4 ms·

How's office morale there after the launch of msfs 2020? Or does rising interest in flightsims have positive effects on xplane too?

Alupis 6y ago
It probably depends what the user wants - a game or a simulator. FS2020 is pretty - lots of eye candy, but the flight model simulation isn't as realistic as X-Plane, which historically has put correctness above eye candy. FS2020 is also very buggy still (including crash to desktop after restarting a flight, etc), although getting better. That, and there are not many plugins, add-ons and aircraft models available yet for FS2020, although it's growing. The default built-in aircraft have many missing features, buttons, autopilot modes, etc - which prevent folks from using these as "study level" simulations. As of right now, serious simmers still use X-Plane/Prepar3d, but maybe that changes as updates roll out for FS2020.
justsid 6y ago
Honestly quite good. Like Alupis mentioned, X-Plane might have a slightly different target audience than FS 2020. That being said, X-Plane 11 is also almost 4 years old now and I'd hope a sim released in 2020 beats it graphically. We recently completed our move away from OpenGL, which served as the base graphics library for a good 20 or so years. It took forever, partially due to how deeply ingrained GL-isms were in the code base. But we are now all fancy and modern with Vulkan and Metal, which allows us to do some really cool and long overdue things with the sim that were previously almost if not completely possible. So that's quite exciting for me, not to mention that it got quite a bit faster in the process. I can't speak for the other parts of the sim since I almost exclusively work on the graphics and game engine bits of X-Plane, but I think most everyone in the company is pretty excited for the future. Also, and this is purely from a flight sim user perspective, competition is always good. Just like it's good if AMD and Intel compete with each other. The only winner is the end user.

Alupis 6y ago

It probably depends what the user wants - a game or a simulator. FS2020 is pretty - lots of eye candy, but the flight model simulation isn't as realistic as X-Plane, which historically has put correctness above eye candy. FS2020 is also very buggy still (including crash to desktop after restarting a flight, etc), although getting better. That, and there are not many plugins, add-ons and aircraft models available yet for FS2020, although it's growing. The default built-in aircraft have many missing features, buttons, autopilot modes, etc - which prevent folks from using these as "study level" simulations. As of right now, serious simmers still use X-Plane/Prepar3d, but maybe that changes as updates roll out for FS2020.

justsid 6y ago

Honestly quite good. Like Alupis mentioned, X-Plane might have a slightly different target audience than FS 2020. That being said, X-Plane 11 is also almost 4 years old now and I'd hope a sim released in 2020 beats it graphically. We recently completed our move away from OpenGL, which served as the base graphics library for a good 20 or so years. It took forever, partially due to how deeply ingrained GL-isms were in the code base. But we are now all fancy and modern with Vulkan and Metal, which allows us to do some really cool and long overdue things with the sim that were previously almost if not completely possible. So that's quite exciting for me, not to mention that it got quite a bit faster in the process. I can't speak for the other parts of the sim since I almost exclusively work on the graphics and game engine bits of X-Plane, but I think most everyone in the company is pretty excited for the future. Also, and this is purely from a flight sim user perspective, competition is always good. Just like it's good if AMD and Intel compete with each other. The only winner is the end user.