The beauty of X-Plane 9 (Part 1 Uk tour arrival: Plymouth)

[EHM-1997 Alexander]

OK, so here's a little x-plane evangelising. It's smoother than either fs2004 or fsx to fly (guages in particular) and looks great to boot (think FSX quality visuals with silky smooth refresh and framrate). Aircraft is the freeware baron 58 by awall86: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=9291

I'm currently doing the UK tour, and I have a Beechcraft Baron 58 fresh from the paintshop (so fresh that not all the decals have been applied yet - will do that on my return to London).

All flights were automatically recorded from x-plane 9 in the alpha version of Flightlogger 4.

These images show landfall of the UK from the Channel Islands down to Plymouth airport.

[EHM-1838 Andrew]

Any more screenshots,info etc concerning X-Plane would be appreciated.I was surprised at your pics.Doesn't look to dissimilar to FS9.Does XPlane have ATC like FS?
Cheers Andy

[EHM-1997 Alexander]

x-plane atc is horrible - much worse than fs2004 - it's definately an area for future improvement (x-plane updates are quite frequent within each major version, hopefully v10 might tackle this area), but you can fly on vatsim / ivao if that's your bag (not mine).

Using XPUIPC you can hook up a number of external msfs apps (I use flight sim commander for planning and moving map as well as Flight Logger v4). In addition my Vrinsight MCP panel now works with x-plane and the setup is easier in x-plane than for msfs!

Most world airports do not have buildings out of the box, and there's no plane traffic by default (there are plug-ins to give some traffic, but I don't bother with those).

The key to x-plane is downloading add-on scenery and aircraft - there are also tools for converting fs2004 scenery over to x-plane which work well in most cases.

The first time I fired up and flew with x-plane I was hit with a culture shock and saw everywhere where it didn't match up with my MSFS expectations. Recently, I flew a leg of the uk tour in MSFS and had the same feeling - spotted everything that was worse than x-plane.

The sims have different strengths and weaknesses - no reason not to fly both - but there are some great add-ons coming out in 2010 for x-plane. See the crj-200 (our business challenger 850), the 747-200, the 777. New developments: http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php?board=64.0

MSFS shines in terms of simulating the whole flying experience - atc, other aircraft etc. Whereas I find x-plane simulates the pilots experience better - although this is an initial shock from MSFS (MSFS aircraft feel like they are on rails, very very stable. x-plane bumps you around in the air much more and feels more dynamic)

I'll grab some more screenies for you, in the meantime here are some videos:

MU-2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdeNhCjNfhI

CRJ-200 (In development)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HV37W-gFkPQ

Seamax:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGgXbrlK5uo&feature=related