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Whats the best flight sim?

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Whats the best flight sim?

Postby Smidsy » Thu Sep 22, 2016 6:49 pm

Probably a stupid question on here, I grew up on Microsoft Flight simulator but have not used it for many years, i am now looking at the current sims on offer but cannot make up my mind which to go for, i have a new Windows laptop on order that is more than capable of running any of them, I have read that Flightgear is the most accurate in terms of a simulator but i have found that the ground maps for the south of England where I live do not reflect the real world, i seem to remember that the Microsoft flight sim series was accurate to a degree, i like to spend a lot of time flying from A to B by land marks so require accurate ground maps, I have not yet seen Flight Sim X or Xplane ( the demo for xplane only lasted 10 minutes so is not in my opinion long enough to decide if it any good or not ), so whats your opinion, Flightgear, Flight Sim X or xplane, or indeed another that i am not aware of ????? Thanks in advance..
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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby StuartC » Thu Sep 22, 2016 7:24 pm

Do you want eye candy or to fly correctly.
FG may not look exactly like what you see out of the window, then FSX doesn't ether unless you spend cash of the custom scenery.
FSX Flight dymnamics are Game quality, not Sim quality.
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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby Richard » Thu Sep 22, 2016 11:30 pm

FlightGear with an F-15 is, of course, the best option.

Options are:

* FSX: can be good but usually requires lots of expensive addons to get it looking like the screenshots, and being 32bit only it'll tend to run out of memory with these loaded. The flight dynamics are limited in what can be modelled which usually results in less accurate modelling.

* Prepar3d: development of FSX (ESP), even more expensive, not as many addons as FSX, requires expensive addons to get it looking great. FlightDynamics about the same as FSX - not sure about this though.

* XPlane; with the HD scenery it looks quite good; but I've only ever used the demo. I don't like it much; and the flight dynamics are always going to be a bit "almost" because of the inherent limitations of the blade element method.

* FlightGear; well yes; it's the best in many ways, but the chances are that if you want a really detailed ground map of your preferred location you'll have to make one. There are some areas that are well modelled; but mostly it's terrain with airports and the occasional building.

* AeroFly FS1 (or FS2): Looks great; but never used it.
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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby Smidsy » Fri Sep 23, 2016 4:33 pm

Guess want a bit of everything, accurate flying (although the manual engine start is a pain in flightgear as there are often no instructions on how to start many aircraft) and the eye candy, but more importantly accurate map detail.
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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby wkitty42 » Fri Sep 23, 2016 9:48 pm

some will tell you that the instructions to start and fly a craft will be found in its POH (Pilot's Operation Handbook) which can generally be found somewhere on the web... some craft do come with something in their directory on disk which you have to find and rummage through...
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby Smidsy » Tue Oct 04, 2016 9:00 pm

So now I'm really getting into Flightgear I don't think I will be bothering with the other simulators, I have my android tablet running as a map, have sorted out the ATC and getting into ILS, once I have mastered that I will start looking at the nav systems and will plan a route using the vor markers from the South of England to Scotland via Wales, this is getting more interesting than what I realised. Also found that by reducing the graphic effects but switching Rembrandt on has increased the frame rate from around 7 fps to 20ish...
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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby PINTO » Tue Oct 04, 2016 9:37 pm

Switching rembrandt on has increased frame rate, you say?!

Image

Rembrandt is generally a resource hog. But whatever works, I guess.

If you need any help with VORs and radio navigation stuff, we have some really knowledgeable people on the forums here.
Actively developing the MiG-21bis (github repo) (forum thread) (dev discord) (fg wiki)

http://opredflag.com is an active flightgear dogfighting community (using a system that isn’t bombable)
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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby LesterBoffo » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:12 pm

There are very few sims that have all the boxes ticked for flight 'feel' in my experience. The two I've liked best, both are no longer with us, and they wouldn't impress anyone from a modern rendering, or have eye-candy appeal.

Redbaron3D with the Western Front 2 Patch w/ Greybeard's FM patch and Targetware 0.64.

Both old propeller aircraft, combat flightsims, both had their aerodynamics, ( damage modeling too..) buttoned down and real.

FlightGear has about the closest feel to TW's FDM I've tried, although I have to give props to WarThunder's non-arcade flight modelling, it's very close.
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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby Captainkool » Sat Dec 03, 2016 10:53 pm

Hello, if you are looking for a good simulator with crappy graphics, get FSX(Steam Edition is good) If you are looking for a great flight simulator with great graphics, get X-plane. Both of these cost a bit of money. If you don't want to spend a penny, stick with this.
Aviation is the key to my life
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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby Josh_grtuxteam » Sun Dec 04, 2016 2:25 pm

Outerra http://www.outerra.com + one of the best FDM JSBSim aircraft , won't it be the best simulator ?

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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby Richard » Sun Dec 04, 2016 3:19 pm

Outerra has pretty impressive graphics; however it is currently lacking mostly everything else in terms of simulation - except JSBSim. All of the stuff that we take for granted with FG, things like instruments, navaids, celestial bodies, integrated weather, canvas, configurable GUI, multiplayer, networking, web server.
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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby Thorsten » Sun Dec 04, 2016 5:06 pm

one of the best FDM JSBSim aircraft


Note that there's usually a lot of FG in aircraft beyond JSBSim - Nasal scripts, animations, rendering effects, instruments, canvas, keymappings and stick mappings,,... 'just' JSBSim gets you an FDM but not even a joystick control of it.
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Re: Whats the best flight sim?

Postby iamzac » Mon Nov 06, 2017 9:16 pm

I would like to try to correct an opinion that always appears when this is discussed: All 3 popular flight sims (FSX/Prepare3D,Xplane,FlightGear) can have good or bad planes, they don't have any limitations, all allow an author to basically build his own flight model independent to the ones that come with the simulator.
Most professional expensive planes that come for FX/Prepar3D or Xplane more or less use they own fdm as extensions.

Besides FlightGear I prefer Xplane, which seems more realistic and on average has better flight models (no, I am not contradicting myself, I said on average) compared to FSX/Prepar3D.
There are areas where Prepare3D is better, they have more ultra professional expensive planes (because of the long history and greater popularity of FSX) and in some areas better visuals compared to Xplane.
In general it looks closer to Flightgear than Xplane, not sure why, maybe because FlightGear developers were more influences by FSX.
Xplane has a *huge* amount of free high quality planes and free sceneries and various free plugins and add ons.
Neither costs too much (for prepare3d people usually buy the academic version), the planes and addons are the expensive part but with xplane you can make a big collection of only free planes.
I find it strange that a commercial software has so much more free stuff compared to an open source project like FlightGear.
It also has areas where it's weaker than FlightGear: the weather and ALS equivalent looks worse, no regional textures (although the global ones look great and can be easily changed), less freedom in configuring various preferences like display preferences, and most importantly the flight model is tied to the graphics engine which means you can't really fast forward much unless you have an extremely fast computer and turn down all the graphic settings, so you would have to make very long trips in almost real time on average.
It's also a resource hog, even very fast computers can't achieve a good frame rate with all features maxed out.
And there are various other small things that I would prefer in FlightGear, mostly because I am used to them.
Also Xplane has a plane-maker where it's very easy to tweak planes and even create new ones graphically (although to make a good one it's still needed to use a 3d graphical program).
Kind of like yasim but more powerful.
X-Plane like FlightGear works on Linux too.

Right now I am mostly using FlightGear under Linux, having all this osm2city and other recent changes was one of the things that brought me back, but I still have an X-Plane 10 installation on my windows partition.
I also can't say that I am a fan of the changes made in the new X-Plane 11.
But you can download and test it for free.
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