by 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.