Classic British Flight Sim

Lol that's made me chuckle

I used to run an add-on called Radar Contact which I quite enjoyed. It was far superior to the default Microsoft effort.
I guess part of the issue is the fact I work at an airport and have to speak to ATC myself, so when I hear the Microsoft one, I'm just left unimpressed.

Anyway, day off today and doing the school run shortly so need to practice my 75% looking extremely ill

Said tool is, in fact, Radar Contact. It does some things better than default ATC (easier SID/STAR handling, getting weather at the destination, displaying arrival runway ILS information, auto-reply, flight grading), but it's cumbersome to set up on more modern Windows versions, requires a database update after each and every scenery change and the selection of callsigns is very limited.
Being an extern al tool has advantages like instantly recognizable transmissions to your aircraft and disadvantages like disk space requirements or needing to be started independently from the simulator.
Default integrates much better. Pop in a flight plan and go, there's navigation on the ground and nobody cares if you cancel IFR to fly a STAR. The only thing I'm really missing is auto-reply.

Another ATC that never fails to impress me is the one in Falcon 4/BMS. A military flight simulator shouldn't need this per se, but you'll get the whole deal, including smart vectoring and spacing to get your entire flight - humans and AI - in. And this is basically still late 90s code!

I wish people looked more at the brains of a simulator than its looks. By now, they're all pretty exchangable in terms of visual features anyway.

Having just been contacted by PCA about X-Plane, I watched the promo. video, and checked the system requirements.
I don't think that my system is up to it.


Minimum system requirements:
Windows 7 / 8 / 10 (64 Bit), Linux or Mac OS X 10.10*
Processor (CPU): Dual Core i3, i5, i7 at 3 GHz or faster
Min. 8 GB RAM
Video card: DirectX 11-capable video card with at least 1 GB VRAM

Recommended System requirements:
Windows 7 / 8 / 10 (64 Bit), Linux or Mac OS X 10.10*
Multicore Processor (CPU): Quad Core 3,0 GHz or higher
Minimum 16 - 24 GB RAM or higher
Video Card: DirectX 12-capable video card with at least 4 GB VRAM



* XPlane 11 does not support PowerPC-based Macs or versions of OS X prior to 10.10.

You can always download the demo and see how it runs.

I play on a laptop without issue. The spec being an i5-6300HQ, GTX960M and 8gb RAM.

Thanks Charlie,
Please tell me how are the buildings depicted?
Are they photoreal, or like drawings as in FSX?
I might be tempted to try the demo.

Downloaded the demo and tried it. Its OK but in my opinion not as good as P3D. Some things are good, like the map display and .......... I can't think of anything else.

Dave G wrote

I tried the XP11 demo just a few days ago. Some things I liked, some I didn't. Both XP and FSX/P3d have their own strengths and weaknesses. Personally I've got P3d how I like it, and I'm happy with that, but if I was coming at flight sims from a clean start I'd certainly consider XP11.

Totally agree Dave.

John

Airspeed wrote: ↑

08 Mar 2018, 12:03

Thanks Charlie,
Please tell me how are the buildings depicted?
Are they photoreal, or like drawings as in FSX?
I might be tempted to try the demo.

I'll get a screenshot later.

I just can't fly around in a sim with a 12 year old graphics engine anymore. It was naff then and it's just as bad now.

Bjoern wrote: ↑

22 Jan 2018, 11:51

I wish people looked more at the brains of a simulator than its looks. By now, they're all pretty exchangable in terms of visual features anyway.

A very good observation, Bjoern.

Charlie Bravo wrote: ↑

08 Mar 2018, 16:34

I just can't fly around in a sim with a 12 year old graphics engine anymore. It was naff then and it's just as bad now.

Before you keep going on about the '12 year old graphics engine' of P3D, remember the first version of X-Plane was 1994, so some would say it has a 24 year old graphics engine.

I also love how X-Plane 11's slogan is "More powerful. Made usable", meaning they admit that all there previous versions were un-usable

Just for your info Radar Contact works in P3Dv4