Absolutely.
Xplane is a button pressing procedures simulator
MSFS is a VFR GA scenery simulator
Hopefully one day they will converge in the middle.
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This is why we are all intitled to our own opinions. Nothing wrong with X-plane if you prefer.
When I fly MSFS, I see the present and future of flight sims, when I fly X-plane, FSX and P3D I see them as the past, basically the golden oldies.
I doubt they take notice really, this sort of talk is nothing new in the flight sim community. As I’ve said before I use MSFS, XP and P3D and it’s been a very long time since something has jumped out and made me lean towards one sim over the others. All have pros and cons and I simply can’t pick one over another.
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That is diffently possible that they don’t read these or take notice but if not they should because people have many concerns and questions that they would like to be answered it would make the product that much better and would be a great thing for the customer communication is the key to success
You are missing a few more absolutely awesome, highly complex, realistic and study-level aircraft.
Hotstart TBM, Torquesim SR22-G1000, HoldMyBeer’s SR22-GT-G1000, FlightFactor 767 and Simcoder’s two REP extensions for the default C172 and Carenado’s XP11-exclusive Baron twin-engine.
Oh I agree that MSFS is indeed the future of this hobby, it’s going to be extremely interesting to see what XP12 has to offer that makes it competitive with MSFS. Addons are what drive this hobby and developers for P3D content are starting to flock over to it. Some are doing P3D and MSFS while others have dropped P3D all together for MSFS. For many the only reason they still bother with P3D is because it keeps them afloat, the P3D ship is indeed sinking. MSFS is going to be where the money is for these developers and it’s what they will support. Unless XP12 offers something that makes it competitive with MSFS I see third-party devs moving from XP to MSFS.
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SimCoders is awesome, I have their C210 and PC12 and it’s the only reason I’m able to withstand Carenado aircraft.
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Agree with this 100%. I would love to see X-plane 12 exceed all expectations.
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I’ll disagree (respectfully of course, and also not trying to invite a lengthy debate or discussion on this topic) that MSFS 2020 is the future of this hobby.
What I mean is: MSFS 2020, at its current stage, and the things it’s got going for it, is not the future of this hobby.
Adding shiny POIs to different parts of the world every couple of months, forcing people to download gigantic updates that people don’t want, leaving bugs unsolved that paying customers have been reporting and complaining about since release day, not paying little to no attention to IFR features, aircraft-specific realism such as flight model, wear and tear, failures etc…all of these is not future of this hobby.
Not allowing specialist, professional 3rd-party developers to override the default flight model is not the future of this hobby.
Selling us a flight model for $60 that can’t simulate something as simple as adverse yaw (something that FSX and FS 2004 had straight out of the box decades ago), and then boldly claiming on Twitch that it was done with advice taken from real world pilots, is not the future of this hobby.
Reality XP’s ( @CptLucky8’s) study-level GNS 530 and GNS 430 avionics products were available from day one on MSFS 2004, from day one on MSFS X (or FSX), from day one on Microsoft ESP platform and from day one on P3D version 1.0 and P3D 2.0 for their professional edition customers. Not having these products on day 1 or even day 240 (or 8 months) after the official release of MSFS 2020 is not the future of this hobby.
Restricting third party developers from using DLLs or raw C/C++ code, and instead forcing them to bend down and use weak, slow languages and technologies such as WASM, Javascript, HTML etc, and forcing them to be compliant with a locked-in, walled-off, sandboxed and inferior console Xbox video-gaming ecosystem is not the future of this hobby.
What MSFS 2020 offered so far since release day up until now has all to do with scenery simulation for gamers, and got absolutely nothing to do with “flight” simulation.
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I shall add: a simulator whose official communication is spreading fear among customers and telling 3rd party vendors are going to stole their personal information to justifying sandboxing is unexpected (1). In my opinion, telling the 3rd party vendors are thieves and customers must be protected from them is a fallacious argument and doesn’t send a good message to 3rd party vendors.
I much prefer the original live explanation, where Eric is not only factual (2), but is also honestly giving Asobo’s point of view from a technical standpoint.
I shall also add I feel like there is a large misunderstanding about what 3rd parties are really doing in this business and I believe the lack of communication is certainly contributing to entertaining many misconceptions both sides unfortunately.
(1) the official transcript and the live Q&A video are pretty much similar, except for this specific question: “Can we talk about DLL?”
Live comment:
- DLLs can carry unsafe code and they can’t have unsafe code in add-ons in the Market Place. Sandboxing is good for having safe add-ons in the Microsoft store.
- Sandboxing is also a good way to port legacy addons in C++
Official transcript:
- When you ship a DLL, you never know what it is going to do! It has access to personal informal information and result in having security issues. Using WASM, we are sure that 3rd party content only accesses designated files!
(2) You can read more about the technicalities I’m explaining here:
SDK Q&A Stream Feedback - #3 by CptLucky8
SDK Q&A Stream Feedback - #8 by CptLucky8
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Oh I definitely enjoy the GTN 650/750 from RealityXP (I have the GNS 430/530 from Flight1). I remember the Dreamfleet Piper Dakota for FS9, if I remember right it had the 430 from RealityXP shipped with it.
Another thing is I would like to bring up is I was bummed when I saw that the devs aren’t going to open up the weather engine, I thought right then and there Active Sky wasn’t going to be a thing. I remember reading though that HiFi is doing something.
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Back to the original topic, I did fly X plane yesterday, for the first time in over a year. Granted, I have all the Orbx True Earth titles, but I found the scenery not bad with this combo.
On the other hand, the default clouds and weather awful, I had to load UWXP and ASXP again to make it palatable. I agree that scenery is not as important in IFR, but weather effects?
Performance was also a disappointment. With everything maxed (except no SSO) I was getting about 25-35 fps, so not much different from MSFS.
All in all X plane doesn’t seemed to have changed much since the Vulkan betas from a year ago. Maybe I’ll use it if there is a plane I miss flying from time to time.
I would like to get back into PilotEdge, but haven’t been able to trust MSFS quite yet. Anyone using MSFS for PE?
For me it’s not so much the performance but how bad the aliasing is in XP.
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This real world flight instructor, ATP and commercial pilot did the entire 11 I-ratings on PilotEdge and videoed it all, using the Working Title CJ4 mod, the only aircraft in MSFS 2020 that I’d consider trust-worthy and fully IFR/Vatsim/PilotEdge/IVAO ready, although it’s still not anywhere near any study or even semi-study-level aircraft that’s ever been made for Prepar3D or XP11. The flight model could be dubious at times, although for the most part it works well, and it has absolutely no realism features such as failures, wear and tear, circuit-breaker simulations that dozens and dozens of aircraft in XP11 and Prepar3D ecosystem so comfortably simulate. So basically it’s a scenery browser aircraft but the FMS is almost 1:1 (according to a real world CJ4 pilot I’ve spoken to, or 75 percent accurate, according to the devs themselves) with the real world unit, and therefore I’d be honest and say that it’s much better than any default or payware aircraft released for MSFS 2020 so far :
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One of the funny things I hear a lot on VATSIM is someone will make a comment on frequency about a problem that hardly ever got mentioned prior to MSFS and generally the controller will respond with “New sim huh?”.
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Well said.
As I said in my post above, FS2020 is a scenery simulator.
One day, I hope, it will become a serious flight simulator as well. If it does, it will then offer the best of both worlds and then…and only then…become the future of flight simulation.
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I know that isn’t all about the aircraft but it will be interesting to see where this whole “serious flight simulator” debate goes when A2A drops their Comanche (I believe their Aerostar is put on the backburner due to the unfortunate gear up landing). There are many that wouldn’t consider the FBW A320neo to be good enough when (and if) FSLabs drops their A320. Many will say the exact same about the Aerosoft A320 (which I believe the FBW A320neo will always be better).
No need to fly on other simulators to know where the benchmark is. The benchmark nowadays is Microsoft Flight Simulator.
But hey, some that know nothing about flight simulators and their history (or have simply chosen to forget, because remembering wouldn’t be convenient to their false narrative) will throw around nonsensical memes like “scenery simulator” ignoring the fact that Microsoft Flight Simulator is infinitely more advanced 7 months after release than any previous flight simulator in a similar time frame, or even much later.
The only way previous flight simulators can even come close (not that close) to compare is by piling hundreds of dollars of addons on top of them. Out of the box, they aren’t even in the same galaxy.
The future of the hobby is firmly set here. There are zero doubts about that.
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One thing I don’t understand about people saying that XP is superior is if it was so great then why are people messing around with fixing stock aircraft so much? While I don’t have the Reality Expansion Pack for the LR 172 I do have the Airfoillabs 172 and it’s LOADS better when it comes to flight model than the LR 172. See what was done here? Addons were used.
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We got people raging here who went on record saying that the CRJ is “default level.” What exactly can you expect from such shining level of expertise? 
But I wouldn’t worry. More and more talented developers are jumping on board and abandoning obsolete platforms, accelerating their schedules, and finding more ways to work with MSFS. For instance IndiaFoxtEcho is working on an helicopter with its own custom flight model directly countering some of the misinformation included in this thread.
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