tonywob

Sure, if somebody could afford to pay for it :)

Thanks for this... just had a look and it looks fantastic and is also on sale currently

Whilst I don't personally like Adobe as a company (I hate subscriptions), Substance and Photoshop can save a lot of time and is why we now have developers producing some good content quickly (rather than in the old Sketchup days which was way more work and looked worse). As for directly baking inside Blender, there are plugins that'll do it automatically, but it's also relatively easy (Bake AO, Bake Diffuse, Bake Roughness (and then invert)). You are right that part is a manual process and baking metallic maps is something it doesn't support directly, but there are ways to do once you have a workflow established. The process is the same deal for MFS (and FSX, P3D). I can do both MFS and X-Plane textures easily these days from Blender/Substance, and have created scripts that can process and convert between them.

This was something I got working to some degree for the Orbx TrueEarth XP and World2XPlane (Used in Simheaven) sceneries. If the building was round and in an industrial zone, there was a high probability it was a tank. It worked pretty well, but also there were occasionally funny ones such as unusually shaped houses becoming oil tanks. Correction on this.. it doesn't replace anything. Blackshark.ai created an additional 3D layer that sits on top of Bing aerial imagery. In fact, Blackshark's tech is now being used outside of MFS and is no longer exclusive: These should look familiar to anyone used to MFS's autogen, and other developers can also use it (for a license fee of course).

Sadly, the last 2 products (I won't name them) that I bought through the X-Plane.org store have been bad quality, and I simply bought them to support the dev community rather than actually wanting the products initially (plus they were on sale). I have a feeling that many have simply lost interest in making anything groundbreaking, and we are currently in a no-win situation

In terms of scenery, the tools have got much easier and better over the year.s Creating PBR materials is mostly child's play these days using tools such as Substance Painter with the built-in library and user contributed materials. In the old days... creating textures often involved photoshop skills, lots of photographs etc, now the job is far easier. However, customers expect more, such as detailed interiors, animated passengers etc. Not only that, MFS (and XP12 to some extent) can make any subpar texturing look decent with AO and decent lighting. I believe the key for devs who want to make good money in either sim is to find an area where nobody is looking at (aka. a niche) and go from there, something available tools can't make easy. e.g. We are really lacking a decent traffic or ATC tool

I presume you mean this one: https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/49749-livetraffic/ as Peroni posted. It has a Mac version, and it's free so worth a shot just to test the waters.

I'm looking for some advice on AI Traffic addons for X-Plane 12 from people who have used or own them. I had a look on X-Plane.org and there seem to be 3 options, X-Life, Traffic-Global and WorldTraffic 3. TrafficGlobal is incredibly expensive, and WorldTraffic3 looks like development has stopped on it. I'm looking for something that will run on Mac OS M2 and Windows (they all seem to have Mac versions), but TrafficGlobal makes you buy it twice if you want it on Windows as well. In addition, I have some questions: 1) Do these programs expect you to manually create routes/AI, or can it just work by itself in the background without needing to set anything up before each flight? I used to have a product like this for FSX years ago that just worked magically in the background and spawned in the correct planes, etc. 2) Do they work with the default ATC? (i.e. Does the default ATC talk to the generated traffic). I know the default ATC is pretty bad, but hopefully I can actually hear the AI traffic being directed. 3) Do they add general aviation traffic to non-towered airports? This one is important to me, I'd love to see GA and VFR traffic being spawned as well. Any help would be appreciated, thanks :)

Exactly my thoughts. Imagine you are looking for a nice little rural airfield to purchase in Washington State, and upon opening the store are met with a plethora of airfields from various developers (some old-timers and various new developers, with various ratings 4-5 stars), a few have even created the same airport. Not only that, there are also free versions of the same airports on sites such as flightsim.to. This is market saturation, despite the fact that MFS has more customers, there is also way more choice, meaning unless developers are really spending effort on marketing their products, it's harder to get the sales, especially if the developer isn't a well-known one. Competition is good for the consumer, with developers trying to make their products stand out (interiors, animated people, etc), but it also costs way more to make. I have.. in my own experience, abandoned a MFS project I was developing because someone simply beat me to it and made a decent freeware version. It would not have been profitable trying to finish it with the demands of payware these days, and I accept I was too slow. Just because there are more potential customers does not always mean guaranteed more sales, especially if there is a lot of choice for the customers. I do believe that if someone really made a high-quality product for X-Plane (Aircraft or Scenery), they'd do well from it, but it would have to target a niche that people really want (MisterX comes to mind with his plans), or high-quality aircraft such as the TBM-900.

Yep, this is what I noticed in the store, e.g recently Inibuilds announcing Leeds-Bradford airport when there is also a version by Orbx, and there are numerous other examples. If people already own an airport, why would they buy it again unless there was something really wrong with the old version or it was really out of date?. In addition, there is some very high quality freeware also competing with payware (and sometimes it's even better). I'm not convinced the scenery market is the goldmine it once was in MFS (Although I don't think it ever was a goldmine). People now want interiors modelling, animated people etc, but the prices remain the same :/

Not just complex aircraft, some simple 3rd party GA aircraft have really high resolution textures that seem to destroy frame-rate as well. Lucky a few offer options to lower the resolution, or it can be done yourself.

This is how I basically got into X-Plane. I downloaded it on my phone as a game.. and eventually got it for my Mac.. Was the same with FS2000 years ago, got it after I tried combat flight sim

Possibly... I don't really buy addons these days for MFS unless it's something really good, but I do follow new releases and look at the products on the store, and absolutely nothing I find makes we want to buy it. A lot of it seems overpriced, and lacking any sort of quality or attention to detail that I used to find earlier on. If there are good small developers out there, they're being buried amongst the rubbish on the store, and this is pretty sad. However, if what you say is true (and I'll take your word for it since you use the sim more than I do), then this is somewhat what I'm saying about "standing-out"... if there are higher quality smaller devs out there, then they're not being promoted or shown very well to customers amongst the absolute mass of low-quality products being pushed out. I don't want to name or shame, but in a recent release I was looking at from a big developer, I was really unimpressed how bland everything looked, very generic and low quality. The lack of quality is by no means anything new, I have the same problem finding anything decent on X-Plane either.

It's certainly nice to see... and despite the constant "final nail-in-the-coffin" remarks, it's still here and not going anywhere. I'd just love to see the same interest we saw a few years ago, especially from 3rd parties. That being said.. there is now so much competition on MFS that only the really big well-known developers are standing out and quality IMO is slipping.

On top of Autoortho, you can also use https://simheaven.com/ for free... This will add 3D buildings, roads, trees etc for large parts of the world that sit on top of orthos and can look very good

You'll have to tell me more about this. XP11 scenery should mostly just work in XP12 apart from the water, seasons and some other items. I've updated TrueEarth GB to X-Plane 12 which is in beta testing at the moment. I've never heard about a mesh not being recognised at all, so if you have examples, please let me know. thanks

I agree with this... the X-Plane.org store is in a pretty sorry state these days, with not much being released and updates to XP12 on older products taking months if ever to come out. There is no denying that a lot of devs have simply moved to MFS. X-Plane is crying out for quality developers, but many are clearly going to where the users are (Especially with scenery dev) The results themselves are interesting, it's positive seeing some growth in X-Plane users, but I also wonder how many of those on X-Plane are from users who aren't running Windows, it looks similar to figures you see for Mac vs Windows surveys. (Maybe this was in the survey already and I missed it)

You could create your own ortho tile using Ortho4XP, this will probably do a better job than the default scenery on smoothing things out Other than that, there aren't really many higher detailed options for Portugal (I think UHD Spain have an ortho/mesh that covers the Iberican peninsular, so maybe that is worth a try) https://www.spainuhd.es/p/descarga.html Edit: Just checked SpainUHD.. it's pretty broken in XP12 sorry

I'm not into airliners and prefer small GA aircraft and short VFR flights: My current fleet that I enjoy using: Thranda C337 Skymaster JustFlight PA28 (the three different variants) Vskylab's Icon A5 (Slow, but fun aircraft to fly) The default Cessna 172 (Honestly, it looks and functions great) Thranda U206G Stationair Would love to see more smaller aircraft created for X-Plane 12 and some decent helicopters, but sadly things have slowed down or vanished at this point

I use it for my job mostly, I work with large datasets etc, so it comes in useful and makes a big difference

I also have an Asus gaming laptop with a 3080, and it does indeed get much hotter than the Macbook Pro and the Macbook also outperforms it with X-Plane. The biggest problem with my Macbook Pro by far is simply that there are very few decent games for it, and those that do work tend to be poorly done ports or running under Rosetta. There is a lot of power to use in these devices, but nothing really (games wise) to use on them :(

Like GoranM, I run XP12 on a Macbook Pro, M2 Max with 96GB. Have no problems with performance, even in densely populated areas However, the laptop was not cheap, so I'd expect it to work well :-)

Well, it's opensource, so you can read the source code and see it's not doing anything suspicious.. but it looks like it connects to the sim and changes the LOD settings for objects directly loaded in memory, similar to trainers used in certain games to cheat. A rather extreme approach, and not one I want to try, but interesting none-the-less

Absolutely superb and atmospheric

A few quick shots of a supposed VFR flight I did flying from Kołobrzeg (North-West poland on the coast) to świebodzice in the South on the Czech border. The weather started out pretty nice with a slight breeze, clear skies and pretty pleasant: ..but things started to cloud over and get bumpy heading south 30 minutes later, I started to descend just before the cloud cover and visibility degraded fast and the terrain started to rise up: ...and safely on the ground just in time.. wondering why I didn't check the weather before I left :)