Murmur

Interesting post as always, thanks Jan! :-) I think the easier thing to do would be to take out the RVR slider in the weather screen, and just leave the visibility slider. Otherwise, XP should translate the RVR value into a corresponding visibility factor depending on time of day, etc. On the other hand, METARs can report RVR values instead of visibility, so not having this automatic translation from reported RVR to effective visibility, could produce incorrect RVR values when fetching METARs from live weather. In any case, the problem explained by Paraffin seems to be present mainly for medium visibility values of a few miles.

In the dropbox link, in the upper right there should be a "download" button. Clicking there, it should put all the files in a .zip file and let you download it on your pc. Then you can extract it in a single folder and proceed with the rest of the instructions.

That's one of several irritating issues that are a symptom of insufficient quality in several aspects of X-Plane. Along with incorrect visibility distance, also incorrect ambient lighting at dusk/dawn comes to mind. And there are several others. Inaccuracies in the physics model, etc. XP does some things very well, but it's irritating that several basic features like these are not considered. For some aspects, it's almost like it still retains part of its "amateurish" stance from past versions. Several of its features seem to have been simply made to be "just good enough" since most people won't care, and not how they should have been done. This contrasts with other features of the sim that have been thought out and tackled in a much more professional manner, e.g. the new G1000, the scenery system, the airports gateway, etc. It is this lack of quality in a few basic aspects that sometimes is disheartening for people like me or Jcomm, whereas the competition usually has a more consistent quality across its various features (although this doesn't mean that they're perfect either, far from it!).

I have a fondness for GE engines. Even in the F16, the GE engines had less issues than the P&W's.

Nice! Wonderful lighting and sky. IMO, cloud colors near sunset could still be improved though. Do clouds spin when you are close to them?

Your question is quite generic, because each user has different priorities with regard to the sim features that are of interest for him. But in terms of features like ATC, AI, weather & season effects, I think P3D is still the most complete. Although there are addons for XP that address those areas, but you will still have a somewhat more complete "package" in P3D. Although as GCBraun said, XP11 is making great strides, and has its own strong points as well.

As Ryan said, the resolution of your desktop is probably higher than the one of your laptop, and the GPU struggles even more. In any case, most (or all?) integrated GPUs are below the recommended requirements for XP11. It's very probable that it's your bottleneck right now (8 GB should be enough for default scenery and min settings).

In the "Joystick & Equipment" screen, make sure the relevant axis is set to "throttle", not "throttle 1" or other functions.

Your laptop has a better graphic card than your PC.

Oh sorry, I missed that you are using X-Plane 10 and not X-Plane 11. xP 11 is much better, have you tried its demo instead of 10?

Try this: 1) In the initial XP screen, go to "Settings". 2) Go to the "Data Output" tab. 3) Check the first button ("Show in Cockpit") for the following 4 entries: "Weather", "Flight controls aileron/elevator/rudder", "Gear & brakes", "Engine thrust". 4) Now select a jet engine aircraft and start the takeoff roll, letting it veer. 5) Pause XP. 6) In the data output at the top right of the screen, check that the wind speed and direction is zero, that aileron, elevator, rudder and nosewheel deflection is zero, that lbrak and rbrak (left and right brakes) are at zero, and that the left and right engine thrust are the same.

Maybe FF simulate satellite position depending on date/time, and the accuracy of the GPS signal based on that. So it should naturally follow that if you skip time in XP, the simulated satellites skip position as well and the simulated nav system will be influenced as well.

I think default XP uses a somewhat different technique from FSX/P3D for cloud depiction. The latter uses a small number of very big sprites as "sheets" to form the cloud shape, whereas default XP uses a very large number of small sprites as "puffs" to form the cloud. For this reason, while both sims use 2D sprites, the rotation of the sprites is more noticeable in FSX/P3D, because you have a very large sprite with a well defined shape doing a very large rotation, while in XP you have small, less defined sprites doing "small" rotations. However, there are cloud mods for XP that increase the size of cloud sprites, producing better looking clouds, but also making more evident their rotations when changing the point of view. I don't have X-Enviro, but from past videos I watched, it seemingly uses big 2D sprites that rotate unrealistically in some situations. I don't know if the current version solved this issue.

AFS2 is still lacking many visual effects: .) Global lighting (necessitating deferred rendering); it doesn't even have landing lights; .) Water waves (and water reflections); .) Terrain self-shadowing; .) Atmospheric scattering. All of these effects remain active in XP even with all sliders to the left. Neverthless, IPACS did a wonderful job in maximizing the "visual return" in common flight situations, even if the rendering engine lacks those effects. All those limitations become more evident for example when the sun is low (no terrain shadowing), over water, at sunset/night (no lights), at high altitude (no scattering), etc. Now, my subjective opinion is that, even if IPACS would implement all of these effects, AFS2 would probably still have a performance advantage, because max performance has always been their first priority. It's just that the headroom it appears to have, is actually smaller than it seems, even if it's still probably there. Especially considering that the switch of XP to Vulkan should improve its performance.

LOL. Nice title. :-)