Xplane 11

[Karl]

Buck and I spent some time with the newly available public beta. He has the full version while I have the free demo (http://www.x-plane.com/)

Bear in mind that t is a beta product. I was still impressed with its core! The flight dynamics are much better than FSX/P3D. It looks more like DCS in many respects. I found the scenery out of the box to be decent. The lighting is really good. Landing lights shine on the dark ground look like.... well landing lights.

The download is ~7GB. The demo is limited to the KSEA area and has a 15 minute time limit. The sim restarts fast and you can hit the a button labeled "RESUME FLIGHT". I encourage anyone to give it a spin, particularly those with a affinity for VFR and the feel of landing.

I see the foundation for our hobby's next flight sim in XP11.

[Travis]

I had a feeling XP11 was going to steer us in this direction. Remember, we can only win if this is good! Thanks Karl.

[BUCK293]

XP11 seems pretty good for a default beta release. I am really pleased with the improvements over XP10. It is much easier to setup and use. Here is a list of known bugs and things they're still working on.

Low frame rate – we are still optimizing rendering; please do not report low framerate unless you see < 5 fps on low settings.
• If the visibility seems too low, set the visibility higher in Weather Customize screen.
• Setting up networking configurations may crash the sim. (XPD-6857, 6864)
• XPD-6851 Sky color wrong when looking through alpha texture
• XPD-6849 Issue with power lines & base mesh
• XPD-6847 Aircraft are tinted purple in Plane Maker
• XPD-6835 Fuel truck missing glass
• XPD-6827 Shadows or artifact on trees
• XPD-6825 Graphics error with gauges in c172
• XPD-6812 Editing the Rendering settings for Visual Effects is SLOW
• XPD-6808 Some windows not re-skinned to match new UI
• XPD-6905 Panels made with plugins not displaying correctly
• XPD-6898 Jagged sky color transition
• XPD-6962 Joystick config Save As box hidden when X-Plane is full screen
• XPD-6959 Color artifacts are visible on the “occluded” area of an object when SSAO is turned on
• XPD-6952 Crash with popped out secondary GPS windows
• XPD-7005 3rd party Tornado crashes sim
• XPD-7004 Text misalignment when Russian is picked for language
• XPD-7001 Local time discrepancy when using “track real world date & time”

Reference: http://www.x-plane.com/kb/x-plane-11-00-release-notes/

[Karl]

A decent look at XP 11:

https://youtu.be/pB_hx2Pb8Mc?t=25m16s

[Vidken]

It looks amazing, but I'm worried about a few things:

Will it be easy to connect to a central server like in FSX?

Will some/all addon aircraft cause latency issues?

If some people use addon aircraft, are the replacements for those not using the same addon look reasonable or at least be configurable?

[N85988]

I have spent quite a bit of time with XP11 now. I have been trying out lots of free addons, mostly from x-plane.org. Some work well, some not very well, and I have found many that really transforms XP11 to look really amazing. I am providing links to the addons that I feel give the most impact to the sim. While none of these affect how the planes handle or how the sim performs, I feel these really enhance the visual experience.

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/ TONS of addons for all versions of X-Plane, mostly free, but they do provide links to payware as well

http://apxp.info/airports/map/US for a map of available addons by airport, for whole world, for ready made airport addons (all freeware)

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?...-luftbilderhd/ better looking autogen, requires a few other freeware addons to make it work properly, has instructions how to do it

http://simheaven.com/ for w2xp scenery, very detailed, best enhancement in one shot

http://developer.x-plane.com/docs/scenery/ for scenery design tools

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?...ic-powerlines/ better looking power lines

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?...9120-ortho4xp/ program for making photo scenery, VERY EASY TO USE

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?...272-superslew/ allows you to slew

http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-...sh-scenery-v3/ HD mesh for XP10/11

For those who are concerned about performance, the demo does NOT perform the same as the current beta. The betas have been different as far as performance from one to the next. Going up to 8 was not performing very well. Beta8 was the first to get much better performance. 9, 10, and 11 have been about the same. They perform MUCH better than the demo, in my opinion, so the demo doesn't provide a good feel for how it currently performs.

I don't think I'll ever give up P3D or FSX, but I am glad I decided to try the full version of X-Plane11. with a little bit of research and a few freeware addons, I am totally blown away with how good it looks and performs. It still has a way to go before I am completely satisfied with it, but I really enjoy it already. If I had based my decision to buy it based solely on the demo, I never would have bought it. Sometimes you just have to take a chance and hope it works out. I'm so glad I did.