starflight

Do you mean it was a popup triggered within the X-Plane UI? If so, I'm surprised to hear this will be part of the standard equipment and UI, in the past the devs have been adamantly against popups and scrollwheels (looks like at least the latter is still in effect...) because it takes you out of the sim's realism and "immersion". Never mind that in real life you don't fly heavy metal without a copilot doing half the stuff while you're flying the plane, or that most simmers only have a single screen and can't see out the window while zoomed in to adjust instruments (or you pause the sim to do it... now *there's* some realism for you!), so many of us really do need some immersion-breaking UI aids.

In the buttons tab of the Joystick and Equipment pref panel, on the right-most column there's commands for tilt up/down, pan left/right, and fast versions of each. In the second column views options you can assign a button to View still spot, however this might not be exactly what you're used to in FSX.

Just as people moving from FSX/P3D to X-Plane can keep both on their systems, maybe you could keep a separate Windows boot partition or drive in addition to Linux? I myself spend my most of my computer time on my Mac, but for X-Plane I move to a Windows box... I had philosophical issues giving Microsoft my hard earned coin, but in the end I gritted my teeth and paid for a (discounted) OEM Win7 license.

I am so very glad I got an SSD for my X-Plane computer. Load times for me are usually around half a minute, even with HD mesh and custom scenery. Some say SSDs make very little difference in performance loading scenery, from responses here it seems clear they're only counting "in flight" time loading adjacent scenery and ignoring the startup time. Which might be fine if they're doing long haul flights--5 minutes out of a 5 hour flight won't even get you from gate to runway. Those who are a little more ADHD and like jumping around the world and fly relatively short flights, or those playing with plugins that can cause XP to crash, those minutes add up. It seems I've easily saved several hours in the last year alone--or put another way, since people are doing other things while waiting for it to load, I've had several extra flying hours by going SSD instead of HDD.

Agree on video card--that'll make the biggest difference in the listed setup and will help with antialiasing and HDR. I think 8 GB of RAM should be enough to start, though. 2500k is still reasonably good compared to the latest generation of CPU, so upgrading CPU can be put off a little while longer, too... especially if it also requires a new motherboard. Edit: Regardless, don't expect to get "most of the way" to maxing things out no matter how good your system is. Some people with i7 4770k and GTX 780s GPUs still have framerates tank in very heavy scenery areas, especially with clouds...

Funny enough, I was looking at ways to make the exhaust trail blur *longer* so it looks more real when looking out the passenger window :smile:

There probably aren't many add-on developers making enough (or expect to make enough) money on their X-Plane wares to devote their full attention to it. The author of World Traffic says sales aren't covering all the bills, the more popular SkyMaxx Pro probably isn't either, so both authors have full time jobs that can keep them very busy at times, which delays updates. Then of course we have far too many XPers who are indifferent to one type or another of add-on, and many who *are* interested aren't satisfied with where it's at (sometimes comparing against more expensive FSX products with full time staff, support and/or much larger contributing communities), so they don't buy it. That's of course their right, but this further reduces an author's motivation for working on a very niche area (niche of a still-niche product (XP10), which is in an already niche market (flightsims) compared to other "gaming" genres). But who knows, if the userbase does increase 25-30% maybe it'll finally reach a tipping point and the amount and quality of add-ons starts snowballing.

I'm extremely ambivalent about this (supposed?) business move as well. Laminar simply do not have the development resources in place to handle a sudden awareness by Steam users. They might make a lot of money short-term on Steam, enough to hire more core developers, but it might come at the expense of bad reviews from gamers who don't know what they're getting (was going to say "whose expectations weren't managed properly" but let's face it, tell them up front all the shortcomings, that it's a sim not a game, etc, many will still buy it and then complain). However, I wonder also whether this marks a business direction change for Steam as well. In the past they've been all about games, maybe they're looking at this to build credibility as a distribution system for professional software too? In fact, I just checked their site and there is a small selection of software titles (about 75) that are clearly not games, even if many of the top sellers are geared toward producing them.

Gave the BGL file format spec a quick read-over, it looks similar in principle to XP10's airport definition file. What's lacking in XP10 is the number of airports (out-of-box or add-on) with this routing logic baked in, and add-ons that can take advantage of it even when it's there. An unfortunate chicken and egg problem.

A graphics card with only 1 GB memory isn't enough to handle the recently released HD mesh, I'd upgrade at least that component. Try the demo which lets you fly near Seattle, that'll give you a good idea whether your system can handle medium-complexity city and airport scenery at settings and framerates that are acceptable to you.

I don't know what taxi route logic is used by FSX (is it actually FSX, or the various AI add-ons that provide taxi routing?). For X-Plane the problem is that until v10, World Editor only let you define gates and runways at an airport. You could lay down visible taxiways and aprons but there was no routing logic, so the ATC would send planes over whatever man-made surface was available. Most buildings aren't solid objects in the sim (rationale was to eliminate overhead of constant collision detection calculations), so the routing logic didn't even notice them. With XP10, World Editor can now lay down reasonably complex taxi routes which can be used by the default ATC, but at the moment World Traffic doesn't read them. I think it's being considered for a future release.

I'm the author of the CYYZ Toronto Pearson World Traffic package. Airport-to-airport traffic can now be auto-generated within the plug-in itself, alleviating a significant hurdle in the adding AI air traffic. The biggest hurdle that remains, other than making WT-compatible aircraft (which others are doing), is making convincing ground traffic for larger airports. Right now every taxi path to get from a gate to runway (or vice versa) needs its own route defined, and different aircraft sizes may need different coordinates to define their turns. The effort easily grows exponentially. Also, until recently we really only had the 747 to play with for commercial airports. It's picked up in the last month with the addition of over half a dozen more common aircraft like the 737, 767, A320, etc, so we finally have more incentive to build new or update existing WT airport packages. X-Plane is unlikely to ever see the userbase that FSX or even FS2002 had, so even though some of us try to do our part, you won't see this AI add-on enjoying anywhere near the same level of community and developer support. It's my hope that expectations are adjusted accordingly (this goes for other add-ons, too).

My own questions: 1a) What are the top 10 features, complaints, or requested fixes submitted by users 1b) What priority has been assigned to them; or if they've been rejected, why and perhaps what would it take to change your minds? In some cases we know steps are being taken to address them, even if it's still early in process and results aren't yet satisfactory globally (e.g. getting crowdsourced airport buildings into the official product; upcoming scenery recuts), I'm not too concerned about those. I'm more interested in why some are considered lower priority, and ones that've been rejected despite high demand even from long-time X-Plane users (e.g. scroll wheel for dials/other manipulators).

Respectfully, I found it ironic that you seemed to be downplaying the missing season textures by saying effects of the seasons are simulated, even though their visual absence obviously greatly detracts from immersion when looking outside the cockpit... then ask about cloud shadows, the lessening of which causes you the very same kind of immersion problem, but has no impact on the flying experience :wink: I doubt your intent was to downplay it, but lacking a disclaimer like "I agree this is a problem, but just FYI...", it came across this way.

I'm pretty sure the same key, "g", will both raise and lower gear. Some other functions have toggle options e.g. autopilot toggle as well as separate autopilot on/off options but might not have keys assigned by default, you'd have to check the Joystick/Equipment options under keys to see all available options. For cycling views, there's nothing built-in but you can try the Cycle Views plug-in (I don't use it myself, just came across it in an earlier discussion and thought I'd pass it on): http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=15665 What other cycling operations do you use in the other sim?

I'd love to see a better AI behaviour myself, but IMHO it isn't fair to expect features like this (relatively complex, non-flight model related, and apparently only available in a paid add-on anyway on the other platform) incorporated "for free" into the base X-Plane product anytime soon.

Symlinking is also very useful for creating near-copies of the XPX folder, if you have the horsepower to launch 2 or even 3 instances on the same machine to fly multi-screen without the horrendous stretching at the outer edges.

It doesn't if you're in windowed mode. I actually size my XPX window 6-10 pixels short of the full monitor height so it doesn't actually think it's full screen, and I can alt-tab or use the task bar like normal while XPX starts up.

Pretty much water under the bridge at this point since they're all available as torrents now, but flightsim.com does allow paused and interrupted downloads... but not if you're downloading using any of regular browsers. The program I used, the download was interrupted half a dozen times, but after each one I was able to resume it. I just confirmed that the final downloaded file unzipped just fine.

You can save different controls settings for every aircraft, using the 3rd party X-Assign plug-in: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=12551 Actually it lets you save 3 sets per aircraft, plus 3 global sets. The one thing I don't know is whether it'll work when you swap hardware. AFAIK XP10 doesn't register control hardware if you plug it in after it's launched anyway, so you'd either have to quit and relaunch when you switch hardware (which might bug you with a "new hardware found, calibrate?" message during launch), or leave both yoke and joystick plugged in when you shuffle them around. Anyway, I have two joysticks hooked up all the time myself, just so I have access to all the extra buttons.

I don't understand the impatience. I'm downloading it overnight on my laptop, so no worrying about the electricity bill. Also using a separate download utility lets me pause and resume downloads, so if the connection fails with just a few MB remaining I (hopefully) won't have wasted 2.4 GB and 13+ hours.

Some planes have "hard" interiors that limit where your "head" (camera view) can go, others don't (like the default 747). I don't know if the 777 Professional product has an interior cabin view, if it does you should be able to enter it after opening the cockpit door, then move your camera to a passenger window. For actual external views, e.g. camera at the tip of a wing or tail, you need to enter an actual external view mode first. Not all of them are Quickview compatible, but camera views positioned after using shift-4 (circle around), shift-6 (ride-along) and shift-8 (chase) should save as Quickviews

For the first time when dark, I was driving on the highway that goes by the end of one of my airport's runways late last night. I was struck by how bright they were relative to the street lights. In addition to the PAPI and runway lighting, I could clearly see even the blue taxiway edge lighting all the way to the far end of the runway. Conditions were rainy and very windy though, so maybe the tower had cranked the intensity up as Janov mentioned could be done. I am not a real-world pilot so have never seen an approach from the cockpit with my own eyes, but I think one's preference for light intensity really depends on your sim setup. On my 22" screen at 1080p at 80° FOV, the default XP10 airport lighting is impossible to make out from the cockpit. I can't even see the PAPI lights, which are literally a single pixel each (with no halo/hazing) until you're almost on top of them, making visual approach at night almost impossible. If I zoom in I get a more realistic depiction of what a pilot might see, but then I can't see any of my instruments. Maybe the custom halo-ing and other lighting effects provided by HDR Enviroment X II and Enhanced Runway Lights overcompensate, but for me they at least make visual approaches possible, unlike the out-of-box experience.

Fans won't boost your frame rate, it'll just keep your components from overheating. Actually it *might* give a small boost, since the CPU/GPU may throttle itself to a lower speed when temperatures get too high, but I wouldn't count on much improvement in framerate. I haven't used any 3rd party fan control utilities for Windows (my laptop is a Mac, the PC tower remains cool enough so it doesn't need manual fan control) so I can't recommend one

The specs on that page say your laptop only has the integrated Intel HD 4600 graphics, which is still only roughly equivalent to a discrete nVidia GT 630M. Unfortunately, both are very far down the list of GPU performance benchmarks, scoring about 600 and 750 respectively on videocardbenchmark.net. Even low-end desktop GPUs from 2-3 years ago, like the GT440, will easily outperform it. I'm sorry to say, but just because it's a brand new laptop, doesn't mean it's capable of running X-Plane with anywhere near decent settings. You'll also want some sort of manual fan control to force the fans to full speed when running XP10. Running XP10 on my own 2012 laptop with Intel HD4000, it can easily spike my i5's temperature to to above 100°C before fans catch up and bring it down to 90C; forcing fans to full means it only gets to about 85C. With most settings turned down I could get 15-20 fps. I eventually custom-built a desktop PC for X-Plane.