Mountain Man

If you're on Linux or OSX then X-Plane 10 is literally the only game in town. Well, there's FlightGear, too, which is still a bit clunky even after decades of development, but it does have the advantage of being free.

Maybe I missed it, but did you try removing all plug-ins and running the simulator "clean" with no add-ons?

I'm getting very good performance with 10.30. While my framerates haven't dramatically increasted, the wildly fluctuating framerates I experienced in previous versions are gone, and my flying experience is very smooth and fluid.

I still seem to be having some problems. When I go to my home airport, the game indicates that it's downloading data, but then it eventually stops and I'm stuck on the loading screen. The default area works fine, but anywhere else isn't working so well.

Apparently TerraSync is supposed to work "out of the box" now with no need for user configuration. I hope that's true because I could never get it to work before.

One of the advantages of open source community projects is that they have the luxury of being able to "sweat the small stuff". I remember hearing a story about an open source developer looking over a professional developer's code and wondering why it wasn't better organized and thoroughly commented. The professional said, "I don't have time for that. I have a job to do. It doesn't have to look pretty, it just has to work and be delivered on time and on budget." That is to say that open source developers and professional studios are often working under different priorities.

Isn't Skymaxx Pro just a graphics upgrade? You need to enable real-world weather in X-Plane 10 itself if you want it to reflect the weather in your neck of the woods.

It's O.K. Bob the Builder said it first.

Just need Howard Shore's bombastic score playing in the background and it'd be perfect.

Um... O.K. I guess what confused me was your comment, "I want this in X-Plane 10!!!!!" Why would you ask for a feature that X-Plane 10 already has? It would be like P3D adding blade-element theory and you saying, "I want that, too!" That's why I was asking if you were being deliberately ironic. And if your intent was to compliment P3D users on their shiny new toy then why did you post it here instead of the P3D forum?

I thought X-Plane 10 had volumetric clouds and fog. I didn't see anything in that video that I haven't seen in XP10. Unless you were being intentionally ironic?

It's called a release candidate for a reason, and you can only get it if you explicitly tell the software that you want a beta version.

I leave it off. It certainly looks great, but it tanks my framerates. I like lots of objects and trees, but I can't have that and HDR.

Carenado's site is like porn for flight simulator enthusiasts.

Hey, thanks for the reminder. I had downloaded that ages ago, but for some reason I never got around to installing it. It does do a nice job filling in the gaps.

I was referring specifically to the rural areas I prefer flying in -- that is to say areas that don't get much love from scenery designers because apparently everybody wants to ogle these big, urban landscapes. But for rural scenery, X-Plane 10 default is the best of the bunch. Screw the ISP, I'd be more worried about my wife smacking me upside the head!

Yeah, like I said, I was just playing devil's advocate. To be fair, except for the handful of hand-detailed cities in "the other sim", everywhere in the world looked pretty much the same, too. I fly mostly in rural areas that I've lived -- Ohio, Virginia, Alaska -- and I've never seen any of them accurately represented in any sim. However, I will say that of the sims I've played, X-Plane 10 out of the box makes those areas look significantly better than any competing product.

My point is that picking out two, specially developed high-fidelity models isn't necessarily representative of the sim as a whole, and it could be construed as somewhat misleading to point to them as proof that the default scenery "ain't that bad". All I'm saying is that you're not going to see that level of detail flying over a random city.

Just to play devil's advocate, you picked two, highly detailed models that used to be commercial offerings but were incorporated into X-Plane 10's default scenery, so using them as your benchmark is to essentially put your thumb on the scale. Having said that, I will agree that in general default X-Plane 10 is not that bad in the visuals department. In fact, it looks pretty darn good most of the time.

X-Plane 10 runs great in Linux. I'm currently running it in Kubuntu 13.10, and I have very smooth performance. I don't know anything about FSE, so I can't answer that question.

I just downloaded it, and it looks like it's version 2. What about my other aircraft, like the 172 and F33A, I wonder? Should I blow a download on them to find out? Edit: The 172 file looks to be the exact same size, 163MB, so I suspect it hasn't been updated.

So how do we get the update? The Carenado 152 product page still has the disclaimer that it's not X-Plane 10 compatible, although a future patch is promised.

The better the numbers entered into Plane Maker, the better (and perhaps more realistically) the aircraft will fly. The problem, as I understand it, is that a lot of designers will fudge the numbers or leave them at Plane Maker's defaults which will give less than satisfactory results.

It really depends on what you mean when you talk about flight models. Microsoft Flight Simulator is great at running through a list of precomputed numbers to give you more or less the correct output in any given situation while X-Plane crunches that same data in realtime. The advantage is that X-Plane can model an untested design while Microsoft Flight Simulator can't. Of course these differences probably won't be evident to the end consumer doing touch-and-go's in a third-party Cessna 152. I think it would be fair to say that while X-Plane's flight modeling superiority is not a myth as such, it doesn't necessarily live up to the hype, either.

Wow, that's pretty low-rent.