The moving grass looks like the ground is rippling, a poor effect in my opinion and the trees move like stiff poles and only if the wind is strong enough too. The XP trees move far more realistically. What is also a lot better in XP12 is the moving road vehicles. Not only do they move realistically but at night their headlights put pools of light on the roads and it varies across vehicles too. Asobo/MS could do with taking note of features like that.
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I downloaded the XP12 demo last night and was stunned how terrible it looked. I kept thinking I had my graphics settings messed up. But even when maxing out all the settings, the default global scenery looks horrible. The lakes and roads look particularly amateurish. The scenery shimmers in the distance, regardless of your AA settings. The clouds are pitiful and hopelessly blurred, no doubt because of performance issues with XPâs antiquated graphics engine. Remember: people are describing the current performance of XP12 as âadequate.â But when the so-called âorthosâ and Orbx and add-on aircraft are installed, XP12 will grind to a complete halt.
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I donât have a pony in this dog fightâŠ
Iâm not gonna judge people for whatever sim they enjoy. Thatâs totally up to them! As long as the sim community thrives, thatâs all that matters. For me, I have abandoned all the others and mostly MSFS now. Pretty hard for me to turn back.
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Yeah it just blows my mind. Look at your pics. Who can beat that???
MSFS is revolutionary!!
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Thatâs one for that things I miss about night flying in XP. White lights from headlights, red tail lights, and the occasional emergency vehicle. It looks really cool.
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And yet 3 years of works on this, when people using xplane 11.5 with addons saying not much difference it said all, there is actual lost of existent customers. Auston was always beyond his mind when he talk about others, usually things get back in your face when you are acting like this in public. Physic stuff itâs now a matter of time, clock is ticking.
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The only thing I liked in XP12 was how easy it is to just go to controllers in the menu bar and setup your hardware. The UI in MSFS rather sucks and is more console (game) based. Anything else in XP12 was rather dissapointing, hardly a upgrade from XP11 and nowhere near a next gen version. Such a shame though.
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âŠand in game ads on billboards in public places like airports, stations, cities and highways.
All right. Hereâs the million dollar question: which features of XP would you think are the most important to implement in MSFS? I can think of:
- multi monitor setup
- road traffic
- ground handling/friction
Fact is that no dev studio on earth can really compete with the visual aesthetics of this sim, aside from a select few that would either be Google, Amazon or have the financial fire power to go into partnership with either of those two to access the same satellite imagery.
Financially to do that would make no sense either since its already been done, right here.
The technical achievement of building a 3D world out of satellite imagery is a masterpiece of creation, regardless of arguments for flight model comparisons (which I think MSFS can likely tweak anyway).
Also, take the flight sim side out of this and the potential is enormous, imagine an FPS game with these visuals, Truck simulator, boats, farming sim etc etc its very exciting technology. Even for this achievement alone, there has to be a valid argument its one of the best games of all time.
Though, I do want to see some puddles in MSFS 
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Google maps would be way too costly for XP commercial use. Microsoft owns Bing data. Giving MSFS a big edge .
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I saw that a timelapse video was released a few days ago of XP 12: Laminar Research shows off 10 hour X-Plane 12 timelapse â Stormbirds
Seems like a really odd video to release - doesnât seem to show anything very much off (the clouds?) becuase itâs really too fast to see what the scenery really looks like.
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Ground handling/friction/physics for sure⊠thankfully itâs also been identified as an area for improvement and rework by Asobo, starting in SU10. Multi-monitor support already coming in SU10, at least a first iteration of.
From a recent Q&A: Live Dev Q&A - May 25th, 2022 - #2 by N316TS
Chat question â What are some improvements that are coming for ground friction and handling? - Timestamp 3
Seb â Four new parameters are coming in Sim Update 10. Two of them are going to give the possibility to eliminate or at least tune, but we decided to cancel it out on our plane where we tested it. Basically, an old feature that we kept from FSX. FSX was canceling out all crosswind below a certain speed. At 50 knots, you had 100% crosswind, and then it was fading out to 10 knots and then it was 0. The problem is, while you take off or land, the crosswind keeps changing. And itâs very unnatural. So this is something where, in the parameters for the plane you can say at what speeds you want this to happen. So on the Cessna 172, weâre testing this, so we basically canceled the effect completely. So you have a 100% crosswind even if you are parked, or if you go very slow. If there is a lot of wind, it can actually spin your plane around, at first. So thatâs one of the new parameters.
Seb â And the other one, two parameters are there to allow you to control how sticky your wheels are when they are rolling fast. So when you are already going pretty fast in the takeoff, the sim was considering the wheels to be pretty much on rails as if there were slick tires from a Formula 1 car. Very sticky. And only the weightâŠso if you pull on the yoke, your plane gets a bit lighter. And the weight goes down, which reduces friction a little bit. But itâs still static. So it means that as long as you donât push to the side strong enough, youâre still on rails. And so, thereâs two parameters that allow you to make it so that the plane drifts off. The wheels are spinning so if you push to the side, itâs going to drift off a little bit, especially with plane tires that are not anything but racing tires. So we tested that with taildraggers. Taildraggers will always be hard to land and takeoff. But itâs a lot more natural and easy with that. So this is something we implemented on the Extra 330 for Sim Update 10. Also, plane makers have examples of how this works, so they can use it, too. We will deploy on more based on feedback. These four parameters are a first step on improving the ground handling. So more stuff will come afterwards. But Sim Update 10 is going to be these four.
From a previous Q&A: Live Dev Q&A - March 2nd, 2022
Forum Community Question - Any update on the revamped ground physics handling/friction? In a past Q&A, we mentioned it had been done. Can you go into more detail and whatâs coming up in the future?
Seb - last year in Sim Update 7, there have been a few improvements on ground physics. I think one was related to an assistance. When you turn on assistance of ground rudder â basically itâs the thing when thereâs a crosswind and propeller effects and the plane goes all over the place, and you have a hard time using the rudder to just stay straight â that is very tough. And then when you rotate, it changes a little bit because you donât have the wheels that hold you a little bit in place anymore, and you have to do some rudder work again to stay more coordinated. On ground, youâre basically changing from one system, which is staying straight on the runway to staying coordinated in flight. You have to make the switch. The assistance takeoff rudder does that for you. And previously it was just switched off whenever you rotated. It made this hard transition when you take off. Thatâs something that has been fixed so that this assistance, instead of switching off instantly when you rotate, it gradually fades out over the first 200-300 feet once you take off. It doesnât have this brutal thing where the rudder turns off instantly. And thereâs other little tweaks and improvements on ground friction that weâve been improving. Mostly for specific bug fixes on specific planes.
But still, there is a deeper rework we need to do. Basically, it all comes from heavy simplifications that were in the sim 10-15 years ago, which were always assuming that the ground was flat. Thatâs why you couldnât have sloped runways or undulated runways. The ground friction modelâŠbasically when somethingâs on the ground and when the brakes are fully engaged, you donât move at all: The plane sticks to the ground. Thereâs what one could call infinite friction: Thereâs no movement at all. This is something we added that didnât exist at all. And it wasnât really needed 10 years ago because there were no slopes. When you put a plane on a flat terrain without wind, itâs not going to roll anywhere. But if you put that same system on a slope, itâs going to roll away and not stay there.
Thereâs also wind. Historically, in the sim, there was a system so that at low speeds, any crosswind was cancelled out. The plane ignores any form of wind, when youâre below, maybe 5-10 feet/second, which is why when youâre stopped on the ground, you go full propeller power and then thereâs some propeller effects, so the plane starts going left. And then, all of a sudden, the wind kicks in, and then if you have a strong crosswind, it does this sort of thing which is not realistic. In reality, if I have a plane on the ground, and thereâs a strong wind, and I release all brakes, itâs going to start moving: The wind is going to push it. And that currently does not happen. There are changes like that that we want to do. We want to do the ground friction model to make it 100% realistic. Which means that we donât have to do anything: We donât have to cancel it out anymore. Everything is going to be realistically simulated from when you stop to when you take off. Thereâs no such thing as crosswind that comes in over a few knots. I think itâs going to make the rudder a little easier. Youâre just fighting one crosswind. It doesnât change over time unless thereâs gusts. Also, itâs going to work better on slopes. This rework is planned for somewhere this year, whenever we have time to go into that. Itâs going to be compatible because the parameters are the same. It doesnât change anything in the way you define or create or make airplanes. It just changes the way all the constraints and forces are sold so that the plane does what itâs supposed to do. All the constraints are the friction, the ground friction, the prop wash, the wind, even the engine, which is slightly shaking the plane. All these things come together. Currently, itâs a little bit better because we worked more in a bug fix development system, where we said, âThe plane is sliding on the slope? Letâs fix that.â âThe plane is sliding when thereâs wind? Letâs fix thatâ Now weâre in a situation where we need to implement a real system instead of having a block of patches. Thatâs basically the next step, and that will give us much more realism the precise moment when you rotate.
For example, a wheel is currently simulated as a single point. So, a wheel can resist movement or rolling or sliding when you brake. It does not resist rotation. A wheel can rotate [with a rudder or tiller] without resistance. If youâre in your car and youâre parked, and you turn the steering wheel, if you donât have power steering, itâs not easy to turn the tire because itâs not a point: Itâs a flat surface. Itâs a patch on the ground of rubber that youâre moving. The new simulation is going to allow this. This helps with stability when youâre taking off. Currently, the plane is just a tripod of points, and as soon as the nose is up, you feel that itâs already twisting because the wheels are not simulated as patches of rubber. They do not resist rotation enough. These kinds of changes are going to make the moments of takeoff a lot more precise and realistic. Later this year.
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Get the demo and see for yourself what the scenery looks like. Here is a hint; itâs like a time warp back to 2009.
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Even the aircraft looks like a lego. 
I was hoping it would be awesome, as I wanted to enjoy XP12 since they have more airliners than MSFS currently has, but I just canât get past those ugly graphics.
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really? I found the XP cockpits to look pretty bad compared to MSFS - esp shadowing / aliasing
ground handling was the only major edge I saw for XP⊠perf was worse for me in XP12, with a much worse look, obviouslyâŠ
MSFS really needs to improve ground handling in the worst way
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Saw a couple of emergency vehicles on a flight tonight from Bristol to London in XP and that was with just the standard scenery which doesnt have any night textures as yet. Thatâs what I will XP for I think, some night flying (dont need to worry too much about Orthos at night) and just to polish up my flying since planes like the 172 are less floaty in XP and more difficult to land well.
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ground handling - definitely better in XP right now
water taxing and water rudder control - yes
âŠbut step taxi, and actually trying to fly off the water was horrible in XP⊠MSFS needs loads of improvement on the water physics / control - but at least you can get off the water in MSFS.
You have to raise gear. One of the streamers last night had the same issue, and once he raised gear, it was easier to take off. I assume âgearâ when in water is like anchor or something.
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XP12 will be a visual downgrade from MSFS, but Iâm hoping I can find its own unique beauty in the XP12 world to where it wouldnât matter much.