I'm still on the fence about buying X-Plane 12

[jonbeckett]

At some point I'm bound to buy it - curiosity will get the better of me.

It's going to be expensive though - I'll have to buy the simulator, and a load of OrbX scenery, and one or two study-level aircraft. I can't imagine it's going to cost less that £500 by the time I've finished - and that's what stops me from doing it.

It's worth noting - for the several years before Microsoft Flight Simulator arrived, I almost exclusively flew X-Plane 11. I knew the Zibo 737, and the Toliss Airbus inside out.

The things I don't miss about X-Plane? The LUA scripts eating all the RAM, and then killing the simulator on long flights. Also the horrific cost of study-level aircraft. Market economics mean the equivalent MSFS aircraft are 50% of the cost or less.

Anyway.

There it is. Somebody convince me or not

[Dragn617]

Hi Jonathan

Like you prior to MSFS i was a keen X-Plane 11 user and invested quite a bit into it over a couple of years. But since FS20 came along i have been in awe of how good it is in almost every way. Scenery is just amazing esp for GA which i do mostly. The big one for me though is Weather. The clouds in FS20 are breath taking and really makes the emersion of flight so good for me. Some say the flight dynamics of XP being better than FS20, but i'm not really sure that's true.

As for XP12, i wont be buying that as it simply doesn't look as good, in fact even though new, it already looks dated to me. The cockpit lighting is still too dark. XP cannot compete with MS and satellite imagery of course which is unfortunate, but it's the weather and clouds which are simply not good enough. I had Active Sky for XP11 and other little tweaks to try and make clouds better with little effect, but they are blown away (pardon the pun) by the next level cloud engine in FS20.
XP12 is not all bad of course, the night lighting is very good and some rain effects are too.

That's my 2 pennies worth anyway.

[Mouldy]

Doesn't help you but I have no choice but to use x-plane 12 as I have a Mac Studio Max. It runs great on there at around 60fps.
I doubt MSFS will run under Parallels lol

Guess that means I wound be able to join your invitation flights though

I bought the Orbx GB scenery.

Still getting to grips with it all but its good enough to give me the bug.

[jonbeckett]

Guess that means I wound be able to join your invitation flights though

Multiplayer has always been an achilles heel for X-Plane. I used to struggle with it using JoinFS before MSFS came along.

[Malaromane]

I have purchased X-Plane 12 and don't regret it.

If you already have an investment in XP11, it likely won't cost you as much as you think to move to XP12. A lot of the aircraft are being upgraded to XP12 compatibility for free (e.g. Hotstart's Challenger 650 and TBM900, the Torquesim SR-22, just about all of Aerobask's offerings) so if you've already purchased those, you can continue to use them.

I agree that it takes some work to make XP12's scenery look good but there are free options that get you well on your way: X-World helps quite a bit and you can always generate your own Orthos (or use the ones you already had for XP11).

I fly both XP12 and MSFS and I'm pretty excited about both products.

[Scorpio47]

I also fly both sims and each one has its strengths and weaknesses as we all know in the meantime.
For those still undecided I would recommend to download and install the FREE demo version and do some tests with that. If and when you own XP11 you can take over most of the scenery and planes and will not be limited to the demo area to do your test flights

My advice: GIVE IT A TRY