active Opinion on X-Plane

[Bassman]

I read a lot of critism about scenery in X-Plane. My thoughts are as follows; I do not believe that X-Plane's main objective is eye candy, although most of the complaints are about eye candy. I have always been of the understanding that X-Plane's reason d'etre has been about getting aircraft flight modelling as accurate as possible whereas FSX and P3D have also been concerned with eye candy and/or accurate representation of real world scenery and objects. Unfortunately at present there is no one flight simulation product that commits itself 100% to both flight modelling and eye candy. Like most of us I have a lot of dollars invested in FSX/P3D eye candy and so when I am doing scenic flights I use FSX; when I do long haul or VFR flights I am now using X-Plane because the aircraft behave more realistic. "Horses for courses" IMHO.

[BradB]

 I do not believe that X-Plane's main objective is eye candy ....... I dunno mate ; have you seen the screen shots from the TE regions  ( GB , WA and OR soon ) . For me XP11 is all about eye candy , much more so then P3D ever was  . IMHO of course .

 

Cheers

 

John

[Jon Clarke]

It is the scenery developers that add eye candy and not the sim developers like Laminar or Lockheed Martin.

I know that the intention and history of XP has been to make it the most realistic flight model sim available, and many would agree it is/has succeeded in that objective to date versus "other" flight sims. Regarding eye candy, nearly all scenery development for XP has been from the community and only recently has a scenery developer like Orbx come to the scene. There are a very limited number of pro scenery developers involved in XP and their input has been offerings of a few airports. XP has had the use of Ortho4XP to allow the user to map vast areas of the world with various qualities of photoreal scenery and overlays. Many airports for XP are freeware but of payware quality. So in essence you have the ability to make XP as full of as much eye candy as you want, and mostly for free ! Orbx's entry into the market has allowed a much higher degree of Ortho/Overlay/POI addons and has taken much of the work that was needed by the user to create Ortho scenery, out of the users hand and done it in a very professional and accurate way. Orbx are not doing anything that a user potentially could not do using the Ortho4XP (Orbx use this tool also) Photoshop and dedicated modeling techniques. The cost of Orbx based XP sceneries are related to the cost of distributable (a user can use ortho imagery but not distribute it) quality ortho imagery, hand placing trees and autogen, modelling of buildings and POIs and bandwidth, office facilities and utilities.

My XP is full of eye candy and most of where I regularly fly (USA West and East coasts and Europe) is realistic ortho with excellent overlay. 

[Bassman]

Guys, I was not saying that x-plane does not have great eye candy and you are correct, lots of eye candy (if that is what is most important to you) now coming available. I have used an Ortho programme to improve my own local area (not mentioning the programme as post might get deleted). My intent was to get people to stop complaining if eye candy in x-plane was not up to their expectations. My comment was caused by someone complaining about the depiction of some bridges in a purchased product. The only way to get perfection is to go out and get a real world licence and fly a real aircraft.

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

the same person has started a new topic, perhaps you will like to add to that.