Gulfstream

This is a very important distinction and other simulators make sure to get correct, 100% of the time. Understandbly when your customers include professional training. It's not enough to feel convincing, you need to make sure you have the "runway environment in sight" at precise distances if you are going to toss it in front of professional pilots for training, even as simply the visuals. That final visible strobe on the "rabbit" better be visible only when it's supposed to be. I'm sure the teams behind these various simulators (who intend to market to this demogrpahic) have this in mind while they read us rant about "billboard clouds" what whatnot. MSFS is missing a lot of the upper atmoshpehere. Lacking? Yes and you can tell. Critical? Not exactly.

I'm jumping in here to say ... sorry, but this is nuts. The "current state" is so mind-bogglingly beyond what we had with REX and 2D billboards it's almost difficult to explain to a non-programmer what we're talking about here. I'm a real life CP/ME/IA who has found himself a senior software engineer. This stuff blows my mind at how complex it is. And it's not just about "bragging rights". It feels right when you fly through it. That's all that matters, right? Hats off to Asobo for the current state of what we have and we're only going up from here!

Fascinating how trees can play such a visual role. In the early days of MSFS (and for some, currently) it was "the trees are way too big!". In XP12 it's apprently "the trees are way too small!". Watch ... they'll tweak this, and the next round of complaints will start.

This is silly. I'm a US/CPMEL and I am very familiar with all of the operations you list above, in the real world. That sounds like a VFR flight to me, which means looking out the window. You can't fly VFR without "looking at the ground much". If you are launching 0/0 and doing a CAT-III inbound with a follow-me truck, then perhaps you can disregard the outside visuals.

Got it.

This simply isn't true ... absolutely none of this will happen (and you can mark my words). There will be no X-Plane on consoles, and the Steam Deck is far from "dominating" any market. I can only assume you are paid for this, and I don't like to call people out like that. But you're either paid or this is not logical.

Keep in mind XBox has been a large market for driving the flight simluation peripherial recovery. Believe it or not, it's "just a computer", not unlike your own. Hook up a USB-3 keyboard, mouse, radio stack and yoke and you are off on your next adventure.

If that figure is remotely accurate it only strengthens my opionion they needed to "dev up". Am I insane for thinking it was higher at one point than $9.99? I paid at least that much on iOS so we're talking (does some maths and averages) ... oh I don't know that'd be somewhere around $200 million. At $0.99 that's $20 million. And that can get you a lot of developers.

This post is so spot on I don't have much to add. LR and X-Plane had an unbelievable market opportunity when MS dropped out of the game, and they clearly made a lot of money. But it seems they didn't scale out the dev staff enough during the lull to push this to where it needed to be in ~2020, and may have remained too tightly focused on "who needs visuals we simulate airplanes". And then when MS re-joined the party with a modern AAA graphics engine, they were left staring into the potential abyss. Note I wish them all the best, I've been a customer since well before XP11 ... I am just discussing the current state of flight simulation. I doubt the Linux/Mac userbase is enough, I have no idea about mobile. They clearly have some very talented developers on the team. They seem to have been able to properly implement the realistic lighting overhaul (which looks quite good), Metal/Vulkan, 3D clouds, etc etc. But just not enough (visually) to compete with the massive programming force that is the team behind MSFS. Obviously MSFS took some ideas that were strong selling points for X-Plane and just ran with them now.

Very interesting video, thanks. This gives a glimpse into how much more is going on than whether or not we have transparent coastlines in the simulator. It's a complex beast for such a relatively small team.

Just pointing out that using the dollar sign in the Microsoft shorthand is a little childish. Personally I don't use either simulator but I've been simming since FS1 so I just stop by occasionally to see what's going on.

The staged screenshots do look good but the question is really going to be, what does this look like in motion? I have the feeling that you have access to the XP12 betas so you may know one thing that Laminar so far has suspiciously avoided showing, which is what the ground scenery looks like compared to XP11. I know Austin said in the video he "hates the roads" in XP11, I wonder what has been done here for XP12. The same goes for the OSM scenery, the water colors, the way the new clouds interact with terrain, whether or not there is any blending between snowy areas and areas without, etc etc etc. That's where the rubber meets the road and we still aren't being shown what any of that looks like in the actual simulator.

You also have to consider the age of the code base that X-Plane is dealing with. Can you imagine the millions of lines of old code that still have to be compatible with all the third-party plugins, etc? Microsoft had the advantage of being able to start greenfield and create an engine that used the bleeding-edge latest technologies. I still can't believe they are using WASM/JS for gauges/etc. WASM was in its infancy when the project was started. Yes, X-Plane can do it, as we can see now with volumetric clouds, correct lighting and GPU trees. So some stuff did stagnate, just because they got a bit too complacent and have to run to catch up now. Can they do it well with the existing code base? I have no idea.

It will be impossible for X-Plane to compete with MSFS with regards to ground scenery, I think that debate is fairly settled and unless they also bring in real-time satellite streaming from a provider like Google, there is no way to compete. They can use incredibly accurate terrain mesh and perfectly placed buildings using the latest OSM data and it still won't be able to compete. You'd have to add ortho on top of that and even then it's a tough sell. I just hope they can improve things like the roads, the building types, and other things still under their control. If they want to aim for the "professional" market I agree it's probably fine to just do your best with what you can (OSM, etc) and leave the beautiful fancy stuff to MSFS and a consumer market. People can complain about "melted" buildings and other issues with MSFS's photogrammetry but we don't fly at 50 feet generally (yes, I know, helicopters etc), and at even lower altitudes MSFS can look simply stunning. I've flown flights where it is almost indistinguishable from what I see outside my window on real flights. And the photogrammetry can be turned off if you need to do low-level flying without seeing such artifacts. I don't think X-Plane should be striving for that. Just get us to the "next level up" from where XP11 is currently at.

And if there is any wind at all pushing you off these courses, none of this will work and you will be hopelessly lost. That's why nobody flies MVFR like this.

You love to rib on Blackshark AI, but do you understand what this technology actually does? You post about your auto-removal of clouds in satellite imagery for XP ... that is what Blackshark AI does. But it does it for the entire globe automatically. Extrudes buildings from satellite footprints. Removes clouds. Places trees. I'm sure you know this ... you find that technology joke worthy? I find it insanely impressive. It's not the melted buildings in phtogrammetry ... it's "this is a tree", "this is a building", "we should remove this cloud".

Come on now. This technology now gets us "study level" airliners, with fully three-dimensional cockpits with every switch and screen working ... all of this over accurate terrain depiction. Wasn't this once the "holy grail" of flight simulation? Well, now you have it.

I was curious how a 2 hour old post got up to 6 pages already. Now it all makes sense.

For the context menus (unverified): https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-11-context-menu-fix-right-click/

This is precisely why competition is good. They are even doing a development snapshot and that has never happened before.

I got my US CPL 20 years ago so I still appreciate these more analogue aircraft. I am very much looking forward to this. I would love a proper DC-10.

One of the most difficult technical challenges for the team with regard to snow coverage is going to be transition zones between snow coverage and no snow coverage. It's one thing to swap out ground and tree textures across an area for the "snow covered" versions to get it to blend in with the new runway textures. It's another deal all together to get the transitions between snow coverage and no snow coverage looking realistic, keeping in mind you have to take in elevation into account. Mountains can have snow coverage above a certain elevation, the lower slopes do not. In really advanced scenarios it has to take into account the actual weather engine, where it is currently heavily snowing and where a front hasn't passed through. This is a difficult challenge. Pardon me for an image from the "other sim" but it illustrates what I'm talking about. Not even this is not perfect, with snow on the roads and not in the fields in the transition zone but it gets towards "reasonably close".

It's unfair on this forum we can't disagree without getting our posts locked or the thread closed. I tried to do point/counterpoint. But at this point I'm convinced people are either on the take or are actually just Austin in disguise. I am out on this particular thread. I wish both platforms the best.

My comments were relevant to X-Plane in the sense that it is so (finally, after 30 years) enjoyable to be able to just boot up a simulator, go into VR, and click a button. And it just works. X-Plane is good for the tinkerers, but I've personally spent who knows how many hours of my life fiddling with configuration flies, overlay priorities, sky modifiers, windshield rain, realistic pilot head movements, making my own ortho, everything. Flight simulation was why I became a commercial pilot in the first place. It's nice to be able to jump and and go for it where the default, out of the box experience is impressive enough. It's topical, because this is something that X-Plane can strive towards. They were first in VR, if they can get a base simulator that doesn't require tweaking all these knobs to get what you want, that'd be a big step in the right direction. Of course, for those want to do all this, the power is available to them.

I am seriously not here to get into simulator comparisons, all I can say on this is I bought the Oculus Quest 2 and recently (thanks to your posts) tried it out, but I tried it it out in MSFS. Totally usable out-of-the-box on a 1660TI laptop card in VR. It does reduce the graphical settings to match the hardware but I had to do ZERO tweaking, ZERO addons and I got a photorealistic world in VR. That's a problem for X-Plane.