X-plane

What's X-plane? >_>

Sorry for my noobish attitude.

It's a flight simulator, competition to microsoft's flight sim.

http://www.x-plane.com/

Traches wrote:

Not sure if it's blasphemy to talk about FS'es competition here, but has anyone here had any experience with X-plane? And if so, what were your impressions?

I ordered a copy the other day, kinda anxious! I tried out their demo, seems like it's not quite as pretty or as smooth as FS, but the mechanics are supposed to be more accurate and it also seems to get better FPS at comperable settings.

Blasphemy! Blasphemy! Blasphemy! Hahahaha... can't blame you for your apprehension though, these days topics get locked that mention Alitalia and the Pope (Alitalia happens to be the Pope's transport of choice) in one sentence.

Should anyone castigate you for wanting to discuss X-Plane here, I suggest you just ignore them.
There exists a tightly-knit X-Plane community with forums,support etc. I've fondled the X-Plane box on several occasions in the shops but my addiction to MS has always prevented me from daring to go where perhaps I should go.
Your assessment regarding the flight characteristics of X-Plane a/c and the FPS confirms what I've been reading all along about this product.

I for one am looking forward to your reports and adventures with your new acquisition. Please keep us posted.

Tailhook wrote:

Blasphemy! Blasphemy! Blasphemy! Hahahaha... can't blame you for your apprehension though, these days topics get locked that mention Alitalia and the Pope (Alitalia happens to be the Pope's transport of choice) in one sentence.

Should anyone castigate you for wanting to discuss X-Plane here, I suggest you just ignore them.
There exists a tightly-knit X-Plane community with forums,support etc. I've fondled the X-Plane box on several occasions in the shops but my addiction to MS has always prevented me from daring to go where perhaps I should go.
Your assessment regarding the flight characteristics of X-Plane a/c and the FPS confirms what I've been reading all along about this product.

I for one am looking forward to your reports and adventures with your new acquisition. Please keep us posted.

It showed up today, I'll do that!

Tailhook wrote:

Traches wrote:

Not sure if it's blasphemy to talk about FS'es competition here, but has anyone here had any experience with X-plane? And if so, what were your impressions?

I ordered a copy the other day, kinda anxious! I tried out their demo, seems like it's not quite as pretty or as smooth as FS, but the mechanics are supposed to be more accurate and it also seems to get better FPS at comperable settings.

Blasphemy! Blasphemy! Blasphemy! Hahahaha... can't blame you for your apprehension though, these days topics get locked that mention Alitalia and the Pope (Alitalia happens to be the Pope's transport of choice) in one sentence.

Should anyone castigate you for wanting to discuss X-Plane here, I suggest you just ignore them.
There exists a tightly-knit X-Plane community with forums,support etc. I've fondled the X-Plane box on several occasions in the shops but my addiction to MS has always prevented me from daring to go where perhaps I should go.
Your assessment regarding the flight characteristics of X-Plane a/c and the FPS confirms what I've been reading all along about this product.

I for one am looking forward to your reports and adventures with your new acquisition. Please keep us posted.

There was a reason for that. Read the rules. ➡

https://forum.flyawaysimulation.com/forum/topic/7643/general-posting-rules/

Last one he posted.

-----------

I've debated whether or not to give X-Plane a shot, it looks good on the boxes and in screenshots but I just can't bring myself around to buy it. 🙄

Can't wait to see your shots and what you think of it.

Flyboy92

Overall Take-- I like it, definitely didn't waste my money, but won't be uninstalling FS either.

Wins:
-MUCH better framerates at equivalent settings. I'm running an 8800 GTS with a 3.3 Gig dual core AMD and 4 gigs of ram, and I could crank the settings almost to max. Can't come close to max settings in FSX.

-Better looking scenery textures and terrain. In FS the textures are all laid out on a flat plane and then stretched by mountains and cliffs, so the sides of cliff faces don't look very good. Doesn't seem like this is the case in X-plane, though i could be wrong. Also, the textures basically look like they're straight out of google earth. The Thing comes on 6 dvd's, and if you install everything takes up 80 gigs on your hard drive!

-Selection of stock planes is a lot better.

-Built in weapons! Didn't play with them much though.

-More control over basically everything, from the size of the waves on water to your failures.

-Lots of control axes to play with.

-You can fly on mars!

-Instead of "Aircraft overstressed" and an end of the mission, you can lose control surfaces and wings for overspeeding or overstressing. Cool 🙂

-The cockpit knobs are much easier to operate than the ones in FS.

-More built in fun stuff. (Weapons, drag chutes, odd flight scenarios.)

-Plugins are a lot easier to manage. Just copy them to a folder in X-Plane's directory.

Losses:
-Aircraft systems simulation isn't anything special. There is no PMDG 747 or equivalent for X-Plane. Complex aircraft are hard to find...

-Weather doesn't look as good. Also, it's the same everywhere.

-Hat switch isn't pre-programmed. I had to map it to key commands. How awkward is that?

-UI in general is not very intuitive, finding settings can take a little while.

-Key commands are hard to look up and hard to assign

-2d cockpit does not stretch to fit a widescreen monitor. It leaves gaps on the sides... Look at the screenshots. I didnt' spend much time trying to fix this though, it could be my fault.

-Smaller community = fewer addons.

-No built in scenery (it has autogen, but no airports, and no St. Louis Arch.) These can be added however, one by one.

-I don't think there are any advanced animations (Wing flex, thrust reversers, etc.)

-The trim sucks. I had a really hard time trimming anything to fly hands off, especially the smaller aircraft.

-Oh, and one really annoying thing is that when you switch to the VC view, it's tied to your mouse. So the view is always centered on your mouse cursor. Basically makes it useless.

Other thoughts
The flight model is the biggest difference between X-plane and FS, and as I'm not a real pilot I can't say which is more accurate. The nose bounces around a lot more in x-plane than in FS, especially with smaller airplanes or at high speeds. You have to be really careful and smooth with your control inputs. The increased lift from deploying the flaps is much more noticable as well.

At high speeds, the plane's momentum can go above where the nose is pointed. It's weird. It seems like lift is over-represented and drag is under-represented... (F-22 easily Accelerated to well over 1000 knots with afterburner at low altitude)

So yeah, that's my take on it. Can't way to play with it some more 🙂

Conclusion........FS2004 RULES OVER ALL! 😀

Thanks for the detailed low-down Traches.

Traches wrote:

-Built in weapons! Didn't play with them much though.

I'm interested in this, not being silly - it's nice to be able to set challenges such as various types of target practice. I'm sure (I hope) those weapons don't merely exist for the purpose of visual effects.

-Instead of "Aircraft overstressed" and an end of the mission, you can lose control surfaces and wings for overspeeding or overstressing. Cool.

This too is what I like to see.

When you say 'Plugins' you're referring to add-ons...correct?
Where did you hide the link to your screenies?
This is a mighty nice looking carrier:

I can't find any reference to the Mil a/c available... any chance of a short list?
...if you find the time of course.
Now don't go and fall for the temptation to fly to Mars first thing -- we might never hear from you again 😀

haha sorry, link's at the bottom.

And yeah, plugins are addons or whatever you care to call them. Goes for modifications to the game as well as scenery and airplanes.

Another nice thing is when installing aircraft, they're all contained in their own folder so you're just copy and pasting that one folder rather than a bit to gauges and a bit to effects, then the rest to simobjects.

You looking for modern planes or WWII era stuff? I love the WWII planes; there's a b-29 that comes with it!

I happened upon that carrier while I was exploring around NYC, didn't try landing or taking off though! Stock there's an F-22, an osprey, F-35, and an F-4. I'm slowly finding the good add-on sites, but it still takes awhile to find anything specific. There seem to be P-51's aplenty!

When I get around to dropping some bombs I'll let you know how it goes 😀

Those screenies answer a lot of questions. Thanks for the effort and and the captions.
The scenery, trees etc. look very nice - no airport sceneries eh? Can't have it all I guess. Personally I prefer the panel view to the VC, those panels look very decent.

Oh yes, WWll fighters and bombers anytime, I've got a great WWll hangar for fs9. I also like more recent a/c. Basically anything from WWll through Korea and Vietnam from both sides of the conflicts. Despite being the world's worst desktop chopper pilot I love the lot regardless of era or make. Out of the more recent jet fighters some of my favs are the F-4, F-111, F-18, F-14 to name the most prominent, not too hot on the F-16 and F-15 perhaps because the Navy don't use them, at least I've never found any with a tailhook 😛 I can also live without F-22,F-35 but how could I forget the Harrier. Rob Barendregt has made gauges for both the FSX and the FS9 Harriers and now those Harriers really behave the way they're supposed to.
I know I'm digressing but one of my gripes with MSFS is that they never coded the ability for COPS which resulted in some developers adding functional arrester hooks which in the early days were useless because the availability of carriers was very limited - some didn't have a hard deck or they had no trap wires. Then the 3wire system enabled you to install the wires so you could shoot traps but you still couldn't launch because of the absence of CATS - which in turn signalled to the a/c developers not to fit their panels with CAT switches. What a mess, what an oversight by MS. If it weren't for freeware developers like RB, we'd be in the lurch. He wrote the gauges and packaged everything, including the sounds into his files and continued developing and improving them.
In FS9, thanks to guys like RB we now have a multitude of freeware carriers and tailhook equipped a/c that can actually be used for COPS. And just when we had it all figured out, along comes FSX and stuffs it up again.
At this stage, the only workable COPS for FSX appear to be part of 'Acceleration'. Abacus's FD4 for FSX and FD5 for FSX are touch and go - russian roulette. They both work fine in FS9 ... I managed to run FD5 in FSX at the beginning, prior to SP2 but now (my second install of FSX on a new machine) +SP2... no go. I guess what happened at Abacus was that they had a working package for FSX - then along came SP1 - so Abacus posted an Update which would make sense since SP1 apparently dealt with scenery improvements and that's what carriers and ships are, scenery. Then Aces decided to release SP2 which threw yet another spanner into the works. Top that up with the release of Acceleration for once I cannot blame Abacus for simply having lost interest in updating their FD (FlightDeck).

I know I keep ranting on that subject whenever I can but the truth is that there is probably not a single MSFS owner out there who would not at least liked to have tried COPS. The fact that MS ignores such requests is pure arrogance. That the necessary bits and pieces can be coded has been proven by RB and other enthusiasts who have given their time to develop the freeware that should by rights be already included in the FS software.

OK, rant over. I feel better now, you probably worse... may I offer you a glass of Ale in compensation 🍻

PS: I'm losing the plot 😳 how could I forget to mention the Panavia Tornado and the A-10 Warthog as two of my favourite favourites 😀