X-Plane

[Keith Smith]

Ryan, I spend a very small percentage of my time in a given flight taxiing at an airport, so the lack of stock airport scenery isn't a show stopper for me. I know it's a biggie for a lot of people, though. There are tons of 3rd party scenery packages for X-plane, though, you just have to get 'em.

I just love how the planes fly in X-plane and the fluidity of the gauges. Being able to snap around the cockpit with 3d views is great, too. See the I-1 video I just published a few minutes ago (http://youtu.be/ImEHlwP8Ujw, should be ready in a few mins) for an example of shooting the ILS 19R at SNA. Between the strobes lighting up the panel, the flight model, and all the rest of it, as far as my brain is concerned, I'm flying the ILS 19R into SNA.

[Keith Smith]

For reasons stated earlier, I don't think these numbers are relevant, but since people are asking:
18% non-linear PITCH response
18% non-linear ROLL response
28% non-linear YAW response

1% nullzone, soon to be increased to 2 because my flight controls are getting sticky in pitch, we can make trimming a bit tricky.

[Ryan B]

Do you guys with XP use Track IR?

I did use it for the demo and it worked alright. Track IR is amazing with FSX... mainly good for VFR stuff (can be a little annoying for larger aircraft when flying IFR). Again the fluidity of the gauges is nice to have in the stock XP models. I do wish FSX had that but plenty of my addons are completely fluid. I think with FSX you've got to soup it up to make it good. With XP out of the box I hear it runs a lot better. Tradeoffs I guess.

Regarding the scenery I do understand about the addons but even stock FSX has buildings placed in accordance with the AFD for all airports in the database. For instance, KDLH in XP10 was completely barren... just taxisigns if I recall. I can understand for you, flying out of little N07 you probably don't look at the scenery as you go by but my home airport is larger so I notice the missing buildings.

Since they are constantly refining XP10 I'll definitely look into it eventually. It basically depends on when the addon flow to FSX stops.

[Steven Winslow]

Here's how I have mine set up in V9.7:

Screen Shot 2012-12-10 at 12.05.18 PM.png (74.36 KiB) Viewed 2728 times

And V10:

Screen Shot 2012-12-10 at 12.15.44 PM.png (70.49 KiB) Viewed 2728 times

[djrisc]

I just love how the planes fly in X-plane and the fluidity of the gauges. Being able to snap around the cockpit with 3d views is great, too. See the I-1 video I just published a few minutes ago (http://youtu.be/ImEHlwP8Ujw, should be ready in a few mins) for an example of shooting the ILS 19R at SNA. Between the strobes lighting up the panel, the flight model, and all the rest of it, as far as my brain is concerned, I'm flying the ILS 19R into SNA.

Oh MAN.. Now there is now a YouTube video that will live on forever of me making a huge mistake. lol

If you listen at 14:38 in that video, that's me in the skyhawk making a very stupid mistake and didn't do the radio handoff properly. Then again at 17:44 you hear ATC in the background telling me to switch back to VFR because I screwed up.

Oops! For the record I nailed it the second time.

Oh well, at least I'm learning.

Brett

[Mark Hargrove]

Oh, p.s. On the topic of weather... I really XP10's rendition. However, recently there has been a third party release (payware) for FSX called "OPUS FSX." The weather is miles ahead of the stock engine and IMC really is IMC now. You can actually practice flying to precision minimums without seeing that stupid "fog" layer above the airport (you know where you could see the airport's boundary fence outline lol). I've flown a lot of other FSX Wx engines are they are mediocre compared to this new one. Also the devs are constantly making changes/adding features.
http://www.opussoftware.co.uk/opusfsi.htm

I've been running OpusFSX since early betas -- their weather engine is indeed phenomenal. I use REX textures along with it and it truly gives an awesome experience. OpusFSX also provides networked display synchronization (much like WideView), so it was a double-win for me.

Keith helped me over the weekend with getting X-Plane 10 set up to the degree that I could start tweaking it myself (thanks again Keith!). I got my networked displays working fairly easily per the XP10 manual, but have run into several issues with tuning the network displays the way I want. One BIG problem is that the 'master' display won't leave the 'external view/slave' displays alone when panning inside the cockpit, even when the external displays are set to 'lock to panel' in the rendering options. It's sort of the opposite problem from FSX -- getting networked displays to pan with the FSX utilities is incredibly hard (not that I understand why anybody would want to; I just know that it's very difficult to make work).

I'm also pretty disappointed with the integration between XP10 and the Saitek panels. I've got a full stack -- two radio panels, the multi-panel, the switch panel, and the backlit annunciator panel. The plugins available for XP10 kinda-sorta-mostly work, but the multi-panel (which is really the autopilot controls) is not so great.

Finally, I'm really struggling to get the FlyThisSim Cessna G1000 panels to work so I can fly a Cessna 182T with the G1000 cockpit (one of my favorite FSX airplanes) -- so far, they don't work at all, but I've not had time to check with their tech support.

I'll keep at XPlane for a while more though -- the simulation experience is quite good.

-M.