A question for XP-11 users

Is this good right out of the box? I'm ready to make the move from FSX.....finally. I'm thinking of picking it up during the next Christmas sale at Steam when everything is 50% off. But I don't want to invest so much time and MONEY! getting it to look good. I see some real nice freeware stuff for it, though, so if I want add-ons that's where I'll get 'em. So, is anyone happy just flying the default sim?

I think you won't be disappointed if you move from FSX. I did at the end of XP10 after having previously tried and disliked XP in the earlier versions, and I haven't regretted.... BUT I also couldn't fully make the switch to XP - for some things I go back to P3D, and for others XP11 feels better by far.

The reason I'm fine with this is that XP11 is really good out of the box + freeware indeed, and I haven't spent much at all on addons. Scenery is amazing just using the freeware Ortho4XP, which creates photorealistic sceneries easily and for free, with XP11 autogen on the top it, and there are many freeware options around to make a lot of area l defaook really good.
The default aircraft are by far better than default FSX but some good freeware or payware addons will help. If you fly airliners, then there is a modder called Zibo who has made a mod to upgrade the default 737 into something close to PMDG level, pretty amazing for free. It also runs nicely in VR while I couldn't run a PMDG addon in VR in P3D, performance is not there.

Things that aren't so great out of the box: ATC is crap, but there is a freeware addons called 124th ATC which fixes that mostly Weather depiction is not great, but neither was FSX out of box - what's missing here in my opinion is a good payware addon, but ActiveSky is in the process of developing one - I'll probably buy that. Weather is one of the reasons I'll sometime fire up P3D and fly that with ActiveSky.

The last reason I sometime go back to P3D is the lack of good vintage 3rd party aircraft - I like to fly stuff like the A2A Connie, P, MDG DCC46, Aerosoft Catalina, a6nd there is a bit of a lack of options on the XP11 3rd party market, but it's improving.

But to finish: if you want to sample XP11 out of the box, you should try it for free - you can run it in trial mode - I can't remember what it does in terms of limit, but I think it's a combination of confining you to Seatlle (a performance heavy area in fact, so it might make it look bad perf wise) and for flights up to 30min only at a time - that's good enough to have a look at cockpits, take them off etc. Make sure to try some night (or dusk) flying, you'll probably be amazed by the lighting, it really looks good.

Okay, I'm leaning toward a buy. I have seen a couple of beautiful vintage airplanes for free. A b-17, and a really nice DC-3. What do you think is wrong with weather? Clouds not realistic enough? I think I saw a free add on that improves the couds.
I understand that Ortho mod is huge. You could wind up having a couple of hundred geg's with just a couple of destinations installed. I have seen videos of it, though, and it does look pretty incredible.
But, yeah, I would miss my old Catalina, and that beautiful Waco by Alabeo. The sim does have a nice selection of default airplanes, though. How about the ones that are a carry over from XP-10? Are they any good. Did they get any kind of a makeover?
Anyway, thanks for the reply.

The issue with weather is that the clouds are not looking great, there's just a bunch of puffy clouds and while you can change their level of cover, you don't get a great variety of structures and cloud types - it fails to look like real world weather. The freeware addons (I use one, can't remember which) help make the cloud puffs look better, but it won't do any miracles - overcast or broken clouds conditions won't look great. I often fly with a weather that is light on clouds, that's where it looks fine.

The B17 and DC3 are really nice indeed - on FSX/P3D this would be sold for a full price. It's amazing what the freeware community produces for XP!

Well, I just tried the demo. I put the settings to where it looked pretty good. I have a 4 year old ASUZ laptop. 8 Gb's of RAMM. 2 Gb nvidea card. It runs DCS beautifully so I figured, lets try it. I was surprised at how smoothly it played this. I tried a bunch of planes. Very nice. But I could hear those fans blasting. My CPU temps went to 94!! Max temp is supposed to be 100. #%&*$#, that was too close.
It ran it so well. The laptop didn't seem to be struggling at all. But those temperatures! I'm still playing around with the demo. If I can't get those temperatures down, I guess XP-11 will have to wait until I get a more powerful machine.