I would not recommend the plane at this point…even on sale. From what I can tell with a quick flight in it - it sort of has some hiccups in framerates when selecting hot spot zones (some knobs) and if I’m reading this correctly, it does not allow you to load SIDs/STARs/or approaches in the G1000 type avionics. That is pretty unbelievable to me, so I could be wrong on that.
And, to be fair, it is listed in the product page notes (which I didn’t read):
Please note : This G1000 doesn’t simulate SID, STAR and ARRIVAL Procedures.
I may be able to salvage it by installing a GTN 750 mod though…
So yeah - that GTN 750 mod pulls Carenado’s bacon out of the fire and salvages the aircraft. I will say that the GTN 750 from RealityXP has paid for itself many times over at this point. Many thanks to @chipwich for recommending it all those years ago.
Here she is with the GTN 750 installed…much, much better…
Initial acceleration seems a bit frisky…not sure if that is legit or not. Climbout was a bit better but it still felt a lot more powerful than maybe what I was expecting…
Closer look at the panel - not sure how good it will be in VR because it uses those fairly aggravating divided click zones for knobs that the early Thranda/Carenado guys used. From what I understand, the Thranda guy is no longer working for Carenado on those conversions, so I don’t know how much more development we are going to see in that respect…
On the green needle ILS. Not sure what the Vref numbers are for the Phenom 100, so just guessed around 110 knots or so. Honest machine when hand flown too…
No reversers, no speedbrakes (?)…but the brakes work fine. Short takeoff and landing distances. An aggravating brake/tire noise that I might need to find a way to edit out.
I really love the little Phenom, since I first bought it in April 2017. Looking at the video I made then, with Drzewiecki Washington XP, I thought the traffic movement and lighting was spectacular around the familiar Washington landmarks. There was an update to the scenery in 2018 and with all of improvements to XP11 lighting, I need to revisit Washington at night. With the GTN 750 mod of course.
Love the house of cards music. Nice! I think this video shows why X-Plane isn’t going anywhere. It’s 3 years old and it looks better than any other flight sim. Sure, you have to use addons to get the best visuals, but what flight sim doesn’t? Add to this the great flight modeling and you’ve got the recipe for some great staying power in the flight sim world.
I hope FS2020 is as good as it looks and better. I’ll definitely be giving it a try when it releases.
I have two main concerns on my end. #1 is that given its online nature the amount of free modding and capability for addons may be limited. #2 the overhead costs of running the streaming servers for terrain or whatever else is streamed must be pretty high. High overhead with a rather niche market and you don’t have to be a business major to see how this can be a problem. Whats that? You say it will be on Xbox so flight simming will finally be mainstream? Let’s not kid ourselves. Flight simming has been around nearly as long as gaming has existed and hasn’t broken into mainstream. The console market is much more finicky. Players flock to the latest and greatest very rapidly. So initially there will be interest in FS2020, and then when COD9 or Madden 2021 comes out people will move on. Console gamers lack the loyalty that gluttons of PC punishment have.
I’m not a RL pilot. Not even close. 10 minuets of sticks time in an SH-3 Seaking in 1983 doth not a pilot make.
And I think that is why I am having so an issue with XP. When I get into a. virtual cockpit I want this as real as it gets. When the RL pilots get into a RL cockpit, they have it as real as it gets…truly real.
What matters to me is the average every day flight experience. You cannot get that with XP.
For some reason, known only to Google, this came up when I was searching for an image of a Derailing Wedge…
No worries Will. I think we all look for different things in our simming, and there is no right answer. I do find it a little bit amusing that for a lot of us that do fly, we don’t …well I guess I can only speak for myself here , so I don’t want all the minutiae and fluff that I have to deal with routinely on every real flight, but that is exactly the stuff you do want. I think that is probably why I have found myself enjoying Condor 2 as much as I have.
Last two days I downloaded and converted 900gb worth of orthophotos. I’m really impressed with some of them. I also highly recommend the ortho-autogen mod that removes the ground textures from the autogen buildings that end up looking like little mis-colored squares under the houses. Not totally decided on the transparent road mod, but I think it looks better than the default roads. Keeps the default highways and bridges though.
The others were too big to upload i guess. Not the best example of the roads, but you can see it keeps the lights and traffic, just takes out the akward road texture.
Theres the link if anyone needs it. Makes the buildings look 100x better. Hard to distinguish autogen from 2d ortho unless your at ground level. I thought there was a problem with the autogen when i first started it up it looked so good.
It really should be mandatory if you are running ortho. I avoided ortho because I tried to build some tiles by myself a few years ago unsuccessfully. Came out janky as hell with no autogen. Now with the pre made stuff, and this mod to remove the ground textures from autogen, its pretty amazing. The free forkboy ortho with these mods looks just as good as the True Earth Florida IMO.
I wish i could upload some better pictures but it says they are too large.
I resized them so it might be blurry, but here you can see what it looks like from about 7-8k feet zoomed in and zoomed out. I thought the autogen had crapped out, but it just blends in that much better. I have objects set to high, so naturally there will be blank spots. Looks way better than stock.
It’s funny really. And it makes sense. But where you see the bug, I see the feature. Although I would enjoy seeing other airplane traffic I definitely would not enjoy ATC. That’s too much like work. Currently there is some ATC and there is some AI traffic. As has been mentioned, neither are great, but I wouldn’t say they’ve been overlooked. In fact I think LR are quite proud of the current ATC implementation.
I’m thinking of finally plopping down the money for Traffic Global for X-Plane. No, they haven’t added in traffic at GA airports yet…but it will still populate the skies around me with little to no effort from what I’ve been reading.
It’s pretty neat Chris, and for the most part you find appropriate airline traffic for your location. Anchorage is full of Air Alaska traffic for example, Austin has plenty of SWA, United and American, Queenstown…Air New Zealand and Quantas. Luton has a strong Easy Jet presence. In other words, quite believable and I haven’t noticed much of a performance hit, if any…
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