How will msfs compete with xp12?

Why? They are two different simulators , why fight?

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I have kindly asked you earlier to post your own comparisons. It is of no use to just state: this is better. We need examples to know why you are saying that. Otherwise we hardly can take your point of view seriously. And I seriously am curious as to why you state what you state.

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Screen shot at KSAN XP12 with Orbx TE. Not bad for Betaā€¦Sun looks like a nuclear explosion though. :rofl: Have both sims and will use bothā€¦Itā€™s nice to have choices :+1:

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The sun looks absolutely terrible in MSFS alsoā€¦

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I wouldnā€™t go that far. I think it looks quite good with bloom and MSFS definitely handles sun-down better than XP in terms of gradually fading out the light. XP, sadly, drops it down in distinct steps that you can see, MSFS fades it imperceptibly.

Yes, if you want to render a dense intimidating forest as seen from above, precisely for a flight sim, it is clearly not with detailed 3D trees that one does this, unless you are ready to publish millions of polygonsā€¦And then letā€™s see what performance will be likeā€¦

XP12 videos show clearly this weakness when it comes to render dense foliageā€¦ yes this is how forests look like from above, blocks of foliageā€¦

But I admit that in MSFS, we do not have the winter leafless versions (yet)

Moving trees with the wind are nice when sitting on the ground and admiring themā€¦

Just like painting, you need optical illusion not scientific drawings to render the illusion of realistic looking objects from a distanceā€¦

Iā€™m assuming this is autogen? It looks spectacular for this short clip. The 3D trees look amazing. There are varied layers of realistic plants. Lots of logs for obstacles. I would love to take my bush plane down there and explore.

XP12:

Microsoft Flight Simulator, on the other hand, is rather bland when you land off field. The trees are simpler, the grass is a basic spike, and thereā€™s nothing out there beyond that, which takes a lot of the challenge out of an off field landing, and the interest out of visiting these places up close. As soon as you get away from the hand placed objects, it gets really generic.

MSFS:

The above screenshot also shows a weird issue in how the trees are animated in the wind. Trees actually rotate about the center of the sprite, which results in the trunk moving more than the center of the tree, and on a really windy day the trunk actually comes out of the ground. That shot is a few versions old so maybe this has been improved.

Iā€™d love to see that kind of varied autogen vegetation in Flight Simulator, with Blackshark placed details like rocks, logs, local variation in the elevation. Maybe the beauty in that Xplane shot is only skin deep, and thatā€™s basically all there is to that scene, and once youā€™ve seen it, youā€™ve seen it all. And then the performance issues of the 3D trees of course. But it should be possible to reserve the 3D models for the closest LOD levels, and fade them out to what Flight Simulator is using now so it also looks great from the air.

Iā€™d spend all my Microsoft Flight Simulator time in one of the cubs landing on sandbars if I could skim my tires on the water with boulders and logs to dodge on touchdown and a unique little landscape at each spot.

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Hahaha :wink: you know the answer. I tried it once, and made a new account afterwards ā€¦ :smiley:

The trees in Flight Sim 2020 look absolutely SUPERB and give a fully realistic feeling of flying over a beautyful forest. I care about beautyful looking trees because this is an important part of immersion of flying over rural areas like Montana or West Virginia or Canada. And of course a beautyful looking forest is very important when flying over the Aokigahara.

I could now write what I think about the ā€œforestsā€ in XP12 (one tree every 20 meter on a flat field is a ā€œforestā€ over there :nauseated_face: ) but ā€¦ whatever. Maybe it will get better after a few OrbX and other scenery coverage addons :slight_smile:

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O.K. now weā€™re just trollingā€¦ :laughing:

LondonController was streaming on XP 12 Twitch and at altitude, he got very ugly trees in XP 12:

Found this interesting poll on the xplane forum:

Does Xplane12 traffic works better than MSFS traffic ?

So I finally got around to trying the demo of XP12.

The graphics are a good improvement over XP11 though in some places itā€™s still a bit disappointing. The lighting has improved and the colours donā€™t seem washed out like XP11, though under some lighting conditions it look a bit dull compared to MFS. In full sunlight in the middle of the day itā€™s very bright, though I donā€™t like the blown out highlight effect on the clouds.

I do like the way the seaplane interact with the water ( a weak point of MFS ) though theyā€™ve now given ā€œdepthā€ to the water and the aircraft shadow appears on the bottom of the water rather than on the surface!

The terrain elevation and coast line low resolution looks no better than XP11 and are the main spoiler of the scenery for me.

I donā€™t understand what people mean when they say it feel like flying on rails.

So somethings are being done better than this sim but itā€™s not enough to make me stop using MFS.

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Streaming XP12, labelled as Microsoft Flight Simulator. I wish they wouldnā€™t do that.

Iā€™ve read that before, and itā€™s an interesting comment. Find some rolling hills, and fly over those hills on a windy day. Then do the same thing in X-Plane. XP is the one on rails in that instance.

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So the XP forum at .org is filled with the most die hard and loyal XP fanatics. Whatā€™s interesting about this poll is that despite the most die hard XP fanatics, some 36% will stick with XP 11 and some 10% are even switching to MSFS. Only 46% are switching to XP 12. You add up the 36% staying on XP 11, plus the 10% switching to MSFS, and thatā€™s a very, very, bad release of XP 12, even among the most loyal XP supporters.

Now if a general poll were taken among flight sim users, I think this is going to look much worse for XP 12. XP 12 being released is inadvertently a huge marketing win for MSFS, even though I donā€™t think Austin/LR intended it to be this way.

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What is going even worse is, those 46% that has upgraded, they are now trying to get the 3rd party developers for their XP11 mods to upgrade them to XP12, and finding that a bunch of developers are soley concentrating on MSFS.

So they are expecting free upgrades to XP12, and if a developer doesnā€™t commit to that, they are taking to social media to call them out. That is going to push developers away from XP12. Letā€™s say you make a hugely popular addon, and it gets a 50% penetration in your market. For MSFS, you are now talking about a 2+ million population. If you get a 50% penetration, that means 1 million sales. XP12 though, the community is wanting you to invest time in revamping and enhancing your product, but for free. With a population of 42,000, thatā€™s only a loss of 21,000 future sales for any new product. Just looking at those numbers, the free work that you would have to commit to just to keep your customers on that platform, you can see business-wise why that would be a hard thing to commit to.

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And there lies the problem with XP12 - even if the user based doubled with this release, companies who left XP for MFS are not suddenly going to start working on XP stuff again.

MFS has the advantages that itā€™s not only die hard enthusiast, but casual simmer and people who have never used a sim before to make up a huge user base. You just donā€™t get that with XP and while XP is a good sim it really needs add ons to get the best out of it and to some extent so does MFS but with so many developing for MFS itā€™s easier to get the experience you want.

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To be fair, those 36% are sticking with XP11 until XP12 is out of early access/beta. So thatā€™s 82.3% sticking with XP12. Another 7% would switch if their hardware could cope with it. However you slice it, only 10% plan to switch to MSFS.

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They will never pull that off with Bing map textures. Itā€™s not possible because they stream textures with trees on them so unless they have textures for every season in Bing which they donā€™t and probably never will have due to the expense, placing leafless trees on Bing textures is not going to work.

And sorry, I could show you what XP12 is capable of but it breaks the forum rules so you will just have to take my word for it that XP can look every bit as good as MSFS, trees and all.

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Yes, I was thinking the same too and should really have made the post too out of fairness.

Iā€™m guessing that just over a third of their user base are content with XP11 at the moment for one reason or another and will really be waiting to see how XP12 progresses before committing to a purchase.

It will be interesting, though, to see what actual percentage of that 36% eventually decide to actually give up on XP11/12 and jump over to FS20. My guess is that some of them are as yet far from convinced over the virtues of XP12 or spending $60 or so for the priviledge of using itā€™s extra features.

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