UrgentSiesta

There's PLENTY to do in DCS World besides pew-pew, even in multi-player.

Prepar3D was the compromise I made to fly favored aircraft. At the time, P3D was looking and running better than X-Plane. The addons below made it easy to switch. BlackBird nee MilViz T-38C & Phantom ADV PMDG 747 Majestic Q400 A handful of A2A Sims (especially their warbirds!) VRS SuperBug

Sparks, You can lower your lap times if you'd map the honkin' big speed brake to your joystick so you can cut the corners tighter 🙂 I can highly recommend topping off your Mach Loop runs by recovering to Valley with a 350kt overhead break: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMDuXrtHWno&ab_channel=104th_Maverick (the procedure is almost identical for airfields as it is for CV recoveries). Here's a diagram: http://www.topedge.com/panels/aircraft/sites/mats/f14-detail-landingpattern.htm (note that it starts with wings MANUALLY swept fully back - because it looks cooler (not a joke) trim is your friend!) Tomcat is considerably more challenging to bring aboard than Hornet, so it's especially satisfying 🙂

This so much 🙂 The irony is that there are groups of bitter complainers for every single sim (and the ne plus ultra are the virtual Mavericks over in DCS World. My god, they make Chicken Little look like the ultimate optimist!). I kinda think it's a syndrome related to some misguided sense of "expertise". They seem to feel like complaining shows how sage and sophisticated they are, etc. Even more tragically comic are the guys who only fly one or two aircraft in one sim, and so have absolutely no frame of reference, yet make sweeping generalizations about the state of the sim, the devs business practices, incredible degrees of Rivet Counting, etc. And when you peel just one or two layers back, you realize that much of it is driven by utterly inexperienced boys who just want "moar free stuffs", or they truly lack the objective skills to figure out that they're complaining about Speed of Light issues (I find it's mostly the VR users there).

100% correct now 🙂

Not uninstall at all. In the XP directory is an installer exe. Run that and one of the choices is to install another copy. you don't even have to re-type the serial number 🙂

Well said across the board! The only problem with the F-4 is that it's based on a very old default aircraft. LR clearly spruced it up a bit, but it did not get the full treatment like the F-14 did (though the F-14 still needs the DLC fixed in order to fly properly). I think maybe LR decided to go Hi Fi on the F-4 and just called it good as is so they could focus on the new one.

I''ve shied away from hdd's for a long time due to extended load times and in-sim stutters. You're not having those issues? What type of connection are you running between the drive and mobo?

I can't quite remember what they promised developers in the very first interview because I'm not a flight sim dev. All I care about is the fidelity of sims & addons. There are just as many people who look at XP's 30-ish year old code base, and based on direct comparisons between the two sims, claim the exact opposite - that XP is held back by it's "legacy" code base, and that MSFS' rapid ascent to utter dominance is directly attributable to it's "fresh" code base. And there are plenty of professional Big Iron pilots who prefer MSFS, and since they do the Real Thing day in and day out, we have to give credence to MSFS' fidelity. All that to say: all these repeated assertions of "light years ahead" haven't yet been backed up by one iota of factual information to support the claims. X-Plane has always been great (was my primary choice for many years), and v12 is undeniably an excellent flight sim. But "light years ahead" it ain't. As good as, advantages in different areas, etc., etc., For X-Plane to be "light years ahead" it'd need to make MSFS look/run/function like FSX. And as much as we'd like it to, that day has not yet come. Ironically you're (sorta) right: none of them are light years ahead of the other, which is exactly my point. I've got "some" good perspective as I'm sitting here writing to you on a Pixelbook (one of the best laptops i've ever owned), and not too long ago I was in charge of a 1200 person global network that was 95% Mac OS (never could get the CFO to give up Winders...). Google's a great shop, and IDK what their end users run (though I've read it's a mix of Chrome OS with Linux VMs and Mac OS for end users. But in the fields I support (engineering, architecture, analytics and design), we never, ever see their products in the hands of end users. And I have and still work with a lot of devs. Though many of them use Linux-based servers, NONE of them (not one) uses Linux desktop. It's running about half Windows and half Macs. I'd be happy to take on a Mac OS or even Linux based client again. I just can't find any. Must be a reason... You do realize that MSFS works, and LOOKS, just fine with no internet connection? And I'm not even talking about cached data. There's a reason it's 100GB+ for the initial install... I mean, go ahead and hit the youtubes - plenty of examples to show it's just as acceptable as XP. And I can fire up DCS World right now and even the old Caucasus map looks as good as XP does. The newer more detailed maps look fantastic. P3D? v4 & v5's skies and water dominated XPs until v12. And the landclass/topography wasn't all that bad either. Even still with v5.3, there's plenty of areas where P3D default looks at least as good as XP. I mean it's rather the inverse of XP where in that P3D airports still look like word not allowed, but once you're up and about? Just search youtube and see for yourself. So even here, on topic in re offline scenery, XP isn't "light years ahead" by any means.

Yes, of course, and point well made. However, developer productivity is, frankly, utterly immaterial to the people who pay the bills (i.e., me and all the other customers who fly what gets built). Continuing your Tool analogy, my company is a heckuva lot more productive deploying & maintaining solutions based on Windows, and our customers are a heckuva lot more productive because of those solutions. But does that mean Windows is "light years ahead" of Mac OS or Linux for either us or our customers? Certainly NOT 🙂 This is a false comparison. P3D and MSFS have nearly nothing in common from a development perspective. Hence the incredibly long gestation of "ported addons" by even highly experienced ESP developers. They basically have to start from scratch... XP v11 to v12, OTOH, have a tremendous amount of code in common. And the changes, though significant, are indeed in the Update class of effort rather than the Rebuild as required by ESP to MSFS. A much better comparison point to use would be dev effort of DCS World vs X-Plane. DCS dev is truly glacial, and XP can fairly be considered a RAD in comparison, despite being able to deliver similar levels of fidelity in the end products. So, XP is great for developers, but the addons in DCSW are every bit as good. We just have far more limited choices... 😉 friendly advice: "stench" is inherently unpleasant, like garbage or dog farts. "scent" is generally a far more pleasant connotation, like flowers or the open ocean. I'm sure Goran's secret falls more in the latter than the former 🙂

Holy Mother of... What a FANTASTIC video, Laurie! (and p.s., I'm glad I'm not the only one who appreciates that little hot rod jet 🙂 )

I was very happy to see the news (though TBH their current products are much more to my liking). But a single addon (or handful), even those at the extreme fidelity levels of HotStart, doesn't make ANY sim "light years" better than any other. If that were true, sales of MSFS would've dried up the day after Challenger released 😉 So if their own A220 is what Goran meant by "light years ahead", he's a self-serving shill. But I don't believe either of those statements are at all true, at least with the public information we presently have. No, "light years ahead", in terms of XP, must be something else, and something much bigger than any single addon. And I truly hope he's right 🙂

I generally agree, but TBH there are plenty of places in MSFS that are rather dreadful relative to the common Glamour Shot geo areas of MSFS. For e.g., the area around Dubai, which is a quaint little town some folks have heard of, was so bad when I visited it that I've not bothered to go back.

Real world pilot, here, too. Any claim of "can't use XP for IRL Visual Nav / VFR practice" is absolute BS and should be rejected with extreme prejudice. It is absolutely true that XP terrestrial scenery isn't even in the same league as FS2022 (when it comes to being pleasant to look at), but I have NEVER had a problem getting where I need to go using the Default landmarks/features in the sim, regardless of whether I've ever been there IRL or not. XP is far more detailed than any VFR chart I've come across, and is as detailed as Bing or Google maps. If you can't find your way around any given area in XP, you're doing it wrong.

Agree - have had pleasant results with certain areas not well represented by Orbx True Earth 🙂