I was curious about the current state of X-Plane and noticed that it gathered quite a bit of interest over at CBFSim. So I installed the demo and experimented a bit. Did some research and experimented a bit more. More experimenting, more research...and finally a monetary addition to Laminar's development (or party) fund.
Everything just works out of the box. Download, install and off you go. No registry entries, no folder path restrictions, nothing.
Installing add ons is so much easier than in FSX. No gauge, effect, sound or similar folders that get cluttered over time. Sceneries don't even require database manipulation, just name the folder appropriately, delete the database file and presto, it's activated without much further ado!
That user interface had me at the first clicks. It's nothing short of a benchmark in efficiency!
In the simulator itself, the visual presentation and performance was much better than I expected, even on my laptop. Not for the rain drops on the wind screen while flying though clouds or the sense of motion or the sloped runways or tons of autogen and (freeware third party) AI or the night lighting or the 25-30 FPS that can be attained with all that enabled, no...it's the animated autogen trains. Those tightly packed roads, but totally empty rail lines in FSX were a bit of an insult to an average European who has logged much, MUCH more rail than air or road miles.
As for AI and ATC and the interaction between them...well, there's got to be a bit of an aftertaste, BUT: Laminar still wants to improve this. So there's another aspect that's fascinating me. You get all this out of the box and there's still more to come.
Honorable mention: The tight integration of the development tools (PlaneMaker, AirfoilMaker, WorldEditor). Centrally managed, continuously updated and (so far) well documented.
The quality of the developent tools is noticable with all the freeware add-ons. Admittedly, there are way, WAY fewer airplanes than for MSFS, but what's available would most certainly come with a price tag in FSX. Zibo's B738, that Lancair Legacy FG, the modded default MD-80, a Let 410, an An-2 and heck, they even have a working Do-328...all free and complete!
Not to mention the terrain add-ons. Basically infinite photoscenery (Ortho2XP) with matching autogen (Europe-2), landmarks galore (various packages) and updated vector and mesh data (HD Mesh). Again, if this was MSFS, you would (most likely) have to pay.
I'm really, REALLY impressed by all that. And I figure it's not the end of the line yet.
That said, if Laminar does indeed improve the ATC or the community comes up with further improvements to their equivalent AI/ATC solutions, I might just get a divorce from FSX.
P.S:
Laminar Research accepts PayPal as a payment method, all the relevant plugins are already 64 bit, there's no grief over old baggage, you can bomb things out of the box and you won't have to go back to school to buy it.
