That’s a good point, and perhaps even an envious position to be in. I’d take one or two A2A level products over a Marketplace flooded with 10 Captain Sim products on a shopfront with seemingly no QA to protect the customer from sub-standard products.
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I don’t know how small the customer base for the consumer market side of XP will get after XP 12’s release (as opposed to their commercial customers), but for P3D, there were so few consumer market customers, the 3rd party developer community for planes at least for P3D, collapsed during 2020/2021, and they all switched to MSFS.
Milviz, PMDG, Aerosoft, Aeroplane Heaven, Just Flight, etc, have practically all stopped new products for P3D and switched to MSFS. The do support existing P3D products, but they aren’t making new products for P3D anymore. Aeroplane Heaven even offered their P3D products for free. I believe other non plane add-on developers also exited the P3D market (only supporting their P3D products, but no new P3D products). The only P3D products still being made are scenery products, but that’s only because it’s much easier to port scenery products between P3D and MSFS - most scenery developers are really targeting MSFS, but P3D is easy to port their scenery products to for some little extra revenue.
Will the 3rd party developer market in XP go the way of P3D, meaning they abandon XP for MSFS? I wouldn’t say it’s impossible. But if it happened to P3D, it can certainly happend to XP.
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Is there anybody who actually knows whether MSFS will or will not apply for FAA registration too at some point?
To get certified would be great. To lose it would be an embarrassment. For that reason I suspect they wouldn’t even try.
Come on… for $60 you get a new weather engine, 3D trees,seasons, world lighting is much much better, including at night, better water, new flight model.
Yes, the changes have broken a few add.ons, but the sim is still stable, and downloaded and ran without issues on day 1, even after all that.
Xp11 still lives on, but I am already loving 12.
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Your opinion and I respect that, for myself however I’m not enthralled by XP 12 and I look forward to a reply from Laminar Research, I’m hoping I get my money back so I can put it towards something actually want. Who knows, I might even pick up a DCS module I’ve been wanting for a while.
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This topic is becoming X-PLANE only.
A reminder of a post above:
This forum is to discuss MSFS. We’ve allowed this topic to remain open. Stay on-topic of the title. All other posts will be deleted.
Thank you.
Sorry about that.
Which lets face is exactly what MS did with MFS, FSX etc. That’s marketing for you.
I have been beta10 testing from the beginning…added multiple rendering monitors…and MSFS as of today is the best it’s ever been…period. I downloaded the xp12 demo… I’m anything but impressed…no comparison.
About being faa certified…I am a FAA licensed pilot will an instrument rating. Just because you fly a simulator that has XPlane on it dose not mean you get to log these hours… it’s limited to just a few hours and they must be flown WITH a CFI or CFII.
For VFR …MSFS is the absolute best for training. To those of you who are working on your private…your check ride…they will do there best to get you lost under the hood… then all of a sudden you get asked where you are. You answer quickly…or your not going to pass. Auto generated scenery is not going to help you know where you are.
For those of you who are working on your instrument rating… both sims work… .but you need to invest in a chart program like Navagraph. I prefer MSFS for practicing approaches. For the G1000 the NXI can’t be beat. For those of you who are going to have to do your check ride with steam gauges (like I did)… without fsx I would never have passed. I say both sims are about equal for flying without seeing…but popping out at minimums…is a lot nicer with MSFS.
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I don’t think that a company of, what 30 people is able to compete with one of 230. MSFS had a head start of multiple years before the sim dropped.
I really think that the people here who are only lyrical about the other sim and play MSFS down are hired by the other one, got their copy for free, are actual workers, or forum trolls.
Oooow, I love complot theories
Do you really mean that XP12 lost it’s certification? Than that argument is down the drain as well…
No what he means is that XP was never certified to begin with. XP has been used as the base software in certified sims, but the software itself cannot be certified alone. An FAA certified flight sim is the entire package, hardware peripherals software and specific plane.
Or the important bit
" This is because flight training systems can only be certified as a complete package (a software and hardware combination)"
LR claiming it is certified is marketing hype and nothing more.
MS could likely easily make it so that a flight sim using MSFS as a base could be certified as well, if they cared to do so. It is just a couple extra features that the FAA requires to ensure minimum frame rates and things like that.
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What it means is XP11 in a static configuration can, and has been certified. MSFS probably couldn’t, for the sole reason there is no static configuration. In fact, that has been something many have requested, the ability to defer or reject updates.
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For me your video just shows that both sims are really good! And being honest, the more I hear that MS flight model is accurate the better I feel about my pilot skills 
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They are not bad as people can think, often exaggerated. Still need improvement and tweaking on few things, but things will get improved and they will get there, there is commitment to improve or they would had never get pilot license, recording flight data, wind interaction, changing point and others stuff in the works that will be announced later, finest details take more time to achieve with tweaking.
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Does anyone know if X-plane is allowing this same discussion on their forum? I am curious as to how the comparison plays out on ‘their side’.
I have no previous experience with XP11, but out of interest I downloaded and tried the XP12 demo. I did a few back-to-back flights, switching between the sims and using the default 172 and the same airport / area in both.
It took a while to get familiar with the settings in XP - configuring my VKB controls, setting up and tweaking / testing the graphics etc., so I had quite a few short flights switching between each sim to try them out in a variety of ways and practiced plenty of takeoffs and landings.
For me personally, as it stands at the moment there is not much comparison, and I found MSFS to be preferable in every way. Two major things that always come up - the flight model / physics and the graphics:
I did not feel a radical difference between the flight models, physics, interaction with the air, and even after much tweaking and profile / curve adjustment, I found MSFS to be closer to the real thing. Yes, of course, I am fully aware it is an amateur simulator (they both are), but I have flown a 152 and a Robin HR 200 in real life and MSFS just felt better to me.
There is just no comparison in the graphics. MSFS makes a decent stab at looking as real as it can (with caveats regarding each pc system, server speed, photogrammetry availability oversaturation, etc. of course) but XP12 is not even playing the same sport, let alone in the ballpark.
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No but it was never going to compete with MSFS streamed scenery and was not designed too. With orthos though it can compete and well. But really you are wasting your time trying the demo and expecting to make any sort of comparison graphically between MSFS and XP12. Globally, MSFS is the king of simulators and almost certainly always will be. Its why I use it to explore cities and countries.
When FS20 released a discussion thread was indeed allowed on one of the Xplane forums. The comments, however, were quite closely and tightly monitored if I remember correctly. I also recall a lot of derogatory remarks at the time about FS20 just being a scenery simulator. The flight model was also imo unfairly and mercilessly criticised. Much however has changed in the last 2 years and I think that FS20 is now beginning to prove itself as so much more than just a scenery simulator. I also believe that the flight model, whilst still not quite as good as XP12, has improved considerably. With a lot of talented developers now working on FS20 I think that it is now becoming or will very soon become the civ. flight sim of choice for the majority of simmers.
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