
X-Plane 11: World Editor 2.0 Released - doener
https://www.x-plane.com/2019/04/world-editor-2-0-released/
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jillesvangurp
For those who don't know what this is about. World Editor is an oss scenery
development tool for x-plane (not oss) and it's the main scenery editing tool
for x-plane. It's also what powers the x-plane scenery gateway which contains
user contributed 3d scenery for thousands of airports worldwide.

The scenery gateway has made a lot of difference to x-plane in recent years.
It relies a lot on automatically generated scenery from open data sources and
it used to be that the scenery was pretty bland and monotonous. Autogen
scenery actually works quite well these days but it doesn't generate airport
buildings. Since they introduced the scenery gateway essentially all major
airports are now covered out of the box and many of the smaller ones as well.
This means you get terminal buildings, signs, taxi ways, etc. for over 8K
airports world wide (last number I heard, probably more by now).

V2. supposedly makes it a lot easier to add missing airports by integrating
external maps and satellite imagery to make it easier to position objects
correctly. So, it will likely result in even more and improved airports.

I've been a long time x-plane user (since v8) and it's a great ecosystem to be
in these days. As of v11, they've ramped up development a lot and managed to
attract a lot of commercial add on developers (essentially most of the big
ones that also target FS X/p3d). Awesome product and it keeps on getting
better with each release.

With this and some free add-ons from x-plane.org, you can get a really nice
flight simulation experience for just the price of the base simulator. I have
generated several hundreds of GB of photo textures (using ortho4xP) and I've
also installed some scenery packages from e.g. simheaven.com to generate
detailed 3d scenery from open streetmaps. Getting the same kind of experience
on competing products is possible but will cost you an arm and a leg.

I've been following flightgear for years as well and I want to like it but it
is just not in the same league.

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zippergz
Many years ago I was big into X-Plane. But it seems like so much of the
development and community is focused on making the graphics as pretty as
possible, instead of making the flying as realistic as possible. I'd easily
take the tradeoff of rudimentary graphics with incredibly realistic controls
and aircraft behavior over rich landscapes and fancy liveries......

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Zhenya
My guess is that the community focuses on what they know; how things look. If
you're busy flying planes all the time and know about the challenges of
flying, then you're probably not spending a lot of time developing for xplane.

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zippergz
Yes this makes sense. It's just frustrating for me as somone who doesn't have
the time/money/risk tolernace for real flying, but would like to be able to
"fly" as realistically as possible at home. I'm sure people like me are a tiny
niche within a niche, though.

~~~
nightski
I was obsessed with flight simulators in middle school and high school. These
included Microsoft Flight Sim, Flight Unlimited, Fly!, Falcon 4.0, and many
more. So much so that I ended up taking up flying lessons and having my first
solo flight on my 16th birthday (the earliest legal date I could do so at the
time).

What I learned is that flight simulators can be a huge benefit. I basically
learned everything in the simulator that I was later taught in the ground
school of a private pilot course (which made those hours really boring haha!).
You can learn weather, instruments, aircraft systems, etc.

The one thing that is really hard to grasp however from a simulator is the
feel of flying an aircraft. I had a horrible habit of overcontrolling the
aircraft - and it was the direct result of my many hours of flight sim
experience. Even when using force feedback joysticks, etc.. there is still
going to be quite a learning curve in a real plane.

So enjoy the flight simulators. But in my opinion I wouldn't get to concerned
about how realistic the flight mechanics are. Because they are the least
important thing you'd learn from a flight simulator. But that is just my
opinion.

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upofadown
Same sort of experience: my transition from zillions of hours of PC flight sim
to gliders did not go well at all. It seemed that I would never get so I could
follow the tow plane in a non-exciting way.

I have observed that experienced pilots do reasonably well at following the
towplane on the simulator even with no simulator experience at all. So it
isn't just that it is different. There is something else going on there.

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piotrkubisa
During trial installation of X-Plane 11 I got an notification from Windows
Defender that it spotted Trojan:Win32/Bearfoos.A!ml. It looks like a false
positive for me, but still it leaves a very bad taste.

Disclaimer: I am not a security expert and I do not take any responsibility
for my opinion - it is up to you to verify if it is free of any malicious
code.

~~~
garaetjjte
Why does it matter? Antivirus software vendors effectively engage in code
signing certificates protection racket.

~~~
sjwright
I haven't run resident virus scanning for at least a decade or more, including
Windows Defender on my Windows machine, and I haven't had a single meaningful
issue during that time.

(And I know this with high confidence because I do schedule weekly full disk
scans on my computers and NAS and they haven't ever found a damn thing that
wasn't a false positive or a fake-positive.)

