This looks cool too… Reality XP GTN750 (you have to buy that of course) mod for the X-Trident Bell 412. I will say that the RXP GTN750 for X-Plane and the Flight1 GTN750 for P3D are two of the best add-ons I’ve purchased for my civil side sims. I love what they add to the sim…
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This looks pretty nice - ESGG - Landvetter Airport. Not my area of operations…but some of you might find it useful. It uses some ortho around the field, so it would be best to have surrounding area ortho to make it match I’m guessing…
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Good looking airport by Rufio - down on the Baja Peninsula of Mexico MMCD, Isla Cedros:
I don’t know if it has an instrument approaches though. I’m not at work with my Jepp subscription handy…
Seeing as they are on sale, they look too good to miss. Here’s hoping Queenstown and Milford Sound will be given the XP11 conversion soon!
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Yeah…I’m a sucker for some $10 airports. My shoe fetish. I will admit I wish I could pay one price for both XP and FSX/P3D versions. Supporting two sim platforms is sorta pricey…particularly when I prefer one over the other…(X-Plane)…
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I needed somewhere to park my new DA-62 
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Thanks for the heads-up about the iBlueYonder sale. In keeping with my cheap nature I opted for the free Huron’s Nest. Now I need a seaplane!
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default Cessna has a floats 
Interesting.
Curiously I have some relatives around there, but then again, I lived around Trento for quite a bit…
That little grass strip on the Heron’s nest is pretty fun…lots of character to it with the slope and high trees.
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Hiya gents and gals,
I originally asked this question on the ED boards without realizing that all comparisons between sims are apparently a bit of a no-no there. Well, it’s a company board after all, so fair enough…
Anyway, suppose that I wanted to test the civvie sim waters again after a long break, and X-Plane 11 was my platform of choice. Now, coming from DCS and thus being a bit spoilt because the best addon AC are just so damn good, which X-Plane addons would be comparable to the best DCS has to offer as it comes to realism and accuracy? Thanks for any pointers you’d care to throw my way folks 
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If modern airliners are of interest, the Flight Factor A320 Ultimate is very impressive. Of course, at $89 it should be impressive.
The nice thing with X-Plane 11 is that there is a wide spectrum of quality aircraft and scenery becoming available. I am enjoying the FF A320 mentioned above, but also a couple of the smaller GA Twins by Aerobask (I have the Velocity V-Twin and the DA-62). Both have great avionics and autopilot functionality. Next I think I will be looking for a small bush plane that is suitable for landing at Heron Island and other isolated strips. Sometimes it is nice to have a change of pace from DCS and just potter around or go globe trotting.
i have zero idea of how to fly private or commercial aircraft in comparison to what I’m learning in the DCS A-10C, but these screenshots you guys post do make me desire to fly other things. Although it’s really hard for a newb like me to understand why people prefer FSX vs X-Plane vs. others…
I leaned in the X-Plane direction when I was looking for a decent instrument trainer. At the time the instrumentation and flight modeling was a lot more fluid in X-Plane than it was in FSX. X-Plane has come a long way since then (I think I started with XP8). I have to admit though that I didn’t really use X-Plane much until version 11 came along. It has a lot more polish and with some tweaking it is visually quite stunning.
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Thanks! Yeah, could very well enjoy flying an airliner again, so that FF A320 is definitely an option. Thank you again!
If I can make a recommendation it would be to get to know x-plane “off the shelf”. In other words get to know the sim free of additional stuff. A few of the included planes are quite good. The sim is very intuitive but it does have its own infrastructure which is very different from DCS and FSX. It looks amazing stock. It looks even better with some of the better mods like the optional HD Mesh. The reason I recommend this is that, even though I have been an xp fan since version 6, I never took the time to just appreciate what Austin and his team put into it. I kept adding stuff and tweaking. Then a few months ago I rage-trashed every stick, pedal and throttle I had collected over the years (long story). Around that time XP also implemented VR capability. Without the stick I was forced to appreciate the sim itself: the view system, the airport builder, weather, ATC etc. once I was back into fully-equiped status I was able to better appreciate the magnificence that is X-Plane. However you approach it, you’ll love it! My life would be poorer without DCS and IL2. But no sim surprises me year after year like X-Plane.
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It’s a subjective choice that will be personal to you as they each offer a slightly different experience. For what it’s worth here are my thoughts (apologies for the long post in advance) …
FSX: This is the granddaddy of the modern flightsims. Microsoft put a lot of effort into MS Flightsim for over a decade and FSX is the culmination of all that work. This shows through with the wide range of situations that you can just jump into. Pick almost anywhere in the world in any weather in any plane in any season and FSX will take you there. It takes almost no effort and this is good for casual simmers.
However, FSX is now over a decade old and technology has moved on. The graphics and the environment don’t look great on modern large monitors in high resolution, and getting it to run smoothly in Windows 7+ can be challenging. You have to put up with semi-regular CTDs especially if you are running 3rd party add-ons.
P3D: This is effectively the offspring of FSX. Lockheed Martin have taken the code and stretched it pretty much as far as it will go. The graphics etc… look great but it still suffers from some of the legacy issues from FSX (32bit limitations for example). Also, as the number of aircraft are limited most simmers run 3rd party add-on aircraft which are explicitly not supported by L-M. Lastly, the base price is 10x the price of FSX even before add-ons.
X-plane: This is kinda the upstart of the bunch. It has a completely different approach to modelling flight which gives a much more fluid and realistic feel IMHO. It’s also designed for modern technology and 64bit from the off and as a result tends not to CTD or suffer glitches.
However it also has limitations. Geography at the poles is missing, and although it does include a large number of the world’s airports out of the box most of them are just flat concrete without any buildings. The default ATC is terrible and it doesn’t populate the world with other aircraft. All of this kills immersion. These issues can be alleviated somewhat with the wide array of 3rd party add-ons available, a large proportion of which are free, and you can even do it yourself with tools like LUA scripting or ortho4xp scenery generation. But this takes effort, and I personally spend at least as much time optimising and tweaking X-plane as I do flying it.
Others: I can’t really comment on others as I don’t have them.
So to sum up, FSX is cheap and easy but old and unreliable, P3D is better but still suffers from problems and is expensive, X-plane is modern and slick but requires effort. Hope this helps 
Edit: I should also add that Laminar Research seem to be putting a lot more effort into addressing X-plane’s issues than Lockheed-Martin are for P3D (my opinion)
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