Scramjet333

Rip a .iso disc image file of the disc; create a batch file (in Windows) or a Perl script in OS X/Linux to mount the disc image and run the executable/binary. Two birds in one stone; it's what I'm doing with my current X-Plane install. The only downside is that you'd have to sacrifice some 6 – 8 GB of storage for the disc image.

Aaaand... how much did you pay for everything? Ortho4XP, W2XP, plenty of airports at the X-Plane.org forums (including those by ISDG, MisterX6, tdg, etc.) are all... free. Your various add-ons may make P3D look some 20% better than X-Plane, but I'd rather pay nothing at all and get maybe 80-85% the quality of P3D, whereas I'd have to pay hundreds to thousands of dollars extra to make that hundred per cent. Nothing says 'diminishing returns' better than this. Admittedly X-Plane still has some rough edges, but even with XP10.51, you can make wonders with freeware, a good CPU+GPU, 32 GB of RAM and a fair bit of free space for HD mesh + orthophoto scenery.

Better late than never; good move on XA's part. However, the general flight sim storefront+developer community as a whole (which obviously includes XA) still has plenty of issues, and they'll all take a rather long while to fix, and new problems will probably crop up as the years go by.

Hello everyone... My question is in the title. I am planning to build a PC come next year, hopefully with the latest hardware then, and I want to dedicate an entire hard disk drive to X-Plane scenery. I was wondering roughly how much capacity I'd need to cover more or less most of Europe and North America with ZL16 orthophoto scenery, with higher-detail scenery around airports. Is 4 TB sufficient, with some breathing room for mesh scenery as well? My current X-Plane 10 install is roughly 300 GB, which includes HD Mesh Scenery v3 and the default global scenery minus the areas covered by HDv3. I don't have any orthophotos yet.

Sigh... With all due respect, I feel that's a very antiquated mentality when it comes to performance notebooks... Modern ones built to a certain standard can definitely cool their components well (and still be powerful in the first place), unless companies do something really ridiculous like attempting to put a GTX 1080 in a nearly-ultrabook chassis (like the Razer Blade Pro, where performance is really more like a GTX 1070). Nevertheless... My GPU temps can be seen in the GPU-Z screen shot in my first post. CPU temperatures are similar: around 65-75°C. X-Plane nearly never brings my components to anywhere remotely as hot as games like GTA V and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt do, whereby my CPU regularly exceeds 80°C and GPU gets to 75°C at least. Even then, I generally don't see either throttling at all until they reach immense temperatures, which only happens when I cover up the bottom vents and leave things to run for an extended period of time.

Ah, OK, but there's nothing to load the CPU at all in that scene. I was crossing the English Channel, didn't have any orthophotos, W2XP roads, etc. Only HD Mesh was installed, and even then, the land around the Channel is generally flat. What's up?

Hi all, I'm currently simulating a flight as I type this post, and I notice my frame-rates wildly fluctuating. Below is a screenshot of my GPU load with X-Plane 10: As you can see, the GPU is currently running at 967 MHz (seen along the top of the window), but its maximum frequency is 1.3 GHz (as seen where the cursor is pointing). The typical load voltage also ought to be 1.10 V rather than 0.96 V. This clock speed (and voltage) varies wildly as my flight progresses, and the GPU load bar, which is currently around at 50%, gives me a little inkling of what's going on, but I'm not sure. This is the scene that X-Plane is currently rendering: The framerate counter is at the top right. My specs (the ones that matter, at least) are as listed below: Intel Core i7-4710MQ @ 2.5 - 3.5 GHz nVidia GeForce GTX 860M with 2 GB GDDR5 VRAM 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3L RAM 1920 × 1080 13.3" display The CPU is running at its full rated 3.3 GHz (rated speed when all four cores are loaded), but the CPU load isn't very high, either. What gives? I don't think there's a bottleneck, but better be safe than sorry. Have any of you experienced this behaviour on your systems? Does your GPU clock speed significantly throttle when X-Plane isn't doing very much?

Question's in the title. Do we e-mail the X-Plane developers individually, or the team as a whole? If so, where can I find a list of e-mail addresses? Or is there a separate contact form to be filled up or something?

X-Aviation has a fair few quirks (putting it very mildly), and I'd rather not deal with the place as a whole, and it is a real pity that they have some great products (IXEG 737, LES Saab 340) but questionable practices, like too much DRM: I mean, a simple key- or account-based activation is fine, but limiting downloads and deleting forum threads asking for help is pushing it. If one has got the time to find and delete forum threads that ask for a raise of activation limits and to reset the activation links for a user, then they definitely have got the time to actually reset the activation limits and answer the forum thread with a simple 'your activation limits have been reset, sorry for the inconvenience' and then lock the thread. I experienced this (my own thread here was locked a while ago after it derailed into something else altogether) : forcing people to install their products where they, the devs, want the product to be—this reeks of early 2000s mentality. I have Steam and GOG, and both let users install the clients and the games themselves wherever the heck they want, and they still run properly. It is a mark of modernity (and sophistication) that an application on a given device is entirely self-contained: it doesn't rely on external libraries installed elsewhere for it to run; it doesn't not run (or tend to not run properly, as the devs of the IXEG have put it) when installed in a different location than the default. I can only say thank goodness for symlinks, and thank goodness for the fact that X-Plane itself is modern, as I've defined above. I've grit my teeth and moved on even though I still don't agree with this sort of thing because the IXEG is still a great product, and even if the publishers have questionable practices. This wouldn't be allowed in the AAA world, but it is, in the FS market, because the consumer profile is very different: there are lots of forty-, fifty-, sixty-something-year-old people with equally old-fashioned mentalities, while the AAA market is aimed at people who are roughly a generation younger.

I just detect a lot of salt in JV's post. All in all, I genuinely feel X-Plane is better off without the FSX devs who feel they can charge whatever they want for, honestly speaking, nothing much at all. Not to mention DRM, OOMs, baked textures, etc. There's no love lost and X-Plane has plenty going for it even without the so-called auspices of Orbx. Speaking of which, how do we contact a specific developer in Laminar Research if we would like a feature added in? Specifically, Ben Supnik?

Speaking of nVidia and GPUs, the AMD Radeon RX 480 has altogether closed the gap between its own, and in many cases, exceeded the performance of its nearest competitor, the nVidia GTX 1060, just through nothing but driver updates:

X-Plane hardly even needs VAS, it directly addresses any and all available RAM since it's 64-bit. Plus, all of those airport scenery packs—they technically use up VRAM (textures, shadow rendering, etc), not RAM. It's mainly the meshes, and aeroplane add-ons that go into RAM. And complicated meshes jack up the RAM usage.

100K? That is a lot of money. Plus, I'm quite sure the flight sim community is larger than the several thousands...

I, for one, am highly apprehensive of FSX developers coming over to X-Plane, with their DRM, extremely-overpriced products which, albeit good, sometimes really are very, very expensive. For example, The Witcher 3: Game of the Year Edition costs anywhere between US$30 to US$60, depending on whether or not there's a sale on, or any discounts or whatnot. This AAA game gives easily three hundred hours of solid gameplay, including voice acting, highly complicated scripted scenes, not to mention incredible graphics. Yes, understandably it's developed by a studio that's five to ten times as big as flight sim developer studios. However, I feel that pricing a single airport, or photoscenery and buildings that we can generate ourselves, at comparable prices to the AAA game above, is tantamount to daylight robbery. The X-Plane community has always been very open, with freeware and donationware dominating the market. The fact that X-Plane 10.51 looks as good as it is, is due to the tireless efforts of developers like Tony (outstanding work on the W2XP generator), Mister X6, and Pumper (who single-handedly redid the Flightfactor 777 cockpit, and the dev studio itself ended up incorporating some of his work for a subsequent update). This is not to mention countless other users who have developed everything from XSquawkBox to SkyMaxx, and all the tiny fixes and bug reports given to the devs. I appreciate developers who put in plenty of effort to deliver a great product, subsequently support and update it for a reasonable amount of time before deprecating it, all while charging a reasonable amount of money for their products. It sometimes makes little sense to people who exclusively play games and not flight sims, why what are effectively add-on products to the original, more expensive than the base product itself.

Incredible - they actually included soft-body physics? This will satiate the 'I fly to crash planes' crowd...