adamjedgar

Forget this question for now

i found the only way i could get prepa3d to run on windows 8 was to have it already installed on win 7 first then upgrade the operating system to win 8. a clean install on win 8 O/S refused to function for me!

i habe all 3 ...fsx,prepar3d and x-plane. at this stage i would absolutely say x-plane is defintely not their yet. as for its "the most realistic simulator" yarn...get into the nitty gritty of its planemaker design software and you suddenly realise it has huge limitations that in fact make x-plane very unrealistic. its AI is nothing more than random flight pths that dont actually go anywhere (aircraft do not follow timetabled routes like in fsx and prepar3d), AI is restricted to 20 max aircraft, scenery accuracy in x-plane 10 is absolutely crap by comparison to even fsx(which is old as the hills) x-planes flight model completely ignores external objects that create drag on the aircraft, such as external fuel tanks, pods, wheel pants, external engines, pylons and fairings, its aircraft porpose badly in flight when using autopilot(i cannot understand why Austin refuses to fix this issue) its default engine sounds are terrible and not very realistic ground lighting is always dark and sky continuously hazy( hence the crowing about fantastic night scenery, day time is bloody awful) as for the x-plane is now 64bit so it must be better rubbish... i have both versions and there is very little difference between them. my understanding is that 64 bit mainly allows for faster endering and texturing by developers at this stage...which, at some point will provide better graphics...however i believe the first of these wont happen until computer hardware performance increases considerably beyond where it is right now as x-plane suffers from even worse framerates issues than prepar3d does. ....one could go on but those who decide to go and try x-plane can figure the rest out for themselves. in x-planes defense, it does have some good aspects that i really like, for example wing flexing, more realism in engine performance, and more realistic aircraft speeds during descent (fsx and prepar3d dont simulate these as well as x-plane does) fsx crashing in windows 8 i have posted warnings about that almost a year ago...prepar3d didnt run so well on it either. that was before v1.2 however, since essentially the latest version was written with win 7 in mind i would have thought it wouldnt be much better. it appears that their are differing issues in all 3 of the sims. at the end of the day, of all of them, fsx is still by far the best. i hope that prepar3d version 2 will change all of that.

I notice that the AVSIM file library contains FSX downloads but i dont remember seeing any X-plane files. Wonder if the AVSIM moderators could create an x-plane downloads section???

Thanks Chris much appreciated.

I wonder how hard it would be to simply convert the one that was done for x-plane??? I know it contains some terrible errors, for example a delta hanger at north end of international terminal (dunno what the creator was thinking with that one :lol: )...but it could be a good starting point as it seems like most of the object placement is pretty good.

thats helpful. i use the x-plane>blender2.49>blender 2.65 option. havent gone the other way yet, cause i still have to learn how to do the layers thing for x-plane first? where does one find xptools? (i have looked in my x-plane folder but am having trouble finding it)

Its all sorted I am able to move x-plane.obj files between planemaker and blender 2.65 fairly easily using the x-plane2blender python script. I also use AC3D as an intermediate program between the two.

i wouldnt rush into it too much just yet. You wont be impressed with what you find when you first run x-plane. Theres a lot of tweaking to do before it even comes close to FSX...even then, it is still a long way off being the better simulator!!! (and to think fsx is already so old)

I have a question in this regard... In the default instillation i have an area of land that is reality is supposed to be water, how do i fix that issue??? Can i change the default terrain data to show water instead?

You know what...i can sum it all up in a few words...but why do that when i can rubbish it will a whole paragraph or six!!! X-plane does not fully simulate an entire aircraft...it is not the most realistic flight simulator ever...nor does it accurately model scenery. that is nothing more than a sales pitch to con simple minded and poorly informed customers into thinking it is better than fsx and prepar3d. For example; According to Austin Myers and his bunch of maties (volunteers i might add..it seems there are a lot of them over there who make Austin very rich as a fruit of their labours), Sydney Airport has a Delta Hanger, there is no such place as Botany Bay, and there are areas of water on both sides of Kingsford Smith international airport runways on domestic and international terminal aircraft parking areas!!! What planet are these guys on exactly??? Oh thats right, they are in space now...gee i wonder what Mars looks like in X-plane...Garden of Eden perhaps??? for a start, the aircraft dynamics in x-plane rely on the aircraft modeled in Planemaker! Now planemaker completely ignores misc objects when in flight. So, if you create wheel pants, undercarriage pods on the side of a fuselage, flap extensions, in fact any appendage at all...they have absolutely no affect on the flying characteristics of the aircraft. So hey boys, lets hang a 50x50 foot sign out of the back of our aircraft...its perfectly safe as x-plane says its a misc object and as such wont affect the way the plane flies in any way shape or form. If you want to include these bodies in the flight characteristics (e.g drag), guess what, you have to manually enter the data into x-plane just the same as in FSX!!! I find it incredible that "those in the know" over at x-plane keep saying these things are insignificant. Dreaming if you ask me! Hey here's a good example of why fundamentally, x-plane needs serious reprogramming and more honest marketing... remember the C130 that crashed because the drag chute accidently deployed whilst the cargo the aircraft was carrying was still chained down in the cargo bay? ...in the heat of the moment, the airforce pilot yelled reassuringly over the intercom..."its ok boys, i tested this out in X-plane first...the deployed parachute is a misc object and as such, will have no affect on the flight characteristics of our aircraft....so we will all be fine!!!" :lol: :ph34r:

Funny thing that...i have been trying to get an answer to the exact same question for over a year! I cannot understand why in the heck someone cannot simply write a step by step newbies tutorial for setting up a home simulator with 3 computers? How flaming hard is it for someone to do that??? Merely telling us it can be done, then launching into some computer nerd jargon bender (which leaves the likes of me in the clouds whistling dixie and scratching my head) is driving me absolutely nuts. It makes me so angry i want to shout and swear at someone. Anyone will do...even my dog!!!

hi guys, couldnt help putting in my 20 cents worth on this topic... if someone had of asked me last nite and for most of today what i thought of X-Plane...they would have got an absolute ear bashing about how bad it is! The truth is, out of the box it is a bit of a nightmare...and i found almost none of the aircraft flyable on the default out of the box settings. The scenery was sh$%^house and i would have throttled Austin Myers with my bare hands if i could have at that point in time. After spending a couple of hours reading and experimenting...mostly experimenting as the reading isnt so easy if you dont know what you should be searching for (the terminology is somewhat different to that of fsx in some important areas that i was having problems with, so searches were proving somewhat useless)! Anyway, i managed to stumble on a couple of settings, and a very important framerates philosophy which have made a world of difference. Ill start with the settings bit... Joystick settings...(oh i love that i can fly xplane in simultaneously real time whilst im typing in this forum...its like eating ice-cream for the first time im all goey about it), anyway... 1. Menu> joystick and equipment>nullzone...set everything in top half to 50% and nullzone in bottom half to at least 5% unless you have really top quality flight yoke (ie no poorly functioning or sloppy bushes and bearings in it). 2. Render options...forget the fsx philosophy of protecting framerates (X-Plane is incredibly framerate friendly compared with FSX...you can set a lot of stuff rather high and get real smooth flight rendering)i have set my rendering options to the following and its as "smooth as a babies butt" run fullscreen at this resolution - on texture resolution - extreme number of trees - populated number of objects- tons world detail distance-high airport detail-extreme shadow detail-global high water reflection-default 3d bump maps-on gritty detail textures-on screen antialiasing-4x hardcore anisotropic filter level - 4x hardcore cloud detail- 10%not many lateral field of view-120.00 degrees left everything else as was in default instillation. i will say that im dissapointed with the default aircraft textures...most do not have 3d cockpits...i guess they figure you get what you pay for in a simulator...low cost = crap textures and animations. Those things aside however, this sim is definitely worth spending the money on to bring up to scratch! i am really looking forward to purchasing, and even developing, some 3d aircraft and scenery of my own for X-Plane. oops forgot to add my system information in Win 7x64 bit - Xplane doesnt seem to install properly on windows 8, in fact even the x-plane.org forum doesnt work properly in you are trying to access it from a windows 8 machine (enter key and right mouse button dont function in the typing window of a post!!!) CPU I7 2700K M/B P67A UD 5 RAM 4 gig GPU ati radeon 6970

I'm wondering if the performance benefits of ubuntu would be noticeable if those who crow about it actually modified their windows startup so it is to optimised for flight siming? Fsx guys always fine tune the OS to stop unecessary apps running (which are included because the "general computing market" demands the valuable functionality they provide, ubuntu is not driven in this way to the same extent...its market is a very different niche). Turning them off in windows does make for a noticable performance increase in flight sim's. Id be interested in a comparison with ubuntu under those terms instead of all this nonesense im hearing here! I would wager the performance comparisons are not so different then! Having said that, i love the open source community. the little men are forcing all these big software monopolies to rethink...or sink! It would seem that the selling of fsx source code and demise of microsoft flight is a classic example of how the open source developers can force change and win. Absolutely marvelous i say!

hi guys, I have little faith in the xplane forum for finding answers on this topic...its awfully messy in its structure. it would be good if I could find recent and technically up to date wiki on this topic. I have just installed blender 2.63 and have xplane10 demo. I have downloaded io_xplanetoblender script and installed it to what I think is the right directory. in blender I am able to export to xplane, however there is no "xplane obj" import option in the file menu in blender. I have read that the import function was not available earlier this year...is that still the case??? surely there must be a solution to this by now...any ideas???