Great to hear that Goran and Theo’s DC-3 joined the CRJ-200 and Realscenery’s Oahu photoscenery in gaining top ratings from the Magazine this month!
http://www.pcpilot.net/view_issue.asp
That makes it a trifecta for X-Aviation. Ok they don’t exactly flood the market with products, but clearly that’s because they concentrate on quality.
Having 3 high quality xplane products featured in the magazine, which has historically been heavily MSFS oriented, gives us a warm feeling where we need it the most 
In other news, this guy (me) is happy to announce I’m back on the Australian Red Centre terrain project after my long break. It is quite complex and brain-numbing work, I had to stop, to keep motivated! Now I’m really enjoying it, including the preparation of some instructional notes for other devs.
MY OBSERVATIONS UPON RETURNING TO XPLANE
FT56 asked me what I thought after being ‘away’ for so long. For quite a few months, I’d been keeping a fresh perspective by using a number of other Sims/games, such as Battlefield 3, MS Flight, DCS P-51D, IL-2 Cliffs of Dover, Aeroflyfs and even the older Flaming Cliffs 2. So I feel pretty qualified. Just call me ‘Dr’ from now on! Or Big Spender..
Here are my notes. Firstly the other Sims:
IL,2 CoD – still buggy, but cheap and with impressive variety and effects. Their sequel might be worth waiting for. It’s their last chance to regain credibility. Must-have for a WW2 Fan.
Aeroflyfs – the kind Robert Arts helped me get this delivered down here at the south pole. Not cheap. I’ve flown it once. Stunning photoscenery based in the Alps, beautiful 3d scenery but too little of it. No navigation, limited systems.
The major advantage, its looks and physics, is let down in my opinion by the limited cameras and no replay function. I need to fly it more I suppose, but it’s missing too much to get me hooked.
Flaming Cliffs 2 – a hoot, an older sim but if you like modern jets, it’s still incredibly challenging and flexible. I’ll certainly pick up FC3 on release.
DCS – the modern successor to FC, this is a real sleeper, as I’ve previously reported. 3rd party development is shooting along, with FSX oriented companies like IRIS moving across. The upcoming Mig-21 looks awful, terrifying. Right up my alley!
The new Nevada scenery looks spectacular. A very specific, deep simulator. The P51 or A10 can keep you busy learning for months. Scenery is massive, high quality and performs well. Some may tire of the same drab look however. That’s why Nevada can’t come soon enough.
Battlefield 3 – no, it’s not really a sim! The plane’s flight model is very simplistic. But it’s a hoot, insane online action, a pleasant relief. As a scenery afficiinado, it’s worth it just to marvel at the beauty of what they’ve produced. Watch your back though.
MS Flight – I know I’ve been controversial with my support for this. Believe me, no one was as surprised as myself. All I’ll say is that although I too am upset that third parties seem to be locked out (for now), the full package is so well done, with the joy of flying in an online community so darned easy that it is seriously my second sim of choice. I only have fsx installed for comparison purposes, it’s dead in my own opinion.
Now back to xplane- here are my notes when first firing it up:
Variety- wow, so many different contraptions, of all genres.
A thriving community, with diverse backgrounds. Third party contributions MAKE this sim.
This is serious stuff- as a flying sim, its flight model and systems modelling is rarely rivaled. Only the dedicated sim DCS challenges it, and even then, its flight feel may not be as ‘scary’ as xplane’s.
With xp, you don’t need a jet, bombs and flak to make you sweat. Just try and fly by the numbers and do a greaser landing in a Duchess, phew that’s enough!
Airports- this is another xplane strength and also weakness. A great variety of destinations. With a variety of quality. You take the good with the bad. Conversely, DCS has less variety of facilities, but they’re all optimised and superb. You’ll never recognise any of them though, or few will.
MS Flight has the potential to emerge as a sim with good variety. Even the Hawaii facilities were faithfully modelled, with a number of them being equal to a $30 add-on in other Sims. And Alaska appears only weeks away..
Weather- supremely controllable. Clouds are marvellous, if a little same looking.
I really enjoy the fidelity of the planes in xp. So many great quality freeware and payware models. As evidenced by the awards mentioned above. Again, if you are deadly serious with your Sims, xp is the leader. Its devs take their job very seriously too.
You’d be surprised at how detailed some of the MSF plane interiors are, well the ones with cockpits at least. But I’d never pretend their systems and handling was at the xp level. Not far off though. Certainly I’ve never flown so much as in MSF. That’s because of the combination of all its strengths. A simpler FM offset by an attack on the visual and aural senses.
So here’s where I get to the ‘room for improvement’ that I noticed when coming back. Feel free to counter in the comments!!
Sameness – no matter where you fly, the terrain and autogen give a very similar look. Even Europe and America look similar. Then Oz. Hence my project, to prove that we can add variety. You all know what I mean. Bloody crisp, beautiful green terrain and Californian houses. Everywhere.
Performance – straight away I noticed that xp is so sophisticated, doing so much, that it is really pushing my system. The other Sims all fly along at 50fps with high-max graphics settings. I can even fly MSF in 3D mode, which halves the fps, down to 30fps.
But with xp, with HDR on, at some facilities the sim really groans. It’s ok, Ben is doing a great job, it’s just that sometimes it loses that ultra smooth fluidity that I remember from xp9. And DCS.
Usually when we post such whinges, we can hear Laminar groan, wince then push out some rabbit from their hat that fixes things! Lets hope 10.10 comes out and makes me eat my words!
More seriously, we have been doing some beta testing of some others’ scenery projects, with a worrying trend for bad fps, with hdr in particular being the usual challenge.
DEVELOPERS, you need to build in a performance buffer for HDR!! If like some, you take the lazy (‘efficient’) route of basing your entire night look on HDR lights, please make sure you don’t use so many lights that it grinds my pc down to 5fps! I know many are in it for a quick buck or to get a higher profile, but you don’t want to be famous for the wrong reasons!
Now I don’t feed my family with scenery development (I can dream!) But if I was, I’d be striking a good balance, with some .lit textures where needed, to minimise the load caused by HDR. Yes it would take longer, it’d be a pain. But your market would be tripled, with many more able to see your efforts.
Funny, that’s what I did with the CBD scenery. I got much more effective results from a large use of lit textures and then very select use of HDR. To me, such lights should be used sparingly, as accents to a core masterpiece. Lecture over!
Lastly, shadows and HDR – what amazed me is why IL2, a relatively older tech game (ok, it’s buggy tho!), has razor sharp, eye-burning HDR and shadows, at low fps cost. It might be me, I just don’t notice the HDR in the day. The shadows, even at GPU melt settings, are nowhere as crisp as I’ve seen in other Sims.
So that’s my impression after coming back. A real serious sim with huge variety, challenge, a great community and plenty to improve. The good thing is that we always know that it will improve and adapt. We just don’t know when. Maybe tomorrow!
‘Ave a great weekend.
S
P.S. is that a first? A whole post without a picture? Sorry, it’s our new austerity measure. We may also go down to 6 point font to save more in future..
Is that it on the posts till monday?
I always enjoy reading you, each days !
Concerning X-Plane reviews in print magazines: I’m writing a bunch of reviews for the German magazine “FSMagazin”. My DC-3 review (4 pages) is there in the August/September issue.
Sorry I have to say it… XPX is still in the deep alpha state. Unusable on hiend ATI GPUs , unusable on hires systems with HDR, very poor quality shadows, buggy clouds, the same archaic sound, problems with low angle rendering quality and si on… I wouldn’t recommend it to XP9 user.
First: X-Plane was always and will continue to be some kind of perpetual beta. It will be beta until XP 11 is released. One can either accept this fact, or use another software, with another style of development.
You are right that the ATI issue is a very critical one. But the other issues you mention are really secondary.
You don’t need high quality shadows for flying a plane from A to B.
You don’t _need_ HDR.
You don’t need non-”archaic” sound.
All these things are just for atmosphere and nice if you see X-Plane as game. But the actual PURPOSE of X-Plane — simulation airplanes and learning how to fly — is not affected by this.
yes xpx is still so so. performance is not where it should be/ where it sounded it would be as advertised out of the gate. plus bug fixes and performance fixes/ news on all of this gets so sparsed out with no updates. frustrating as hell
Why don’t you see great points ? You are always complaining, some of you runs it with med settings at around 40 FPS or more !!
HEY GUYS, with low settings , I can’t reach 20 FPS, it’s almost unflyable.. and I develop a plane on that ! So please be comprehensive, let Austin and his team work properly.. it takes time, unless you already developped anything, you can’t imagine how long it takes.. Moreover in a debuging work !
My XP10 looks like XP9, runs worst, but I’m not complaining because, I know one day I’ll have a top PC, and I’ll finally run it at max setting with good FPS, like many videos we can see on Youtube..
its always one day , later, in the future, delay etc
Again, chris: Be patient.
You really have to understand that X-Plane is not a typical product of a typical software company. X-Plane is the personal “baby” of one guy — Austin. X-Plane was ALWAYS made to fit the needs of this one guy, and if Austin decides to postpone an update (or maybe even can’t release an update, even if he wants to, who knows?), there’s nobody who can change this.
(But — you can try. You can mail him, and he even answers.)
I dont’ get it that, for many people, Austin and X-Plane have this Robin-Hood-kind of aura that normally is reserved for open source software. Guys, Austin is not Linus Torvalds and X-Plane is not Linux. They charge you rougly the equivalent of a Windows 7 operating system license (a development effort of 1000′s of developers and testers). The engine is not a community of enthusiasts who give away the results of their private efforts, for free. This is a big-bucks software development company. Austin flies a Cirrus SR-22, which is the BMW 7-series of private aviation, and is looking forward to buying a Cirrus TheJet. That’s being paid with your money, his customers’ .
Don’t get me wrong – he runs a successful company that publishes a great product which people (including me) are willing to pay for. He deserves the entrepreneurial success that he has, to its full extent. But it also means that we, as his customers, don’t have to treat Laminar as an open source company, accepting to be the beta tester of its half-finished software. X-Plane 10 took much too long to be published, and still isn’t ready for prime time. Austin got distracted by the much more profitable iOS app business and decided to rest on Laminar’s laurels while Microsoft killed X-Planes only serious competitor. When MS-Flight was announced and the X-Plane community started to get really impatient, Laminar productized what they had, because it was tactically important to do so, but not because the product was finished.
I can agree to everything what you’ve written, although it’s a strange mixture — Austin is like … Steve Jobs producing perpetual beta software
But I knew this when I bought XP10. And I knew that I can’t do anything to change this. So I knew to be patient. Do I like this? No. But until MS Flight becomes a real simulator, where the whole planet is accessable, I’ll stick with X-Plane.
And I’m simply tired of reading chris’ complaints that XP 10.10 is still not released.
Oh, and as a side note: I believe that it’s possible that in sometime in the future, maybe when Austin has earned enough money by current XP development, XP development is stopped. I don’t know how important it is really for him to offer an alternative to Flight. Maybe, if he thinks that HE does not need X-Plane anymore, he could drop it. Interesting what would happen then.
Mario,
thanks, and yes, I agree with you, too. My comparison of Microsoft Windows 7′s retail price with that of X-Plane’s was a little unfair because Windows sells millions and millions of copies while X-plane sells, I don’t know, probably a couple of hundred thousands, if at all.
I, too, am glad that Laminar is still interesed in what in the end is only a niche market. And I fear the day that X-Plane goes the way of Aces and stops active development of the product. If that happens, there is no flight simulator left that can follow in its footsteps. So we have to live with X-Plane and it really is a great product. And software is never finished, we all know that.
My only point is we should not be too apologetic for Laminar.
I agree, it’s really annoying ( And I know what I say, how many times I was ban because asking when it’s out .. ) but that’s it, for better products..
…mm I speak quite often with him ( from a dev POV ), and he is really accessible helpful. And is next ACFT is not the ” The Jet ” it’s a Lancair Evo. ( about that, check his page, all progress is published, it should painted in september )
I still have the first impression I had when I flew XP8 some years ago for the first time.. a big BREATHEE as I switched from FS2004. I only launched the crude software to fly helicopters,which are still unrivalised in systems and Flight Model, but had to close eyes for nightmare sceneries and lack of intuitive menus. Know, I’m 80% XP pilot, 10% DCS Black Shark and 10 % IL2..
LET THE MAN DO HIS UPDATE, You’ll say then ” How were I so impatient, the result excess our expectations ! “
We sound very similar Huey! But you have bigger balls, flying that Shark..
Yes we all need to be patient. Xp10 on medium -low settings still beats 9 hands down.
Being patient is so hard. Try to and each time a release looks solid, then fails and or no news makes the game all the more difficult
How old are u Chris? If u are over 65, then u should know better. If under 20, then you have a very long road ahead indeed!
Read some books, go for a bike ride, build scenery, find the higgs boson. Live life in the meantime…
I am over 20, under 30
Great post Simon, X-Plane will never be finished..period, and that is the great thing about this sim, there will always be something new and always something great coming along, look at the the poor MSFS survivors, once the development stopped then the fun went out of it and it became very stale, If X-Plane was like that then we would be complaining that it is boring, If X-Plane is one thing and that it is certainly not boring, we are coming into a golden age right now and yes I admit there are a few issues to be dealt with, but I think back to XP9 last year and what I am using now and it is simply amazing how far we have come in a year……Viva le X-Plane!