Still no Steam OS. :sad:

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This game has been in alpha for over a decade. But to its credit, it has outlasted many other open source game projects.

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Quoting: iiariFor anyone reading, Laminar Research tends to treat these "early access" builds more like release candidate open testing, so they're usually pretty stable and feature complete, and they're looking for last minute issues that people bring up, so you can use these with confidence.

Not exactly true. According to the X-Plane website, this is very much a beta with currently hundreds of known bugs and other issues that make it not ready for primetime. That's why Laminar Research always includes the previous version as part of the beta purchase so you have a fully stable product to fall back on while the developers put the finishing touches on the next major release.

From the development blog linked in the main article:

"So why Early Access now? Not because X-Plane 12.0 is done – we still have over two hundred open bugs and a lot of things we want to do. X-Plane 12 is in Early Access so that the entire X-Plane community can be involved in X-Plane 12’s growth, not just a limited number of testers."

https://developer.x-plane.com/2022/09/x-plane-12-early-access-is-here/ [External Link]

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Just took the demo for a spin, and it looks and runs great. Hard to believe this only an early beta. The new 3D cloud rendering is the real deal. You actually enter clouds by degrees instead of your view out of the windows suddenly turning white. The 3D water is very nice, too, but has less of an impact on one's flying experience since you're usually viewing it from a few thousand feet in the air where you really can't see any detail.

Supposedly the air traffic control experience is improved, but I didn't really mess around with it, and I know Austin Meyer has been going nuts about the new weather rendering engine, which I assume works as advertised.

I suppose you could argue that this is just a feature update to X-Plane 11 (which was arguably just a feature update to X-Plane 10, and so on), and while there will obviously be a lot of similarities to earlier versions, I also know from reading the X-Plane blogs that significant chunks of code have been rewritten from scratch in order to implement the new features to the point that they could not be easily backported to version 11. And considering the length of time between full version releases, and the constant support and updates X-Plane receives throughout each version's life cycle, I think asking full price for the latest release is more than fair.

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Normally, I stay far, far away from anything "early access", but this is a very tempting purchase because I know Laminar Research will deliver.

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Quoting: JacksonI have faith that Disney won't let their IP go down with microtransactions.

That's a bet I won't take. Disney is in the business to make as much money as possible, and the "pay to win" market has proven to be highly profitable.

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As someone who owns the complete Stellaris soundtrack on Steam, I'm hoping for new music!

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As much as I like Paradox games, it is simply too hard for me to keep up with all their DLC releases.

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Quoting: BeamboomI thought this game didn't run well on desktop Linux? Has that changed?

It actually runs very well on desktop Linux. I bought it day one, and based on recommendations at ProtonDB, added the following to the launch options:

PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 %command%

I have logged over eight hours of playtime without a single issue. This is with a GTX 1660.

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I couldn't get the game to launch initially until I switched to Proton Experimental and added the following to my launch options:

PROTON_ENABLE_NVAPI=1 VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr11 %command%

This is the most common recommendation at protondb.com, and it worked for me. I do get a couple of grey boxes with error messages that popup before the game actually starts (one is an error message which appears related to the launcher; the other says something about not having the correct GPU drivers), but I just click "OK" on them, and the game boots up without issue. Played for over two hours without a hitch.

Performance is not perfect as I do notice occasional framerate dips as Spider-Man swings through the city, but it doesn't affect gameplay. I'm playing on the medium graphics preset which look pretty good to me.

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