It has been a while since I last visited ELITE's site, but as of today it revealed an interesting information regarding their 3D Scenery & Custom Airports offers, namely for LM P3d and X-Plane sims.

"ELITE brings a new level of environment customization for your Lockheed Martin P3D or X-plane sim."

Scenery & Visual Systems – ELITE Simulation Solutions

These visual systems allow their simulators to be run with external visuals provided by P3d or X-Plane.

I was a long time user of ELITE, and while I regret they've given up on their desktop line of simulators, just as ALSIM did too, it's always good to know they're still active and quite alive!, and I'm glad that they've added X-Plane to their Visuals offers, which certainly also means a lot to this platform.

Edited August 8, 2025Aug 8 by jcomm

I'm interested to know, what does this provide rather than just using the sim directly? Is the 2D cockpit it shows that much more accurate?

1 hour ago, tonywob said:

I'm interested to know, what does this provide rather than just using the sim directly? Is the 2D cockpit it shows that much more accurate?

Well, I've been away from ELITE for a while now. Last version I beta tested was 9 desktop, and they even had a in-house scenery engine, but eventually gave up in it because they had to concentrate their efforts in other more importante areas.

ELITE is a table based simulator, gathering it's data from the aircraft manufacturers, systems performance from their rw counerparts, etc, so, although it might look "pre-historic" in the desktop versions with their 2d panels and very basic scenery, unless one used P3D for the scenery, the FNPT versions with full cockpit mockups and visual systems are very realistic, as I was given the chance to try once. 

The aircraft performance is also very accurate, the use of properly damped and with force feedback controllers really makes controlling the aircraft very true to real, so, they use P3D, and now also X-Plane AFAICT, for the visuals only, and rely on their own solutions for the flight dynamics and systems modeling.