I'll be throwing this up at Avsim too whenever they get back online.


I've never seen this done before and thought it might be an interesting exercise. FSX and XP10 head to head, making the same flight in the same aircraft showcasing the kind of addons each sim currently has to offer. The screenshots that follow are unedited and show both sims as they are installed on my PC right now. I also thought I'd offer some commentary and observations along the way, primarily from the perspective of a long time MSFS user who is still relatively new to XP. These are just my opinions, I'm not trying to promote one sim at the expense of the other. Both have the strenghts and weaknesses and it is of course up to the individual to determine their relative merits!

It's taken me a good few hours to put all this together, but as I said I don't recall anyone doing this before so I hope at least some of you find it a worthwhile effort.

First of all the flight itself... a 390NM flight from Shannon (EINN) in Ireland to Manston (EGMH) in England. The flightplan is pretty straightforward VOR to VOR and the routing is EINN SHA STU BCN CPT OCK BIG DET EGMH

In more descriptive terms... after taking off from Shannon we head east south east passing over Limerick and then between Kilkenny and Waterford, leaving the Irish coast at Wexford. Across the Irish Sea we make landfall on the Welsh coast at Fishguard, tracking across south Wales past Swansea and Newport, crossing the mouth of the river Severn and into England just north of Bristol. Continuing to track eastwards across England we pass over Swindon and Reading before adjusting course to pass to the south of London, past Heathrow, over the famous WW2 RAF Fighter Command station at Biggin Hill before heading further into Kent over the Medway Towns and finally tracking along the north Kent coast towards our destination of Manston where the intention is to fly the published NDB/ILS/DME approach to runway 28.

The aircraft in use will be the Carenado Beech King Air C90 - available for both FSX and XP10. Cruising at 18,000ft we can expect a respectable 240 knots TAS.

The flights took place on consecutive days using live weather. The XP10 flight was first on 10th March 2014 departing at 1400 local using XP10's built in weather downloads and depiction. The FSX flight was on 11th March 2014 departing at 1200 local using Active Sky Next for weather conditions. Ideally I should have used the same weather for both flights as the weather for the FSX flight had considerably more cloud cover than the previous day with fog at the destination.

The addons in use are:

FSX:
Orbx FTX England - AUD$32.95
Orbx FTX Wales - AUD$32.95
Orbx FTX Ireland - AUD$32.95
REX4 Texture Direct - AUD$39.10
Active Sky Next - US$49.99
Steve's DX10 Fixer - AUD$37.30
Carenado King Air C90 - US$39.95
RealityXP GNS430 WAAS (installed in the C90 cockpit but not used for navigation during this flight) - US$49.95

Total cost of addons approx £180/US$300

XP10:
alpilotx HD Mesh V2 - FREEWARE
alpilotx Farms and Treelines V2 - FREEWARE
alpilotx Experimental Dense Forests - FREEWARE
Sim Heaven OSM Europe - FREEWARE
OpenScenery Object Library (required for OSM Europe) - FREEWARE
Urban Maxx V2 3D - US$7.95
Sky Maxx Pro - US$39.95
EINN Shannon Airport Scenery by Renair from www.x-plane.org - FREEWARE
EGMH Manston Airport Scenery by adriansw from www.x-plane.org - FREEWARE
Carenado King Air C90 - US$34.95

Total cost of addons approx £50/US$83


I consider the above mix of addons to be fairly typical for an "enthusiast" and a good representation of what both sims have to offer currently.

As far as in sim settings go:

FSX:
DX10
8xCSAA
2x SGSAA
16x AF
SweetFX used to increase contrast slightly, decrease gamma and add some bloom
All scenery sliders maxed except autogen on "very dense" and water on "2x low".

XP10:
2x SSAA + FXAA
16x AF
HDR on
Atmospheric scattering off
All scenery sliders maxed except road traffic at "Chicago Suburbs"

Both sims running 2560x1440 res on a 27" Asus PB278Q PLS monitor. Please people I can't stress enough the importance of properly calibrating your monitors.

System specs are:

i7 950 (Bloomfield) overclocked to 4GHz
12GB RAM
Nvidia GTX780Ti
Asus Xonar DG 5.1 PCI sound card
Both sims installed on a 1TB 7200RPM mechanical drive
Windows 7 64bit

So then, on to the pictures!

PLEASE CLICK ON PICS FOR FULL SIZE!






The astute observer will notice in the XP10 shot I made the silly mistake of taking off from a closed runway at Shannon! Perhaps the most striking difference here is the almost glass like water of XP10. If you look closely you'll see both sims have the bauxite refinery at Aughinish on the other side of the river Shannon.






Climbing out of Shannon and turning right to intercept the SHA 112 degree radial. With the default XP10 clouds you'd get an instant "white out" when flying into clouds, but the XP10 shot here shows the much better Sky Maxx Pro clouds which reduce visibility but don't have instant white out. Both sims show the prominent industrial estates in the town below. Looking at this area on Google Earth neither sims get it quite right but I'll perhaps tip a nod towards the Orbx version for looking more like the real thing.






Heading east and climbing. You can see here the quite significant difference in terrain textures, clouds, and particularly the amount of autogen.






Looking back across the Shannon river. Another good comparison between the terrain textures and clouds.






Up at cruise altitude now showing the C90's instrument panel in both sims. XP10's cockpit shadows are shown to quite good effect here. Also note XP10's notoriously not-so-good GNS unit with the infinitely better (and more expensive!) RealityXP GNS430 in the FSX shot.






Another comparison of the Irish countryside as depicted in the two sims.






One thing I do have to point out is how great the Carenado C90 looks in XP10, it's an absolute stunner! The FSX version by comparison, in my opinion just doesn't look quite as nice. I've also got issues with the anti-aliasing and overall image quality in DX10 that are visible here (take a closer look at the jaggies on the cheat lines on the aircraft livery) but more on that later.






Passing over the river Barrow with Waterford in the distance. This shot shows pretty well one of the biggest problems with the MSFS graphics engine. The further away from the aircraft the lower the LOD (Level of Detail) becomes and the engine displays lower res terrain textures. Compare the textures underneath the aircraft - nice and crisp - to the ones progressively further away - blurrier and uglier. Contrast this with the XP10 shot where the terrain textures remain beautifully clear all the way into the distance. I know this FSX shortcoming can be mitigated to an extent by forcing a higher LOD radius, but that comes at the expense of both framerate and increased VAS usage, something we have to be mindful of considering FSX's 32bit VAS limit.






Leaving the Irish coast at Wexford. One of the criticisms of the OSM scenery in XP10 is the buildings can sometimes look like "Lego brick building" slapped down on the ground. You can perhaps see that here with some of the larger buildings in Wexford that look a little out of place.






Out over the Irish Sea. FSX's sun effect courtesy of REX4 Texture Direct is rather anaemic. Sky Maxx Pro's effect in XP10 is much more satisfying.




Now here's a real eyesore. I think it's a waterclass issue? Anyone care to shed any light on this?






Approaching the Welsh coast. This shot shows the water in both sims. The wave animations and reflections in REX4 Texture Direct are pretty nice, and up here the sea certainly looks a bit livelier than in XP10. Sometimes XP10's water looks fantastic, other times it looks very artificial and plastic. To be fair though as a seafarer I think neither sim has really captured the look and feel of large expanses of water. For every day I've seen a blue sea there would have been three or four when it was green, grey or even brown.






Crossing south Wales. The XP10 shot shows quite well how good forested areas look with the experimental denser trees mod from alpilotx




Here's an XP10 shot that I think shows quite well how good towns or villages can look using the OSM scenery. Basically the buildings are placed as they are in reality and follow the roads much better than the FSX approach of autogen annotated textures with vector roads slapped down over the top.






The large town just above and in front of the C90's nose in the FSX shot is Llaneli. The XP10 shot is a little futher along the coast and you can see Swansea in the distance. Right at the very top of the XP10 shot you can see some strange things going on with the urban textures. That's Port Talbot.




Now here's a shot I want to use to illustrate something you won't see in XP10 - approaching clouds. XP10's weather depiction is really limited and you don't transition nicely between different degrees of cloud cover. Clouds just pop in or pop out as you move from one METAR reporting area to another. Big thumbs down from me! XP10 really needs better weather depiction.






Crossing the Severn.




Here's another pic I want to illustrate something else. This shows the DX10 cockpit shadows in FSX. Not as stark or strong as the ones in XP10 - see my earlier cockpit shots - but very blocky and pixellated. Not very nice to look at IMHO.






Another shot showing the differences in the sky environments. Sky Maxx Pro's clouds are way better than the default XP10, but sometimes (like here) they still don't look very natural.






Now's probably a good time to talk about terrain textures. Orbx took quite a pasting on various forums when they released FTX England and I think a lot of the criticism was very unfair and perhaps built on unrealistic expectations. In my opinion they achieved the most important objective and that was to make it look like England. The only reservation I have is the bright yellow fields they have scattered everywhere which I presume are meant to be rapeseed fields. Yes there is a lot of rapeseed crop grown in this country, but I think they've gone just a little bit overboard putting these bright yellow fields all over the British Isles. It's also not quite right to be seeing such bright yellow rapeseed in March. However, I understand the inherent limitations of having just five seasonal texture sets available...

Which brings me on very nicely to XP10. The elephant in the room here is the lack of seasonal textures. Whether you are flying in July or January it all looks exactly the same. From the interviews with Laminar I don't think they're going to address this any time soon so hopefully John Spahn will work some of his "Maxx Magic" and get us XP seasons! The XP10 textures used here whilst far from being ugly or an eyesore, unfortunately do not look like English farmland. Orbx FTX England - even with all its rapeseed farmers - looks much more like England to my eye at least which is perhaps to be expected as it's a product specifically meant to represent England.






Having said all that XP10's terrain can still look pretty good, especially with the HD Mesh V2 and OSM Europe. Unfortunately the weather didn't co-operate for my FSX flight and I couldnt' get a direct comparison shot!






Passing Heathrow. Now's a good time to talk performance. Passing London was going to be the stress test. On both sims here the performance on my system was fine and at no point did I notice the framerate tanking to an unflyable degree. My biggest concern was FSX and its much maligned 32bit VAS limit. I watched the memory used by FSX as I passed London and it was pretty steady at around 2.5GB - absolutely fine and well within safe limits. No doubt DX10 helped here somewhat. Now as far as XP10 goes... The OSM Europe scenery by default draws objects at an excessively large distance from the aircraft. There were some instructions posted recently about how to reduce this distance, but having only recently reinstalled XP10 in the last few days I forgot to apply this tweak. This combined with running XP10 scenery settings pretty much maxed out meant poor old XP10 was suddenly drawing literally tens of thousands of buildings in London! Net result was all 12GB of my RAM was rapidly gobbled up by the voracious 64bit XP10 and I got an OOM! No the irony wasn't lost on me. Quick reboot and reload and I was good to carry on from where I left off, with some more sensible scenery settings.






The FSX shot here shows me just after starting my descent at BIG and the XP10 shot shows me shortly before starting the descent at BIG. The eagle eyed reader will have noticed the AI traffic in the FSX shot... in this case a British Airways A319 on its way to Heathrow from Munich. This means it's time to talk about AI. XP10 has AI traffic, but not as we know it. It basically randomly populates the airports with a random selection of installed aircraft. This means you might very well see the NASA's 747 Space Shuttle Carrier at your local grass airstrip. Also, because XP10 uses the same models as the user flyable aircraft, and calculated the flight models in the same way it means a mere handful of AI aircraft in the sky will severly impact your framerate. In a nutshell XP10 badly needs an AI traffic overhaul because the XP10 skies are awfully lonely at the moment.






Now heading away from London descending towards the VOR at Detling Hill.






Descending further as we head into Kent. Check out the strange things happening with the Urban Maxx textures in the XP10 shot.






Over the Medway Towns. One probably subjective thought here is that the Sky Maxx Pro clouds look not so great from a distance, but really nice close up. Conversely REX 4 Texture Direct's clouds look very nice from a distance and perhaps a little flat and "cardboard cutout" up close.






We are afforded a sight of our destination though the XP10 clouds, but the following day was foggy so no such luck in FSX! Note the functional weather radar in XP10.






Passing overhead Manston we turn to 111 degrees and continue on for another 10NM before executing a procedure turn left to intercept the ILS. In XP10 we can see Ramsgate and its harbour, but it's a pea soup in FSX.






XP10 has the runway in sight but FSX is still stuck in the soup. Now's probably a good time to touch on that perennial of subjects.... flight models. I hand flew this approach all the way from Detling Hill and both aircraft and one observation really struck me. On the outbound leg of the approach I flew 100 knots at 2,500ft with one notch of flap. After making the procedure turn and intercepting the localiser, at one dot below glideslope I dropped the landing gear and selected full flaps, all at 100 knots. The C90 in XP10 handled this in a fairly docile and well behaved manner - I had to push the yoke forward a little to counteract the trim change until the aircraft settled down at a slower speed. In FSX the aircraft quite literally ballooned 100ft up in the air and I lost 20 knots in the space of about two seconds. It was very abrupt and almost impossible to counteract. Now I don't know which depiction is more accurate to real life, but if the FSX depiction is correct for the behaviour of a C90 selecting full flaps at 100 knots then all I can say is "wow". Other than that I also noticed quite a difference in engine behaviour. In XP10 the engines were much faster to respond to throttle movement and settled down very quickly (both in torque and prop RPM). In FSX there was noticeably more lag in response and the engines took longer to settle. From what I understand about the PT6A engine I think FSX might be closer to reality here. However, I'm aware both sims come up short in modelling turboprops. I also noticed the aircraft in both sims performed very close to the performance charts supplied by Carenado.






Come on, you've got to admit the XP10 one looks so much better!




I tried to get a shot that really captured Sky Maxx Pro's crepiscular ray effect but this was the best I could do on this flight. The native HDR of XP10 combined with Sky Maxx Pro means you can get some really nice sky effects. This shot really doesn't do it justice.






Journey's end. Note the American style freight train passing by. There's one along literally every minute or two in XP10! A minor annoyance but something I hope gets fixed. Another thing I noticed is that in FSX the road traffic in the UK drives on the left. In XP10 they are driving on the right. It's no big deal but worth mentioning.


I know I haven't touched on ATC here. It's fairly common knowledge XP10's ATC is pretty basic. So is FSX's but at least we've got some other options from third parties with FSX. I really hope someone steps up soon to give XP10 a better ATC. The other thing I didn't show here is the night time environment. Put simply XP10 blows FSX away in this regard. Night flying in XP10 is exquisite and the FSX simmer will have to pick their jaw up from the floor after seeing XP10 flying at night.


Finally I want to say something that might be a little controversial. Quite a few people are swearing by Steve's DX10 fixer and the improvements it makes in FSX. It's been written that not only does FSX look better with DX10 it also performs better as well, with a lower VAS overhead thanks to DX10's superior memory management.

Unfortunately the better performance and better looking bits simply aren't the experience I've had. I've seen no appreciable gain nor drop in performance using DX10. I'm also finding DX10's anti aliasing and overall image quality to be inferior to what I can get with DX9. Please take a look at the images below, taken with DX9, 8xS anti-aliasing, 2x SGSAA, 16x AF and running with ENB on my system:





In particular look at the cheat lines in the aircraft livery and compare them to the same in the earlier shots all of which were taken with DX10 8xCSAA and 2x SGSAA. I don't know what I'm doing wrong but I simply cannot get my DX10 FSX to look as good as this.

Anyway, I had some fun putting all this together and I found it an interesting exercise. I hope somebody finds some use in it. One particularly interesting - and surprising - thing I noticed is how good XP10 looks and flies relative to FSX, and now compare how much money was sunk into the addons used during these flights.

Both have pluses and minuses. I'm not a fan of the clouds in XP but the a/c looks good and the shadowing is better.

I tried XP several times and it was just too bizarre. I know FSX has a crappy flight model but other things make up for it.

Great comparative piece. I'm sure you'll get a lot of "but you.." statements from fans and foes of both sims, but what you've laid out is a very reasonable look at both.

My thoughts - they both look great (still amazed at how far sims have come over the past two decades) and X-Plane is rapidly gaining and passing FSX in some, but not all areas. I've wondered how much P3D has added to FSX, but honestly haven't even tried it, so I can't comment. But X-Plane has been making big strides, and I think the playing field is getting closer to level as each few months go by.

It would be interesting to fly the two flight simultaneously, on exactly the same hardware, with real weather enabled to see how each handles real weather compared directly to each other. (Using whatever the best environmental add-ons are..)

Anyway - great post..!

BeachAV8R

Wow! Great comparison of the two sims.

As a hard-core FSX flyer, I admit I had to swallow a few times and remind myself of the much better ATC, better weather and AI aircraft of FSX.

I felt the same to begin with - there were too many quirks in XP after spending so long with MSFS. To be fair though if you take the time to do some reading up on XP, get some advice from the XP old hands and get your head around how things are different you'll come away with quite an appreciation of XP. I'm finding XP's implementation of lots of stuff better than FSX...

As I wrote above, night flying is stunning, the first time you see a big long runway correctly following the terrain contours, the ostensibly quirky UI that is actually considerably more functional than FSX, installing aircraft and scenery in a way that is far simpler and more straightforward than FSX, the way XP10 actually lets your graphics card stretch its legs...



Thanks Chris I appreciate the comments, especially as I've enjoyed reading your various articles over the years.

I'd especially appreciate your thoughts on the issues I mentioned regarding flight modelling, particularly the tendency of many FSX aircraft to balloon up when dropping the flaps. My real flying experience is limited to a couple of hours in a PA-28/PA-38/Alpi Pioneer 200 (the Pioneer 200 flight was with a Serbian MiG-21 pilot, pretty awesome). XP definitely feels very different to FSX in this regard. I could perhaps understand the very abrupt change if I dropped full flaps at 140 knots, but this was going from one notch of flaps to full flaps at 100 knots...

I expect once I put this up at Avsim I might get some not so kind comments. XP has been getting more and more attention over there recently, especially in the screenshot forum and I get the impression some slightly more partisan flight simmers don't appreciate it.



I wrote the above from the perspective of a dyed in the wool FSX flyer. I'm still fairly new to XP and have only really been properly exploring it in the last couple of months.

Right now I don't think the two sims are mutually exclusive and you don't have to be a monogamous flight simmer! I'm certainly enjoying both. Right now the flow of payware for XP10 is fairly slow so I don't have much of a problem buying stuff for both. If XP10 payware development really picks up then I'll have to re think my flight simming as I don't think I could justify spending significant amounts of money on two sims.

Very nice write-up. It would be interesting to see how Prepar3D v2 stacks up. I stopped flying XP10 a year or more ago being fed up with the lack of visual progress, and because of the great add-ons available in FSX. I have since moved on to P3D, but miss flying in XP10. I am happy to see XP10 is maturing well, and I hope that in a few versions it will meet my expectations from the previous versions.

Good job!

Great comparison Pielstick, that must have taken a good amount of work.

I also own both and although I do like XP10, I don't fly it often mainly due to the unrealistic default autogen with lots of tall apartment buildings everywhere even in suburbs areas which is not typical here in North America.

I don't see that occurring in your shots above, so either that was fixed with some of the add-on files you installed or the autogen has been improved in the latest XP10 patches and I need to update it and try again.

XP10 clouds have been another pet peeve but I see SkymaxxPro seems to do a good job in your shots of fixing the dirty grey cottonballs of the default XP10 clouds, so I think I will be picking that up too.

Anyhow, glad to see how far XP10 has come and continues to come, hopefully the devs and modders will continue to focus on things the community has been calling for to make it more realistic/plausible looking to fly in.

I like the way the planes and especially helicopters feel in XP10 better, but as a VFR GA flier, the scenery I fly over in XP10 just doesn't look nearly as plausible enough compared to what I see flying VFR in FSX with ORBX regions, mostly due to the autogen... hopefully that is something that they've improved at least it looks so in your shots.

Thankfully I'm not a fanboy of either, and can appreciate the strengths of both and the awesome innovations that modders and third party devs continue to come up with for both, so we can only benefit from the continuing development of both.

Thanks again, I will be updating my XP10 and giving it some flying hours soon thanks to your post.

Regarding your flight model comments - I'll preface my comments with this: It is my understanding that some developers have written heavily modified flight models for their aircraft that sort of circumvent (or alter I guess) the inner workings of FSX in order to provide a more accurate flight model. I believe AccuSim is one of those developers, and I think VRS did it with their Hornet too. I haven't flown an AccuSim product yet, so I can't comment on how those changes affect the realistic feel of flight - I'd love to try out something like the AccuSim/A2A C-172 and Cub since I have a whole crapload of real hours in those aircraft.

With that caveat, I'd say that your observations on FSX are pretty accurate. In particular, power response always seems to lag in FSX as if the throttles are almost being moved by proxy or something. Almost like there is a half a second delay before the sim responds. This is particularly noticeable with turbine/turboprop aircraft. X-Plane, I feel, does this better.

The margins of the envelope FSX usually handles pretty poorly. Spins, knife edge, etc..(again, with a nod toward developers who may have overcome those issues with external programming). The mantra of most X-Plane users is that gauge update rate is more fluid, and just the feeling of fluid flight is better, and I agree with that. Ground handling is also far better in X-Plane provided the aircraft have the correct friction values.

Regarding flap deployment. In real life, both our Citations and King Airs will balloon a bit upon initial flap application. If you put the flaps in at or near the max flap operation speed (200 knots in both the B200 and Citation V/Ultra) you'll tend to get more control forces than if are flying at a more moderate speed. I always get a chuckle at pilots that are flying near maximum flap extension speed, and they decide to put the flaps in right at localizerglideslope intercept, because then you get a double-whammy - the slight balloon from the flaps, plus the slight negative-G pushover as the autopilot tries to scramble back down to capture the sinking glide-path. Always fun for a tickle in the tummy but not so good for passengers.

To be honest I've never really paid much attention to the differences per se between FSX and X-Plane in this regard because without the tactile feedback it really doesn't pop out at me.

I could go on for pages about the things I like (flight model wise) with regards to both sims, but I'll leave that for another day.. <g>

I just got finished writing an article for our next issue of PC Pilot about the exceptional Saab 340 by X-Aviation. Definitely nipping on the heels of the best FSX quality payware..








BeachAV8R

In general I would say quality payware airplanes make a big difference for both sims.

For XP10 especially, some of the included default aircraft are pretty rough and make a bad impression coming from FSX (the Baron was the one default I liked), my impressions and enjoyment of XP10 went up significantly once I bought a couple of quality payware planes and helicopter and those actually compare very favorably with FSX and benefit from the more lively feel of XP10.

Thanks for the kind words.

Towards the end of last year I was feeling very positive about the future of flight sims because XP10 was making progress, P3D2 was just around the corner and 2013 had been a bumper year for great FSX addons.

Now I'm a little more jaded. I think it's fair to say P3D2 hasn't got off to the best of starts. I returned mine for a refund in December. I'll revisit it if/when the bugs get sorted and developers start making some nice P3D2 only stuff. Right now it just doesn't offer enough for me to justify the effort, especially with the memory leak in 2.1

XP10 has been maturing, but quite slowly. Laminar were basically given the market on a plate and have utterly failed to capitalise on it. Listening to the noises Laminar are making it's becoming clear to me at least that they aren't at all interested in really pushing XP into the position of market leader. It's almost as if they are perfectly happy to remain the "also ran" or perhaps a niche or cult sim. Disappointing really as a lot of what's there is really top notch and the potential in XP10 is mouth watering.... however, Laminar don't appear to be interested in realising that potential





Thanks for the kind words. Yes the tall apartment buildings are still there in default. The freeware OSM scenery from Simheaven helps with this a lot. Basically they exported the OSM building data and put it into XP. The files available at Simheaven have worldwide coverage but depends a lot on the original OSM data, which itself relies on people actually filling in the data in the first place. Simheaven does periodic updates of the files to incorporate the latest OSM data sets. Europe has got the best coverage, with North America next.

Whatever you do make sure you get Urban Maxx V2 - it's only $8 and addresses a real shortcoming in XP10, namely the lack of proper urban textures.

As for the autogen... XP10 has one set of autogen for the entire world. Users have requested regional type autogen like what FSX has so the buildings can at least look something like they should in various parts of the world. Laminar have said they are going to re-do the autogen but it's not going to be regional.

Sky Maxx Pro does a nice job of making the clouds much nicer, and the crepiscular ray effect is really nice. There was a bit of a stir recently when somebody was playing around with some undocumented data variables in the data ref editor plugin and managed to enable dynamic, real time cloud shadows. The effect is absolutely stunning and adds hugely to the visual immersion factor. Unfortuntately it only works with XP's original ugly clouds. The maker of Sky Maxx Pro is supposed to be working on an update that will integrate the cloud shadows. Having said that XP's weather depiction is still a long way behind what we have in FSX with the likes of Active Sky Next or OpusFSX. XP really badly needs a weather overhaul and a decent weather injector.



Thanks for your insight Chris, much appreciated. The balloon effect in XP10 was there, but it was controllable. In FSX it was very abrupt and pretty much uncontrollable. If you have the Carenado C90 give it a try... 100 knots with one notch of flap. Apply full flap and drop the landing gear and see what happens.

Interesting about your thoughts about how FSX models flight toward the edge (and beyond) the envelope. I seem to remember some years ago Rob Young making very similar comments. If I recall correctly he was the first developer to implement proper spin behaviour in his flight models.

The A2A C172 is great, really very well done. I'm pretty sure the Majestic Dash 8 runs its flight model outside of FSX and injects it via Simconnect - I've heard they are the first developer to get proper turboprop behaviour in FSX and this is how they did it. Again, another addon I have but haven't had the time to sit down and learn.

I agree the ground handling in XP seems to be better implemented. I know you can do some stuff with FSUIPC in FSX that lets you replicate wet or icy runways.

I'll keep an eye out of your Saab article in PC Pilot.... Again I have the Saab but too many addons too little time! I've heard nothing but praise for it though.



My thoughts exactly. The default aircraft that come with XP10 are pretty uninspiring. Some of the payware available is really excellent. The LES DC-3 is a work of art, and some of the most fun I've had flight simming recently has involved abusing the Flyjsim 727...

Oh yeah, and helicopters in XP are much better than in FSX....

Agreed! (Haven't flown any "hi-fi" add-ons for FSX yet though, so maybe they've tweaked things up a bit..)

BeachAV8R

Nope. Several years on and the Dodosim Bell 206 is still top dog for FSX helicopters. Funnily enough that's another one that does its flight modelling outside of the sim and injects it in. Do you see a pattern emerging here?

Helicopter Total Realism is of course an option but there aren't plugins for all the helicopters available, quite a few are missing.



Just noticed something looking at these shots again.

Check out the first instrument panel shots...

The barber pole on the airspeed is at different values: 190 knots in FSX and 215 knots in XP10.

What could cause this difference? Perhaps different atmospheric conditions?

Interesting to note that both shots were taken at 18,000ft, approx 1160lb/ft torque and 1900RPM. According to the performance charts that should give me around 240 knots true airspeed.

I didn't make a note of the temp/pressure but assuming ISA conditions the FSX model is pretty much bang on at 240 knots true airspeed give or take, whilst the XP10 model is doing around 254 knots.

If you open the screenshots to full size you can just make out the DME in FSX is indicating a ground speed of 220 knots, and in XP it's 240 knots. I know DME isn't the most accurate, but I can't get a GPS readout for the groundspeed in these shots.

Interesting.



Now then, I'm on leave, the wife is away for 3 weeks visiting her parents. I can carry on flight simming until the wee hours every morning! I got Wings Over Flanders Fields for Christmas and haven't even fired it up yet, still need to properly check out the DCS Mi-8 and UH-1, got a bunch of campaigns in IL-2 I want to fly, the latest Team Fusion patch for CLOD is imminent, thinking about reinstalling FS9... Too many flight sims not enough time even if I am staying up flying until 4am every morning

Maybe the XP10 C90 had all the fat people sitting in the rear seats and the FSX one had just one Ethiopian pilot? That's a politically incorrect way of saying that load does matter. An extreme aft CG (generally) results in a faster cruise speed while a forward CG results in more drag and lower cruise speed. I'm not saying that's the case, but I figured I'd just tell a story that might make the difference plausible.. <g>

BeachAV8R

Could be! I remember setting up the FSX flight without any passengers or load, only the pilots. Can't remember what I did with the XP flight. I might be wrong but I think XP doesn't give the option of placing a load at specific reference points like FSX does, but instead distributes it evenly around the CG, in which case you are right the XP flight would have had a CG aft of the FSX flight!

That's pretty cool if it turns out to be CG, some FSX planes are greatly affected by CG.

I remember having lots of problems flying the ORBX Lancair IV-P initially, it always drifted to one side and I spent a lot of time trimming rudder but I always felt like I was crabwalking it, and then folks discovered that it was very sensitive to CG and loadout, so you could eliminate most of the drift by balancing the CG and weight of flying with single pilot.

There are good payware helicopters for X-plane? Worth trying it after the long-long fsx run? Now i mostly flying helicopters in FSX.

My only attempt with X-plane is a huge fail. One of my friend have it, but the scenery is a mess on his system. Won't impress me...

There's a number of payware helicopters over at www.x-plane.org

Take your pick:

http://store01.prostores.com/servlet/x-planestore/Categories?category=Helicopters

If you weren't convinced by the scenery in XP10 then alpilotx did the freeware HD Mesh V2 which makes a pretty big improvement for all of Europe and North America, but it weighs in at over 60GB. Throw in the Treelines and Farms v2 from the same place (also check out their New Zealand scenery it's pretty nice) and Simheaven's freeware OSM scenery and you have a pretty big overhaul of the default XP10 scenery.

Laminar are supposed to be working on a major rework of the default scenery in XP10, I think they were trying to work out how best to distribute it.


Going back to my comments above about the rapeseed fields in the Orbx scenery, I was looking for something else on Youtube today and came across this:



Maybe Orbx didn't get it so wrong after all! In fact I'm rather impressed at how close Orbx actually captured the look of the English landscape.

I like the BK-117.

BeachAV8R did a good review of it here (with XP9 and it works well with XP10 too):
http://www.simhq.com/_air13/air_438a.html

Yeah - the BK117 is very good. Pair it up with some custom scenery and it is a lot of fun..



BeachAV8R

Thanks folks. Maybe i give it a try. The X-plane have a helicopter with landing gears and realistic ground friction? UH-60, Mi-17 or something similar?