X-Plane - help me decide

Flight Sims
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With all the recent X-Plane talk, I am now seriously considering to start flying X-Plane.
There are only two problems: no money and no time. However, the first one can be solved by waiting a few months.
The second reason is really holding me back. I currently only fly DCS, and am lucky if I can get in one flight per week. This, combined with the fact that I already have way more aircraft than I am half-proficient with, has led to me not buying any more aircraft.

You can understand why I would hesitate to spread my simming time any thinner.

The main reason why I want to fly X-Plane is in anticipation of the Christmas flight. It would be really awesome to fly around my hometown of Leiden, and some vacation destinations, in a flight sim. This is not possible in DCS.

However, I am afraid of the huge amount of add-ons (because of money and troubleshooting) needed to actually get a halfway decent representation of an area and the (real-life) weather.

In conclusion, I want to fly around a half-way decent representation of specific places in Western Europe (mostly Holland) with real/realistic weather for as little money as possible. Depending on your estimations, I may or may not buy it (so little time to fly).

What are your thoughts on this?

Update: apparently X-Plane 10 is on sale for €25 now

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What Christmas flight? LOL…(I’m just wrapping up the announcement - should be up tomorrow morning!) We are going South this year!

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Let me think on your post tonight…and I’ll get back to you in the morning (well, our morning…lol…)

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Pretty much the same situation as @Freak here. I am still on the fence about XP-11 but I am not sure if it is worth it without addons that cost a sh**load of money…

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The Netherlands look a bit under represented when it comes to addons in X-plane, it looks fine as is, beats FSX/2004 default scenery hands down though. But if you really want to fly around Leiden and land a 206 on the Kaasmarkt, or try a beaver in the Galgewater then you’d really need FSX with NL2000.

http://www.nl-2000.com/nuke/

For the rest of the world I still think X-plane 10 default looks better then P3D/FSX, although the ORBX scenery($$$) solves a lot.

Found this for X-plane but it’s payware(EDIT: It’s not, I was wrong): http://asn-xp.aerosoft.com/?page_id=2618

Googling onwards I found some recommendations on how to improve VFR for The Netherlands in XP-10:

That scenery package has a bunch of interesting looking recommendations although I really cannot vouch for any of it since I have not tried em yet.

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There is also Ortho4XP that many people are using to give true satellite imagery (I guess) of their scenery area…but I know nothing about how it works or how it looks. I’ve not tried it.

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Totally forgot about that one! It’s quite impressive really.

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Thanks for the suggestions, I’ll browse through that over the weekend. Now I have to figure out how long the X-Plane 10 sale lasts.
Any opinions about X-Plane 11?

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Still in beta, soon to be released.

Buying the digital download of xp10 from the x-plane site nets you xp11 at no extra cost, fyi. The steam sale doesn’t do that - you’d have to buy xp11 for full price on top of xp10. Just so you’re aware.

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Steam XP sale will last till Nov 29th. And there will be the steam christmas sale soon so no hurry here :slight_smile:
also starting the christmas flight little bit later will asure that your pictures will not be overlooked in the huge pile of others :smiley:

The other option is FSX, it is 5e on christmas sale (right now 12.5e) but as mentioned the default FSX scenery is not so good as XP. I have experience only with FSX, so I am looking forward to buy XP10.

My solution when I heve little spare time for virtual flying is to do only short hops :wink:

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Link to on-topic post