in X-Plane).

SimHeaven will give you much more autogen and trees than default X-Plane. To sum up...

1.  Ortho4XP - ortho (satellite scenery) and mesh.
2.  SimHeaven for expanded autogen buildings