Thinking about it...

[lqcorsa]

Hey guys. X-Plane 9 is looking really good. Infact, in some ways, better than FS9. I'm holding off on transitioning everything into FSX until I can run my DirectX 10 card with Vista, so in the mean time I've been doing half my flights in FS9 still. But after looking at some new X-Plane 9 screens...X-Plane can sometimes look alot better than FS! I've also heard the realisim is alot higher too.

So I'm wondering. What are the pros and cons of each in detail? For example in-game FPS. Scenery. AI Traffic. Realism.

Thanks :smile:

[MacFire]

Hi there,

In my opinion, x-plane is a very good alternative, and better in some aspects than Microsoft's proposal.

Microsoft wins in overall polish of the software product. It has embedded educational material, nice gui, ai traffic, nice atc, tons of plugins, and usually (usually :wink2:) its quality assurance is superior.

x-plane lacks atc (it does have atc but it just can't compare to Microsoft's at this point in time), does not have educational material, no ai traffic. No bad jokes from Rod Machado either :smile:.

BUT. Physics model is really good, scenery is getting better and better (including cool things like cars on the roads, flocks of birds, very good forests, and impressive river renditions), very good weather modeling (including such things like uphill wind currents for gliding). Charts is another aspect I like from x-plane. They are full screen (not just a little box like Microsofts) and resemples real charts, having different presentations for different kind of charts (sectional, etc). You can also edit navaid information on them so you can have up to date frequencies for your area, etc.

I'd encourage you to try it. There is a free demo download at x-plane.com that you can use with no restriction for 10min. You have to reboot the program after 10min to continue, but its enough to get an idea of what you get.

Hope this helps,

Anton