X-plane:



FSX:

Hehe she doesn't look happy with your flying...

Is any woman ever?

They both look really bad, I hate when developers put 3d People in the cockpit. They never look good and only ruin the experience. From the outside, Carenado has nice 3d people, but thank god they dont appear inside while in 3d cockpit view.

Rob

Oh, Heidi in A2A's Cub is OK. Makes any landing a challenge, the way she changes the centre of gravity too far forward plus blocks your view with her hair. And her Goth sister... rrrrrrowrrr

Yeah I like that the theres a button in the new XPlane Jetstream 32 to make the co-pilot "go to the bathroom", mine stays there the whole time.

Actually, the blonde would look okay if they fixed her hairline. Looks like something thrown over her head. But that X-PLane co-pilot. Geez! If that's the best they can do, why put him there?

If Xplane was the only flight simulator out there, I'd give it a shot.

I thought some of the scenery was nice, especially at night, but if you compare the default 747 panel to the one in FSX, FSX wins hands down.

I'd take a screenshot but I've already deleted it.

Yeah I have the same feeling about many of the "default" airplanes they include in the X-Plane 10 package, which there's a couple that are really well done (the Baron 58), but they also include a bunch that are out of date and really bad examples and anyone trying the X-Plane 10 demo who happens to try those instead of the Baron will come away thinking WTF? like I did originally.

Here's a shot of the co-pilot from one of the payware add-ons (Jetstream 32) and so it's obviously possible to have good looking graphics in X-Plane10 but IMHO the devs just make some bad decisions on what they include in the demo and full package with those default aircraft.

I hate doing pilot models. I really, really do.

Pretty, but awfully many polies (see the JS32 shot from XP) - awful performance.
As little polies as possible, good performance - fugly.

Make the model sit right, make the model grab the controls right, check that shoulders, knees, and hips aren't unnaturally positioned.
Individualize, texture.
No clones, no mutants, but no Tom Cruise or John Travolta in your cockpit either.

Texturize and adjust, texturize and adjust, texturitze and adjust...slightly larger nose, slightly taller, slightly retreating hairline, oh, let's just have individual hair colors! And a beard! Yay!
Risk modeling boobs and make a crew member female? Nah. Too many traps.
Add some ethnicity features? Nah, too risky as well.

To top it off, the models need individual headsets, individual sunglasses, shoes, etc...

And in the end?
An uncanny valley nightmare with just as many polies as necessary to make the external model appear less ghostly.

(http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o183/t3h_3vil/FS%20Development/Pilots.jpg)


If I had the resources, I'd easily put a detailed pilot model in the virtual cockpit as well, but it would need to be at least as useful as HL 2's Alyx in terms of detail, personality and AI.

Until then, it's either the ghost of A. Stockstill or Otto.

Yeah personally I am not a fan of adding human objects to sims, unless you can make the humans look pretty realistic then the unrealistic humans just bring down the immersion.

Even with Orbx airfields, they put in all these cool "PeopleFlow" humans in the airfields but probably due to the difficulty you mention with the human modeling, their humans look unrealistic to me compared to the other superbly modeled Orbx objects at that airfield, so I just leave "people flow" off, not only does it save me framerate but keeps my immersion up, even if the airfields look more empty.

IMHO these sims should leave the poorly modeled stuff out, thankfully usually we are able to config/tweak them out.

I realize that high poly's mean a hit on fps but then there are games where people look so realistic like say Far cry or Sniper Elite V2 and I'm able to run those with high frame rates why is a model in FSX such a hard thing, I mean there are some ways to get around polys by using shading and texture aren't there?

FSX supports bones, specular and bump maps, all of which can be used for animating and realistically texturing models of humans, BUT...it simply isn't necessary.

I could waste a ton of time, polygons and custom animations on a co-pilot who can assist you flicking switches (by, e.g. "reading" a checklist to him), do ATC for you and babble some random sentences, but what for?
It would at best be a feature used for a few YouTube videos and turned off after a few times as the novelty fades and repetitiveness sets in. Not worth the time and energy invested into implementing it. (What captain always flies with the same passenger or first officer anyway?)



Don't compare MSFS to other games. The purpose of a flight simulation engine is just about opposite of one for a first person shooter.
A shooter gets up close and personal with their human models, but have a draw distance of a kilometer at best.
Flight simulators, however, need a draw distance of fifty to sixty kilometers at worst, but, then again, don't need to invest any serious GPU resources into human models.

Military simulations, by the way, cover a good middle ground, with less details for the humans, but a larger draw distance than shooters.

So in short, a comparison is in "bananas vs oranges" territory. With the FSX-banana suffering from genetic defects, but that's another story.

After getting a few freeware Aircraft I got a Dehaviland Dragon Rapide that has a cabin full of passengers who look more or less realistic, I would think that someone who makes payware could make crew and passenger models, place-able people for missions and so forth however I don't know if payware aircraft have the hooks to place them, and I've not even looked into mission building in FSX, placing objects and parked aircraft etc.. though I have seen some freeware that people have done this for.

Passenger models are fixed within the model itself, and there is no method that I know of to have an external module put people inside an aircraft.
Ramp rats are a different affair, as demonstrated by various ground support add-ons.

As for the Rapide, an open cabin and just ten to fourteen seats makes putting in some passenger models a sensible solution to in-flight loneliness.

Filling up a larger aircraft, however, does not make sense beyond cardboard passengers for previously elaborated performance reasons.
I seem to remember a (payware) aircraft whose exterior model had a few of these filling up the cabin.

How about TakeOn Helicopters? The secretary is quite hot and has a very business-like cleavage. Best of all she talks... Rarely and only when spoken to.

Although I like the tongue-in-cheek nature of the original post, to be fair the plane with the hideous co-pilot is from 10+ years ago. It's still included because the plane itself is fun even though no one has bothered to take the co-pilot out.

That's not very realistic is it