Longranger

To be a bit more prcise: The Reality Expansion packs replace the X-Plane engine logic. So you have to prime the engine if necessary, watch the temprature and pressure. You have to do an outside inspection before the flight. It replaces the aerdynamic model and enhances the flight characteristics. Sound effects are improved. They actively support their own headshake plug-in (freeware). They give warnings and advisories about the plane. In general they become a totally different plane. As an example the Car. Bonanza F33 and V35 have more or less the same charateristic. But eqip them with their REP plug-ins you see that the tail of the V35 isn´t as stable as the tail of the F33 9if the wind comes from the side. And you learn why many owners of this plane have equiped them with wing tip fuel tanks. It improves the stability.

10.50 is in the release candidate state. Since you are buying the DVD Version: Simply Download the latest installers/updaters from http://www.x-plane.com/downloads/x-plane_10_installer-updater/ to install X-Plane on your computer simply make a new directory on a drive like F:/X-Plane 10 and simply tell the installer to install in this directory. When you start X-Plane it automatically looks for updates and installs them. I simply started with X-Plane 10.03 andf from then on it simply updated without any major problems by itself. How often did I completly install/reinstall P3D? 7 or 8 times.

Well, there is no F35, but the Carenado V35 works great together with the V35 REP plugin under 10.45 and 10.50.

As long as you don´t know the area, yes. Then they get a pretty good general impression. If you know the area the normal reaction is Nope. It doesn´t fit.

The streets have a totally different layout generation. X-Plane only knows several anchor points and the type of road that is has to use. Then it looks into the mesh and tries to place a believable road ontpo the mesh, that connects these anchor points . It even has to decide on its own when to put a bridge into the terrain. Only after the roads have been placed the autogen can start and try to place objects between these roads. Among these objects the street lights.

Well, Lets look into what Dan Klaue and his Team has to do to convert a FSX-plane: They take the original 3D models, the textures ahnd the sound recordings of the FSX plane. Then they have to modify the 3D models. In FSX you have an inerior model and an exterior model. X-Plane on the other hand has one 3D model that contains the whole plane. After this is done they have to genrate a new plane in PlaneMaker. There they have to put the 3D model together with an aerodynamic model of the plane. They have to add the engine, its profiles, the basic controls, the instruments and so on. Then they add a number of plug-ins. This is they reason why X-Plane Carenados always behave differently to their FSX predecessors. They are new planes with the X-Plane default engine, their own aerodynamik model and several plug-ins that improve the flight model and add new features. And what does simCoders do? They add a few of their own models that replace parts of the default logic of X-Plane. Then they replace the aerodynamic model, add additional sound effects and replace the sound logic of the Carenado planes. So even Carenado can´t really say how the new enhanced plane behaves. And now tell me how anyoune should convert parts of these enhancements back into the FSX? It would be more or less a rewrite of the internal flight model in FSX. There is no way to directly convert a plane from FSX to X-Plane or vise versa. It is more or less a total exchange of the flight model.

ddenn said it might be possible but he is concentrating on aircrafts right now. He doesn´t think that scenery objects would gain so much from this plug-in.

Another big difference between the two sims is the amount of free heigh quality addons. If you want to start with P3D now it will probably become very expensive. The biggest advantage that P3D has/had that it was rather easy to reuse old FSX add-ons in P3D. But it starts to feel the pain of this decision, so I wouldn´t be surprised if this changes in P3D v4. Another big difference is the run time of each major version. When you bought X-Plane 10 in 2012 (a totally different looking program without 64 Bit support..) this version is still totally fine. With the update installer from the Laminar website it will simply update to 10.45 at the moment, in a few weeks to 10.50. And it will probably be 1 or 2 years till we see X-Plane 11. In the meantime you would have bought P3D v1, v2, v3 and often a complete reinstall of P3D. On the other hand P3D and FSX:SE still have much better AI traffic, although you wont use it if you are using IVAO, VATSIM or PilotEdge. I wouldn´t start with FSX:SE now since I expect that its activity will significantly drop when Dovetail has its own simulator running.

Well, I think fully functional isn´t really realistic at the moment.

You are wrong. At frirst many things in X-Plane look and feel weird, when you are coming from FSX/FS9. It taikes some time till you get used to the differences. When you have a few flight hours under your belt, things will improve gradually. When I mdae the jump (right after the release of X-Plane 10) I had real trouble to get used to the different keys and commands. Today I really have to wonder why I ever thought that the FSX keys and commands were logical..

Hmm, let me guess: You are using a 10.50 beta? This is a bug in the current beta.

That´s a well known problem. At the moment settings like Flaps don´t have a Nullzone, so it normally you can´t assign an axis to such values. I haven´t checked in the current beta, but as far as I know this bug is still open.

Vulcan and DX 12 are on a totally different level. They are responsible for the event handling and how to reach the GPU. PBR is simply a different kind of shader. For Vulkan, DX12 and OpenGL this is simply a different payload.

Hmm, for me SMP , the Real Weather Connector and FSGRW now work fine with the beta 4. Even the new 727 v2 now works in the beta. And RTH is broken by design. Since they are using Art controls that are only for internal purposes, they can´t complain if X-Plane changes some art controls.

Well according to some statements RTH will probably have to be rewritten anyway. The rendering was changed significantly so the Art Controls, that you SHOULDN´T use have changed. But RTH is based on the use of these Art Controls.