X-Plane 12 First Impressions: The Good, Bad and Ugly

welcome back to the channel well last evening just when i was about to tuck myself in for the night i read online that x-plane 12 had been released now i simmed exclusively on x-plane until microsoft flight simulator came along and that's caused me to rethink things while i was waiting for x-plane 12 i flew almost exclusively on microsoft flight simulator but i was excited to get my hands on x-plane 12 on the early release beta just to see what it had to offer so last night i extended my bedtime by about an hour i got it installed and got about a half an hour to play with it this morning i got a little better look for about an hour and i'm going to share my first thoughts with you the good the bad and the ugly except for a shiny new startup screen for those who have already flown x-plane 11 x-plane 12 will feel very familiar in fact maybe a little bit too familiar once you get past this flashy new main menu the menus and interface is almost exactly like x-plane 11. despite the drastically improved visual quality as you can see everything else is so familiar that it almost doesn't feel like a major upgrade it kind of reminds me of the improved graphics of high definition television when i first saw it it wowed me after a while i took it for granted and wasn't until i looked back at the old tv archives that i was reminded how good it is and it doesn't help that x-plane will always be compared to microsoft flight simulator which has a very high bar when it comes to scenery quality because of this it's easy to under appreciate what laminar research has done in producing this version 12 of x-plane so let's look at a couple of the new aircraft that have been added let's look at the cirrus sr-22 which was added in the new version the new aircraft are nicely modeled but i had hoped that the older aircraft that were carried over might have had some upgrades to their textures to compete against those at microsoft flight simulator the sobo obviously is a master of modeling and lighting and it's tough to compete against that but this upgrade to x-plane has definitely narrowed the gap in the graphics area also explain has some other advantages i i really do think that the user interface is more intuitive and user friendly the systems fidelity definitely is better right now on x-plane and the flight model out of the box x-plane is definitely better although some of the microsoft flight simulator add-ons are quite good unlike the photo realism of photogrammetry offered by microsoft flight simulator x-plane creates plausible scenery using auto-gen which is high resolution even up close unlike the blobs we see if we get close to some of the photogrammetry and ai from ortho in microsoft flight simulator one of the nicer new airplanes added in x-plane 12 is the citation 10 which is modeled quite nicely and seems to have quite a bit of fidelity to the aircraft one area of x-plane that's always bothered me is the runway handling always seemed difficult but i find that in this version it seems to be much better it's not such a big test to keep the aircraft on the center line as we gain a little altitude here you'll get a view of some of the autogen you can see it's quite dense there used to be lots of open areas in the auto gen and x-plane depending on your graphics settings but you can see it's quite packed still not as realistic looking obviously as microsoft flight simulator but a vast improvement and most people who are using the simulator for training don't really care about seeing their mailbox a lot of us who are cockpit builders are like to use the popped out displays gotten used to those in microsoft flight simulator you can see that on the citation 10 all of these uh all of these displays can be popped out and i assume you can remove the bezels by removing that bezel graphic as we did for the g530 430 in the g1000 in x-plane 11. so this is a really nice unfortunately a lot of the airplanes don't have this possibility as i'll show you on the a330 and the boeing 737. a lot of us like to use those popped out panels uh in openings and air manager panels on other monitors to provide a virtual cockpit now here's the a330 and uh you'll see all of these i'll click them you can see all of these are not clickable they don't pop out which is a real disappointment only the fmc and unfortunately the fmc is the 737 fmc not the mcdu for the airbus 330. i was really hoping that laminar would make it so that there was a setting to remove the bezels instead of having to do that manually for those windows that pop out and also that it would remember their locations for each airplane now here's the 737 and you can see these also will not pop out only the fmc but it would be nice if these were saved so that you could use them missions for each aircraft so now let's take a look at what i think is probably the strongest feature that they added besides the graphics improvements and that is the ability to set precise weather for the simulator for instrument training we want to be able to set precise ceilings and visibilities visibility by distance or also by runway visual range rvr and visibilities that really do look like the real thing and i think they've really nailed that in this regard for my many many years of flying i can tell you that what i see looks very realistic in the way the visibility falls off with distance and so on so besides sealing and visibility you can also set the temperature altimeter setting and of course the precipitation type and uh intensity and you can just the runway conditions whether they're wet icy or snow covered you can also set wave height for the water in wave direction and as you can see that a lot of flexibility to set a very realistic weather scenario so i'm going to set the location to boston so we can get a look at some winter weather in a realistic scenario not los angeles so let's select a realistic runway like 2 7. so here we have one mile visibility in light rain and you can see the rain effects on the windshield and also you can see the see the garmin gt 580s you can click those they're touch control and this creates a problem now you can see that you they give you the hand that you look like you could pop them out like you can the g one thousands but you can't as i said these should be g three thousands but anyway you can't pop them out and you can't use the mouse to pop them out because you need the mouse to make them operate that's why i think the pop-outs ought to be something like control click or alt click like on microsoft flight simulator so that the regular click could still be used to operate that but you can see the weather looks quite realistic looking off at that tower off to the 11 o'clock position as we roll down the runway just take a look at this it's stunningly realistic i see patches starting to form on the runway as we get airborne and start to turn here shortly you'll be able to see if you look off to the left you'll be able to see faintly the ground and buildings showing through the the snow and rain here i'm going to set the rvr to about 500 about the minimums for most airliners to take off and you can get an idea what that looks like in the rain fog and with that visibility really looks great so back to a beautiful sunny day in boston so if you've made it this far i'd like to thank you for watching the video today if you like my videos please like subscribe comment and share with your friends so to sum it up let me just say this i really did see the familiarity of this with the previous version a little bit of a downer because i was expecting something a little bit more dramatic but in a way that's good because some of the strongest things about x-plane 11 were its interface including vr and the use of multi-monitors and that's all remained pretty much the same they've added some decent airplanes that have some improved textures a little disappointed that they didn't add improved textures to some of the existing airplanes i would have liked to see the pop-outs be universal for every screen like microsoft flight simulator but at least x-plane will remember the location that specific type of display was opened and left open when the aircraft was shut down so that it will open it again in the same location microsoft flight simulator requires a separate add-on program to do that the auto-gen and 3-d trees have really filled the world up and made it look so much more realistic than it did in previous versions of x-plane but still not up to the level that we're getting from microsoft flight simulator and probably never will without using ortho scenery as an add-on that could be a game changer for some casual and sightseer type simmers but for pilots training that may not be an issue so besides advantages in the user interface the systems in the flight model i think where the new x-plane 12 really shines is the weather being able to produce realistic weather in the terminal area especially for low visibility and ceiling approaches for pilot training and certified simulation faa certified training devices i think x-plane has a real leg up and it's going to be a while before microsoft flight simulator can meet that bar now i haven't had a chance yet to try vr in x-plane 12 but i'll be doing that shortly i'll let you know what i find out on that but i'm just assuming since the performance on a 2d panel seems to be pretty amazing compared to what i was expecting i figured all that autogen was going to really bog things down but it seems to be doing well with the volumetric clouds and the autogen so i'm thinking that vr may work well too and the interface in the vr nx plane is definitely superior right now at least to that of microsoft flight simulator so the bottom line is pretty much what i expected to find that for those who are interested in flight training x-plane is probably the best choice and that this is a big step forward towards making that even better on the other hand if you want to learn the landmarks of a certain area and become familiar with the way it looks you can't beat microsoft flight simulator i have to admit i find it quite relaxing in the evening to put my vr headset on and get in microsoft flight simulator and fly around areas of the world that i'm interested in or have had experience in or hope to go to and just look at the area and it's very very uh therapeutic for me as i said x-plane seemed familiar to me when i tried version 12 and at first it put me back a bit but now i think of it as an old friend plan to keep it around alongside microsoft flight simulator to round out my flight simming hobby thanks for watching hope i'll see you watching my next video you

Channel: Russ Barlow

Views: 176,183

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Id: qxa0cgtx8NQ

Length: 13min 38sec (818 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 06 2022