I'd like to share my experience from the past few weeks in moving away from FSX Steam Edition to X-Plane 11. The original reason was that the hard disk where FSX used to live died after a power surge. With my birthday coming up, my brother gifted me XP11 - it was either that, or Vault 76, and I am so glad he picked the right one.
As most other FSX players, I have sunk some money the sim over the years: FSX Gold Edition ($70), FSX Steam Edition (€5), PMDG 737 ($70), FTX Global Base and Vector (AUD 114), Angle of Attack 737NGX Captain's Package ($79), PFPX+Topcat (€56), Air Hauler (€31), ProSim 737 flight model (€60), multiple payware FMC apps for Android/iOS (€20), Opencockpits MCP + EFIS (€651), Throttletek G-737 throttle quadrant and gear lever ($900)...
It starts to add up real quick, especially after I've decided to get my own
home cockpit going. My roadmap had been to wait for the 64 bit version of Prepar3D to stabilize, re-purchase the PMDG 737 (no comment), build my home cockpit some more, and pick up the full Prosim suite somewhere along the line, probably when the overhead panel started to take shape.
I knew nothing about X-Plane other than it was "the other sim" with a very good flight model, but still a niche product without a lot of addons. I approached it with a "what the heck, let's give it a shot" sort of attitude. Something to putter around in while I gathered my wits to go through the nasty and prolonged process of re-downloading and re-installing all of the FSX addons.
divergent_fallacies hit the nail right on the head with
his post. This was something I was absolutely not lookig forward to doing again. I lost another hard drive 3 years ago, had to reinstall everything back then, and still remember the pain to this day.
After a few weeks I am still in a daze. I came in with no expectations, good or bad, and every time I discover something new and easy. I am blown away by how mature and well put together the X-Plane platform is. It's a framework for all things related to a flightsim, and as a framework it is so much more flexible. I absolutely love how installing something is as simple as dropping a folder. No messing about with 32bit vs 64bit DLLs, registry entries or other arcanum. It's all self enclosed. There is a log file! One! And it has everything the sim does, loads, or wants to load but can't. Helped me troubleshoot why certain scenery libraries weren't loading (I put them in the wrong folder). From the log file I discovered that one of the sceneries had a small LUA script running to make sure that traffic on a certain bridge was using the traffic lanes as it was supposed to. Mind. Blown.
Performance is amazing. I have a fairly old Core i7 965 and a GTX 970. Nice, but nothing spectacular. I remember how I had to delve into FSX's entrails to move its single, unthreaded code to something other than the default core 0 on my CPU, just so I can get an extra FPS or two. Around 50% of the time the EGKK-EHAM milk run in the NGX would crash with out of memory errors on final approach into Amsterdam. I like my eye candy. I don't need 60 fps - 20 to 25 is just fine for me, thank you. Oh, there is an X-Plane plugin that auto manages scenery details and LOD? Really? And it's free?
So I've bid farewell to the 300 euros worth of add-ons that I've had a good run with on FSX, and will never look back. I can use my expensive home cockpit hardware in X-Plane and keep on building it with the knowledge that it will do what I want it to do. I do feel however that I'll need to learn LUA for the most esoteric bits.
I can only recommend picking up X-Plane. It has its own quirks and shortcomings, sure, but even its current state, I feel it is already lightyears ahead of FSX Steam Edition. I can't comment on P3D, never having gotten to the point of using it, but the different design philosophies and more recent code base tip the balance in XP11's favor. Interesting that it's still considered a niche product so that FSX/P3D devs for the most see it as too small a community to develop for. This gives volunteers and smaller devs room to grow and experiment, and gives us users a vibrant ecosystem.
If you're an FSX:SE refugee, and still on the fence about X-Plane 11... go ahead, take the plunge.
My two week tour of discovery into things X-Plane lead me to the following plugins and sceneries. Keep in mind I only fly tubeliners - well, only one, the 737-800. The following list is anchored around that and my need to do away with the virtual cockpit and build a home cockput that will not need a mouse for anything.
- Zibo Mod 737-800
- Terrain radar for the Zibo 737
- AviTab tablet for the Zibo 737 virtual cockpit
- Better Pushback: top-down view of pushback setup (so much better than the pushback options in the PMDG 737)
- DataRefTool - X-Plane datarefs for interfacing with the sim, invaluable for a home cockput builder
- FlyWithLUA NG - absolute must that allows LUA scripting of the sim
- 3jFPS-wizard11 - a LUA script that manages sim performance by adapting view distance, cloud quality, anti-aliasing and scenery
- XP11 Ultimade Mod - a LUA script to prettify X-Plane: cloud color, shape, size, draw distance, water effects, enhanced night lights, cockpit shadows (might conflict with 3jFPS). Also eats FPS for breakfast.
- OC USB Mapper - use OpenCockpits hardware with X-Plane (MCP and captain EFIS in my case). No SIOC required. Edit \Aircraft\B737-800X\plugins\xlua\scripts\B738X.opencockpits_mcp_efis to change EFIS button order, which is different between the OC hardware and Zibo
- Python Interface - Plugin to allow Python-based plugins to work, such as the NOAA weather plugin.
- NOAA real weather for X-Plane - in the absence of Active Sky for X-Plane, this is the weather engine I'm currently using
- WebFMC for Zibo 738 - an FMC implementation that runs its small web server at port 9090, which can then be accessed from a tablet. There are some X-Plane FMC apps for Android, but none for iOS. Runs fine with the iPad Safari. Add to Home Screen gets rid of the toolbars and opens the web FMC in full screen.
- ZHSI glass cockpit for Zibo - lets you display the various screens (ND, PFD, upper and lower EICAS) outside of the sim. Since I usually fly without the virtual cockpit, I can't use xTextureExtractor, as those displays are only rendered in the virtual cockpit. I also did not like the display style used by XHSI, but it could be an option for others.
- ExtPlane - Networked cockpit panel displays, used by ZHSI
- X-RAAS Runway Awareness and Advisory System - very nice RAAS implementation, also works with ZHSI displays
- Ortho4XP - generates high resolution terrain images from orthophotos available from online providers. Eats hard drive space for breakfast. Combine with a terrain mesh like HD Mesh and an autogen scenery library like X-Europe for best results. For me these three replace FTX Global Base and Vector. Super powerful tool. Awful UI that only its mother could like. It gets the job done, though.
- HD Mesh v4 - high definition digital elevation model (although the default X-Plane DEM is pretty good as well). Recommend you get the torrent files for the tiles.
- x-Europe 2 - OpenStreetMap based object placement; the third layer to augment XP visuals. Without it, the previous two show correct terrain and aerial photos, but there will be no 3D objects like churches, radio towers, trees, bridges, etc. Only covers Europe though.
- Transparent roads - with the high resolution orthophotos the roads rendered by X-Plane look out of place. This one makes the road textures almost transparent, so road traffic drives on orthophoto roads instead of more artificial looking X-Plane roads.
- xOrganizer - visual tool to help organize scenery layers. Much better than editing scenery_packs.ini. Also checks for missing object libraries required by sceneries. Very useful tool.