Excellent analysis! As flight simmers, we really have to appreciate how the MSFS team has pushed flight sim forward. In the year 2024, I can at least say the best civillian flight simulator on the market is using the latest and greatest that 2024 technology is offering. I couldn’t say that in 2019.
In any given year since 3D graphics and 3D games were introduced for the personal computer, I believe there exists a “holy grail” for a flight simulator. That is, given the technology and hardware for that year, there is a theoretical perfect flight simulator that could be achieved. Now of course this theoretical “holy grail” flight simulator will never be achieved for a given year, it’s impossible. But MSFS 2024 is the closest to that “holy grail” flight simulator for 2024.
What it comes down to is, I have confidence that the MSFS team will fix the bugs within the next 4 years for MSFS 2024 (most likely, all the most major bugs will be cleared within one year, but there will still be some lower priority bugs left after one year’s time). They did a decent job with MSFS 2020 over 4 years, despite the botched MSFS 2020 release too back in 2020, so that’s where my confidence comes from.
What do I think XP 12 or XP 13 will be in 4 years time? I don’t think it will be anywhere close to MSFS 2024. Just look at the default GA avionics. They were so poor when MSFS 2020 was released. 4 years later, MSFS default GA avionics are the poster child of what default avionics in a flight simulator should be like, and the MSFS team lapped LR not once, but they lapped LR multiple times when it comes to default GA avionics. Just for default GA avionics alone, I have very little confidence that LR can catch up to MSFS 2020/2024 in 4 years time, especially at the rate of improvement that LR is progressing at.
Very very few people use default. The same applies to MSFS2024. If they used default, the in-sim market place would not be thriving. Why don’t you modify your Xp12 install, and make it look 100X better? That is the logical and sensible thing to do. I don’t get all this default vs default rubbish. If an addon can improve the game/sim over what the developer can provide, why would you NOT want to use it?! XP12 modded looks very very good. Each sim, as I explained prevously has it’s pros and cons. Use whatever makes you happy. But don’t start comparing default to default. It is a completely fruitless excercise.
Heard this a million times before, RIP XP etc etc etc blah blach blah, If someone gave me 10000 $ purely just to gamble with now, I would put it on XP still being around in a decade, and MSFS having gone the way of MS flight…
Sometimes slow and steady wins the race. As can be evidenced in the weather situation:- Live Weather - how accurate is it in MSFS 2024? A comparison
No it doesn’t. It doesn’t hide all the flaws the game engine has and it takes an awful lot of spaces which I don’t have right now. XP12 modded doesn’t look good at all where there is high population area. It looks good when you are over landclasses in the middle of nowhere where the ortho tiles is just a jpeg.
If you need to spend 40$ a pop for TrueEarth Scenery to get anything similar to what MSFS offers out of the box, XP12 is not an affordable place to be. I would rather spend my money on planes than scenery but that’s just me.
Auto-Ortho is free, and does a similar thing to MSFS out of the box. Sim heaven is free, and uses micorsoft data for object height and placement etc… What microsoft offers out of the box.
Speaking of out of the box, Microsofts default airports are awful. Even have made up taxi way signs. However XP12 default airports are way ahead… Again, PROS and CONS.
Fact is I use both sims, and at the minute, for all of its pretty scenery out of the box, FS2024 is the ‘Ill pretend I didnt see that sim’'. What use is pretty scenery, if the buildings are melting, the scenery is popping in as you approach it? To me, thats immersion killing. To others, no so. Again, opinions and pros and cons.
It’s true. default airport are better in XP12 but auto-ortho is not equivalent to what MSFS does. MSFS tries to color correct every tiles when they generated them. Also building have the same shape are real building not the same model over and over again. You talk about immersion ? That’s my issue.
But most of all, my issue is with LR. They put people in charge that refuses to change. Philip, per example, thinks the XP1000 avionics is good enough. It is not. They don’t realized that providing good default avionics helps 3rd party. The phenom 300 or the TBM 850 would be so much better if the G1000 in the sim was better. Forcing dev to code their own is a bit insane.
Their graphic engine still pretty much runs on 1 core and if you have any aircraft that uses SASL plugins, it runs on the same core and steals FPS away. There is still no motion vector so no TAA, no FSR2/3, No DLSS. No frame generation of any kind.
When you start adding addons into XP12, your fps start going down quickly because the game is still single threaded for the most part. Ben has promised they are working on multithreading but it will take them forever to get there.
You might think we are hating on XP12 but we are not. They are selling a product in 2024 with a graphic engine for 10 years ago and they are trying to chip away at it at a turtle pace. Meanwhile, they are still charging the full price for XP12. They haven’t deliver half the thing they promised for XP12.
So excuses me if I am being critical over the direction of Xplane 12 has a product. At least with Asobo, I know they will be fixing bugs. They have an history of fixing them for 4 years in MSFS 2020. In Xplane, it’s gamble. We might never know what brilliant idea Austin might have and decide to code instead of fixing what needs fixing.
Aside from custom airports and planes I want that don’t come with MSFS, I use default. And I am having a blast using the default 172 G1000 in MSFS 2024 now.
I don’t even think the author of those photos in that Reddit thread was using custom scenery. They were probably using all default scenery in MSFS 2024. And the author of those photos was just looking for the same location in the world in MSFS 2024, to do a comparison to their real life photo.
XP 12 cannot do what the photos in that Reddit thead show that MSFS 2024 can do. And I will be skeptical and say that XP 13, when it’s released, even with auto ortho, won’t be able to do what MSFS 2024 does.