XPlane-12

Do it. I love X-Plane!

fair price.

I am on the fence with XP12 for some time now, uninstall or keep it, thats the dilemma :slight_smile:

for now, only the beta test of COLIMATA’s F-104 FXP is keeping it safe on my drive

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Why uninstall it? Need the room?

I still find it to be the most accurate sim of the two I own. I find that I use X-Plane for IFR practice and deeper dives and MSFS for quick jaunts and lazy tourism. I now enjoy both equally yet for very different reasons. BTW, I flew a hard IFR flying from Merril, AK to Fairbanks in a DC-3 for FSE and flew it using ATC. The whole experience was plausible. Recent XP updates have been reported to have made improvements with ATC. That flight concurred.

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Yeah, I fully agree with you! I never understand (except the storage size, but ssd/hdd are very cheap nowadays) that when you have a new flight sim you should uninstall the older…

Not exist a perfect civil flight sim, all of them have their pros vs cons. Also important to mention that even if you have the best ever flight sim if it not have the aircraft or the region you wanna fly you will use it rarely.

In my pc i have these ones and examples of why i still have them:
MSFS2020 - global scenery, and some 4 prop aircraft unique to him, PMDG 737.
XP12 - The most used one, a best for helis, Airbuses, CL650, IXEG 737, …
XP11 - An24RV, Tu154M,…
XP10 - PMDG DC6
FSX - A2A B377, …
P3D - MJ Q400, QWS 787
AFS4 - Smooth, beautiful, Helis, VR
PSX - B744 on professional level
Condor Soaring 2 - Gliders

So depending on the mood and aircraft i wanna fly, i open X or Y sim. Why not have them all, then i not loose any good addon.

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I fully agree @smokinhole and @stavka

its the most accurate and definitely its not perfect. so I wanted to delete it out of that frustration :slight_smile:

its great for sandboxing imo. custom aircraft over custom scenery. I just dont have enough will to play it that way.
F-104 FXP beta test gave me that purpose. I played test pilot over Nevada.

I guess I will stick with that test pilot way of play in XP for some time.

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this view sums the frustration with this sim. I know this sim isnt perfect (what is?), but it can be real pain sometimes.
but definitely it could shine when flying … in cloud … on moonless night :grin: :wink:

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or there is lot of shine up there at FL500 :sunglasses:

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Sadly all sims have their issues. On Lisbon (capital of Portugal) it sometimes at distance creates some huge spiky hills that only disapeared when flying close and there not exist any hill in the place, and talking about msfs the claimed nr1 in scenery.
So, yeah, all flight sims have their scenery issues. For a guy (me) that cames from FS3 having this “things” is not enough to uninstall them.

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Well at least now they have competition. They’ll either figure out whether or not “eye candy” can finally be as important to them as it is to all but a portion of their current and future users—or they won’t.

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I am really curious what they have in plans after that price increase.

I hope they will up their game and it will be worth it.

Having better holidays and yearly bonus payback ??? :stuck_out_tongue:

I think can be a streaming global photo scenery (that have monthly costs)
AFS4, MSFS, FlyInside FS all have it since long time, now its time for xp to also try it.

@PaulRix did you see this?

I’m really hoping they revisit the other terrains they had in 11. Looks like there should be a pretty nice discount for owners of the True Earth scenery in 11.

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Thanks for the heads up Ted. I might have to pick that up seeing as I will get a decent discount. :sunglasses:

Edit > That is a VERY good discount. just $3 if you already have the XP11 version.

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So I was out of the loop during the period you posted this…in that separation/divorce cave…so I’m going to go back and read your full first impressions AFTER I post just my quick and dirty first impressions from just an hour with the DEMO last night… I don’t want your impressions to change mine…but then I’m interested to go back and read your full post and then I’ll comment again… :rofl:

I downloaded the demo last night and fired it up. Very, very first impression in the demo…there are some sweeping cut scenes that show the weather…lighting…rain ponds around PDX. Absolutely stunning. I initially fired it up in 2D and whatever preset settings (I think they were near maximum) were running very fluidly at 3440 x 1440 even on my aging 2080Ti. I was super excited by what I saw. It looked lush and verdant…very very nice first impression…

The demo plops you in the Cirrus cockpit (ewwww…I don’t know man…just not a fan of that plane for some reason…even though I’ve never flown one…they look so…sterile…). I took the opportunity to map my HOTAS with most of the settings I’ve been using in XP-11. Everything looks very very familiar (that’s a good thing). The PDX area demo scenery is very good…and a nice break from Seattle and Innsbruck or wherever (is ONLY the PDX area included in the demo?)…

I took a short flight…everything felt great. Then I struggled a bit to get the proper order of operations right to get VR working. That wasn’t X-Plane’s fault…more of an inexperience with me on how to get non Steam games working with my new (to me) Quest 3. Finally stumbled upon the right combination of starting things up.

My first impression in VR…the cockpit and environment lighting continues to struggle just like it did in XP-11. I tried to find an HDR or bloom setting that would fix things…but it looks like there is possibly a LUA plug-in that can perhaps help. Whatever the case…all my fiddling with the sliders couldn’t fix the high contrast problems. The outside view out the window is way too bright…and often the inside view of the cockpit is way too dark. Too contrasty (that isn’t a real word). I only tried the Cirrus, the DC-9, the 737, and the Airbus. Honestly…underwhelmed by everything…I mean they pretty much looked like XP-11 models. The Airbus is obviously a new addition…but it doesn’t look like overwhelmingly great. I’ve always loved the default DC-9 though. I’ll explore the other included aircraft later today. In VR though…the cockpits are too dark.

Performance-wise…what was perfectly fluid in 2D required some concessions in VR. I still don’t know what the meaning of the settings sliders are…it would be really nice if there was a pop-up as you mouse over them to describe what it is exactly they do and what affect they have on performance. I’ll need to find a description online.

I found the scenery in VR to be less compelling than what I was initially presented with in 2D…no doubt due to the scenery complexity and density being scaled back. Performance was good enough on my 2080…but if I added traffic and custom scenery I’m sure I would need to make additional concessions.

I only spent an hour with it…so very very rough first impressions. I’ve always like Laminar’s VR menu tools on the hand controllers…and the ease and simplicity of the view control system for things like fly-by and circling view are (IMHO) so much better than FS2020 and I assume 2024 (does 2024 now have a fly-by view?)…

If XP-12 goes on sale again soon I’ll probably pick it up and start making the move towards it. I will spend more time in the demo to be sure though…

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That was my first impression on seeing the opening scenes in the demo. The color seemed better…the diffuse lighting…very good. It wasn’t until I got into the cockpit that I felt the HDR or contrast or something isn’t quite right from that perspective.

Agreed. It looks great…comparable to the rain on the canopy of the Hornet in DCS at night… very moody…

My hope as well. Something about MSFS just hasn’t clicked for me. I mean…I only logged less than a dozen hours in MSFS 2020…and didn’t buy barely any add-ons for it. I think I haven’t given it a chance (might as well skip right to 2024 now)…so I admit I’m not fully informed on it.

So that’s not just me. I was messing with all of the sliders trying to get some of that shimmer toned down but wasn’t finding the perfect mix of visuals and performance.

Interested to try that…

Interesting that is still around. I had mapped my mouse pointer on/off to a HOTAS button for that very reason…

Interested to try that out too…

This has me most curious. I had also read there is some auto-ortho thing but in the very brief research (a You Tube video maybe by Q8Pilot?)…it sounded like it injects some stuttering perhaps. I need to explore this more… I also have the ORBX scenery areas for X-Plane 11…would be curious if I would have to repurchase them for XP12…something I would not be keen to do… ($$$)

Good to hear stuff like that still works…

Were those VR settings? What is your GPU? Oh…nevermind…I see you answered @Troll in the affirmative.

You’re gonna have to stop… :rofl: You are going to make me regret reading this thread…

Always appreciated this aspect of X-Plane. It seems to be able to handle the back and forth from 2D to VR without much issues…

Nice…

Interesting…I like to hear this…

Quick question…better to buy XP12 standalone or Steam edition?

I’m still not sure how to do this. That was what I was struggling with in the XP12 demo I think. My XP-11 version runs through Steam…which might be set up to use OpenXR. I’m not sure how I get the standalone demo (which does not run through Steam) to just default to OpenXR. I don’t want to screw up my other installs of other things…as I predominantly use SteamVR…I think… (what does DCS use?)… I’m still getting used to this Quest/Meta environment.

Didn’t get to try that in the demo last night…interested to check it out today.

Good to know.

Hope to read success on that later in this thread…

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Weird going back to my old thoughts about XP12 when I practically stopped playing it when I bought the XBOX two years ago. MSFS 2020 has been my civ-sim ever since. Actually, I have come back a few times. A week-long deep dive into VSKYLABS SR-71 was time well spent. And twice since my switch, I’ve carved put a few days to scratch my FSEconomy itch. But that’s been about it. I use MSFS like a living room Google Earth. I’ve found so much satisfaction with that approach to civ simming that X-Plane just seems like work now.

Then came MSFS 2024. What a buzz killer. If simming was sex and MSFS 2024 was a girl, I could easily see our rocky relationship convincing me that lifelong celibacy is the only path to sanity.

Anyway, my initial few, small complaints about XP12 were actually resolved by LR. The shimmering clouds, particularly. Same with ortho and tree placement. By the time I quit X-Plane, I honestly had nothing but positive vibes about it. It started good and quickly became great. I do have a workflow with VR that isn’t hard but can’t be sensibly explained in this format. I’ll happily walk you through it. But you have to accept a VR framerate of 30. For some, that’s just not possible. I don’t notice it.

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I don’t know if this will work for XP12, but in XP11 (because even though it has a ‘HDR lighting’ setting, it isn’t really HDR) that issue was driving me nuts. I had to turn off HDR on my monitor before starting the sim otherwise the colour saturation/contrast was insane.

Until I found this tip online: Change the Vulcan/OpenGL setting to…

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Let me get back to you on this soon; I’ve had maybe a total of 10 hours of time in any sim since the school year started, but I might be able to sneak in another hour or two over the holiday break.

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you mean the thing that the cockpit is too dark in XP12?