X-Plane 12 Early Access has been released and can be found here: https://www.x-plane.com/
You have the choice to download/install the demo version first, so you can test it on your hardware! Default area is KPDX
What are your first impressions (mine is still downloading!):
One day without laughter, is one day without living.
One day without Flight Simming, is one day lost living.
Installed the demo, it works but comparisons with MSFS are unavoidable...the scenery is just a joke.
As are the clouds but probably that will get fixed.
The F4 is OK, flies better than it looks, the F14 is better.
All the Xplane 11 aircraft I tried worked reasonably well, some dataref complaints and I expect there will be detail issues.
Will I get it? If my Orbx TrueEarth scenery works then probably, if not then not...
Bought it and gave it a quick spin at lunchtime. Definitely improved, and the ground handling's not as wonky as older versions. (May have been fixed with XP11; I didn't spend much time with that one.) Wow, the autogen buildings are just hideous, though. Scenery doesn't look bad from a landscape perspective, but the buildings feel like Maxis SimCopter days...
Looks like Ortho4XP is still going to be a must for areas you fly around in a lot.
Comparing vanilla X-Plane 11 to Beta X-Plane 12, my impression is that X Plane 12 is a good incremental upgrade. Very similar in experience to me when I went from FS2002 to FS2004. There are a lot of environmental improvements, such as tress and clouds. The lighting is different, but I almost prefer to 'softer' lighting that 11 has rather than the 'harsher' lighting of 12. The auto gen is nothing to write home about. It will be fun to see how it matures.
Performance wise, 12 runs about as well as 11 with Enhanced Skyscapes. I never got in to Ortho. I don't have the time or desire to spend the time setting it up, and I don't want to dedicate the drive space to the scenery. Honestly one of my big gripes with MSFS (and Xplane to a lesser extent) is the shear kaiju size of the game. But that's a rant for another thread....
Now MSFS versus X Plane 12? Visuals wise, no competition, MSFS wins right out of the box. But anyone who tracked the development of X-Plane 12 should know that. Laminar Research stated very clearly that visuals were not a priority for development. The stock aircraft are ok. They are stock aircraft. I'm looking forward to REP being available for the stock 172 and other 3rd party aircraft or other addons being updated to X-Plane 12 (I'm looking at you Thranda, HiFi Simulations and Just Flight).
Tried the demo, ended up buying it. There's just something about the handling in X Plane that keeps me coming back. There scenery is still meh, but the flying...
I agree the scenery is not u to par with that other flight simulator, but Laminar made it very clear during development that their is more on the flight model than scenery. They just don't have the financial resources Microsoft has.
I have been messing with the joystick file and profiles. Joystick fil is now matching XP11, but I certainly lost a lot of bindings in the profiles. Would not be an issue if you only have a yoke, but I have a lot of peripherals, switches and buttons that need to be re-mapped.
Guess I am in for quit a bit of work on that.
But I do like how the default planes fly, and also just added the FF B757 and Zibo. Have yet to make my 1st flight in those tube liners.
Overall, I am not unhappy with this Early Access release.
One day without laughter, is one day without living.
One day without Flight Simming, is one day lost living.
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