Quoting: Cyba.Cowboy

Quoting: Mountain ManI agree that competition is a good thing.

Gonna be picky here, but Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is not expected to support Linux-based operating systems though, so technically, X-Plane has no real competition...

Not on the Linux platform, at least; unfortunately, Linux is only a tiny sliver of X-Plane's overall sales, so frankly, we're lucky Laminar chooses to support it at all.

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This literally doubled my average framerate according to the benchmark!

Now why can't more Linux games run this well?

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Quoting: iiari

Quoting: Ardje

Quoting: SkipperroMan... I'm collecting everything with Vulkan support and I have X-Plane on my wishlist for a long time, but I'm not as big of the simulator fan to pay freaking 65$ for it. I would rather save it for Kerbal Space Program 2.

I have X-Plane also on my wishlist. I did have some fun with Euro Truck Simulator, but I guess X-Plane is more realistic. And I actually don't want that.

Quoting: EhvisCompletely different beasts. ETS2 is still a game. It's open ended, but the simulation level and mechanics are still geared to have fun even without skill. X-Plane is not a game, it is just a simulator. I think most flight simulator enthusiasts will tell you that flight simulation is a hobby. With matching time consumption and expenses. I have many hours in various X-Plane version, but haven't done too much of it lately and I'm getting rusty to a degree where I couldn't even get my B727 started any more. :D

Yeah, absolutely what @Ehvis said above. X-Plane is a hard core sim to the level that flight schools actually use dedicated commercial versions of it to train future pilots. There really is no "game" here unless you buy mission or sim-economy mods, which people say are a lot of fun but I just don't have the time for...

That said, it's still an amazing product. If you wanted to flip every switch in a Boeing 737 cockpit, plan your fuel, program in your flight plan, go down your pre-flight checklist, pilot your flight in near photo realism, and even be able to see real-life air traffic around you and potentially talk to real people serving as air traffic control, all in life-sucking real time, then this is your thing and $65 is a steal (I've spent far more on planes and scenery and mods). X-Plane actually recently got me over my fear of flying for a real trip.

BTW, on the XP .org forum I've been chronicling my experiments [External Link] at trying XP in Wine/Proton and how to make the Linux version look nearly as good as Win XP with xEnviro...

I agree that competition is a good thing. But it remains to be seen if MSFS 2020 really will live up to the carefully orchestrated media previews and marketing hype. I still remember some of the bold promises and pre-release screenshots from Microsoft Flight Simulator X that were simply never delivered.

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Quoting: ArdjeX-Plane looks a bit dull to me, but this got me excited: X-Plane almost twice as fast on Linux than on Windows [External Link].

Yeah, but Linux got blown away in every other gaming comparison. :(

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Quoting: ArdjeThe bigger question for the flight sim world is when does MS 2020 come out, which is the only title that will bring me back to Windows for gaming if it does not run on Wine/Proton and which looks bonkers amazing and which could make XP 11 somewhat irrelevant...

If all you care about is eye-candy then X-Plane might become "irrelevant", but X-Plane has always been the king of physics and flight dynamics.

But before you declare MS Flight Simulator 2020 the king of graphics, the trick is actually very simple: orthophotos, a trick that has been around for years, and you can add for free to X-Plane 11, assuming you have the time to generate them from publicly available satellite imagery resources, and the several terabytes of hard drive space to store them. My hunch is that MSFS 2020 will not store the considerable amounts of data on user's hard drives but will be an online-only title that will pull down the data only as needed.

And while orthophotos generally look good, they come with certain problems, such as textures sometimes being oddly stretched over surface geometry, "baked in" shadows that don't match the in-game lighting, dynamic roads not lining up with the photos so that you end up with oddities like cars driving through buildings, generated 3D structures that don't line up with the photos leading to flattened buildings, visible seams between photo textures where they don't perfectly line up, and so on. And, yes, every single one of these problems is visible in the MSFS 2020 trailer, but the deliberately fast-paced editing makes them hard to spot.

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Quoting: GuestThey had talked about preliminary tests and some improvement in performance actually. They also said miracles should not be expected. It was long ago. :)

X-Plane 11 is actually extremely well optimized at this point. In fact, it runs better for me than X-Plane 10 ever did. So in my case, Vulkan could only deliver small improvements.

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Quoting: TcheyToo bad it's going to be "historical", and not "mythological" with beasts, gods, etc.

In that case, you want Total War: Warhammer.

As for me, I think the market is over saturated with Total War games. The only thing different between each of them is the setting and graphics. They could just sell the Total War gaming engine and then sell "scenario packs" offering different eras and military technologies.

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I've gotten so many free over the past few years that it almost makes it pointless to buy new games.

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Has a very strong resemblance to Breath of the Wild.

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Quoting: pbI used to love KDE, using it all the way through v2 and v3. When they released KDE4, I promptly switched to gnome 2. Then came Gnome 3 so I switched to Mate. With Mate losing momentum in favour of Cinnamon, I switched to XFCE and I never felt the need to switch again (though I have sometimes tried other DEs, including newer versions of KDE). The worst thing about open source is that all the time people break something that is working well, and the best thing about open source is that there are always plenty of alternatives to switch to. :P

I've heard it said that one of the best things about Linux is the amount of choice the consumer has.

I've also heard it said that one of the worst things about Linux is the amount of choice the consumer has!

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