Quoting: STiAT... with 1,245 on patreon, that's for sure welcome.

As a Patreon backer for Lutris, thank you for pointing out that the Epic Grant is still roughly double what Lutris gets from our own community, and that's the bigger shame. After Valve and Wine, Lutris is the third most important tool for compatibility that we have, with several items that would not run to a broad swath of our community without the work of it's devs and script writers like someone who posted earlier. I hope this is a big prompt for more to go to Patreon and give themselves to important Linux gaming resources like Lutris (and GOL!)...

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I actually signed up for this because I'm really interesting in trying the tech, but off the bat, this is a huge shoulder shrug of a title list. We'll see how long I stick around...

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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...

I can't imagine even the hardest core, Richard Stallman worshiping Linux flight sim fan wouldn't do a dual boot or get a new machine to run MS 2020 when it comes out (assuming Proton doesn't work). I mean, dating myself here, I'm a flight simmer back to C64 and Apple IIe days, and MS2020 seems to be what we've all been waiting for our entire lives. It looks that good. Also, the dev team has been doing astonishing communication with the community, with near weekly updates and vids, and some of those vids have been terrific. They have an amazingly candid and detailed timeline online that they update regularly. They're also fully planning to embrace the third party mod community which has kept FSX and P3D alive all these years, very directly opposite the stand-offish reputation that Laminar XP has with that community. MS seems fully aware of current FSX and XP weaknesses and are addressing those. The only ones I can see being disappointed would be those using VR, as they've said they don't expect that working on release.

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Quoting: Cyba.CowboyCall it "geeky", but this post just sold me on X-Plane, 100%... Knowing that this Linux supported flight simulator is so in-depth and complete makes me want to rush out and buy it now - except that right now, I only own a laptop with above-average gaming capabilities - so it will sit on my "wish" list for the time being.

Oh, no, you should do the opposite and definitely buy it. It might actually run reasonably well on low to medium settings. I've read of it even being quite playable on low end hardware. The problem is you shouldn't expect to upgrade graphics or mods all that much. And don't think some hardware tweaks here or there will help, as an additional issue with XP11 is the code is older, utilizing a single core only no matter how many you've got and passing very little through the GPU. So some users, like one of the posters up above, are frustrated that monster i9's with 2080 Ti's are limping along at 25 FPS with beefly graphics mods and that doesn't represent a dramatic improvement in FPS over their old 1050 Ti gaming laptop. The code just can't do much with the better hardware. That's where MS2020 will be a game changer potentially, being coded for the machines of today...

Quoting: Cyba.CowboyDoes X-Plane support all those fancy flight input / output devices (such as all the stuff Logitech sells [External Link]? What about virtual reality headsets - are they supported under Linux-based operating systems?

If those things are supported, I could build a pretty slick - Linux powered - flight simulator in my garage... ;-)

I can't speak for VR, which I don't use, but yes, all the other toys work very well and the sim overall runs via easy to understand and modify scripts, configs, and .ini's, and thus is perhaps the most infinitely configurable title I've ever played.

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This is a franchise that I should absolutely be eating up, but I haven't been able to generate an ounce of enthusiasm for it in the near 30 years I've been playing it on a PC. How's this newest title on Linux?

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Quoting: elmapulactually fuchsia may be a bad thing...

Whoa, I'll believe Fuschia when I see it... Who know what, if anything, they'll do with that. I've long considered myself a Google fan, but I'm getting jaded after seeing head-scratching move after move... Especially after this bewildering Google hardware launch (Pixel 4 expensive and missing features, Pixelbook GO with WTF spec choices, no movement on Chrome OS in a while, killing services I use left and right, etc) I'm losing faith in their ability to read the market and to see things through to a satisfactory conclusion. Perpetually keeping everything in beta and treating things as disposable experiments that hundreds of millions of people around the world use every day is getting old... As a fan and early adopter of smartwatches and someone for whom that kind of notification system really fits with my workflow, their complete near abandonment of Wear OS has felt particularly insulting and betraying. It seems like Google is naval gazing too much and not plugged into their customers.

Quoting: elmapul...fireos was not able to compete

Considering the number of Fire devices Amazon has sold and how ubiquitous they are, and their likely level of investment (or lack thereof) in FireOS, I'm guessing they've been pretty happy with it....

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Quoting: peta77So next MSFS sounds like an impressive flight sim. But having the map data source online definitely can be a problem, depending on your internet connection. So the should be having a good caching strategy or a prefetch functionality for it to be still usable even if you live in a region with bad internet.

Yes, your connection quality will matter quite a bit. My best bet is it'll be like Stadia, where you'll need 35-50 Mbps for best performance and about 10 Mbps to participate at all. Or maybe not that much, given that ortho scenery works quite well with older drives, not requiring SSD's.

Regarding other options, they're way ahead of you :). You'll be able to fly completely offline (which reviewers said even that version was better quality than our existing options) and you'll be able to pre-cache your frequently flown areas for use without streaming as well, limited only by your storage space.

Unless this is going to run on Steam like FSX, I really doubt we'll see it work on Linux, even on Wine. If it's the genre redefining title it seems like it's shaping up to be, I'm fully prepared to buy a totally extra Windows PC just to run it (and, of course, run everything else on my Linux rig :) ).

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Quoting: peta77What I got from previews is that they are doing some autogen-stuff from open-street-maps like X-Plane is doing it.. ...but it won't all over the globe

As I replied to someone earlier, they've released all the details on it. It will not be autogen based on open maps, but will be faithful representations based on streamed Bing Maps, 2 pedabytes of data worth, with algorithms deciding on 3D building representations based on Bing Maps appearance. And it WILL BE THE ENTIRE WORLD. Anything Bing Maps has done will be in the game. More populous areas will have higher detail maps and they'll do more customized maps of high use areas (Paris, NYC, etc). Want to know how good your favorite areas will be in MS2020? Check out how detailed the Bing Map is now.

Alpha hands on previews by journalists, who could on their own select anywhere in the world to fly (their hometown, where they work, where they went to college, landmarks, etc) were stunned at the level of 3D detail far in excess of anything in existence right now. They said it allows for true VFR flying now... And this is just the alpha. Looking forward to it!

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Quoting: peta77That's some really exciting news as I was actually a little bit disappointed about the performance it has shown so far on an RTX2080ti @ 4K. It has used (according to nvidia-smi) less than 50% of my GPU and about two third of my CPU cores were just bored while having just 25fps! I hope with update 11.50 X-Plane will finally be able to fully (or at least a lot more) exploit my resources so the experience will be a lot smoother.

I would temper those expectations. They've already said people shouldn't expect an FPS boost with Vulkan. This is being done solely I think because of expiring OpenGL code and Mac requirements to use Metal. And your experience is totally typical, BTW. XP11 will bring even the tippist toppiest systems to their knees. It's because of all of this legacy code that pushes almost the entire sim through one core of the CPU, and the GPU doesn't matter all that much. So, again, sadly, your experience is typical.

One theory as to why MS 2020 will look and perform so much better is that it's a new, ground-up creation with contemporary code built around contemporary hardware and networking. I mean, all of our current sims are built around code that is 10-15 years old, or older. I wonder if, for a theoretical XP 12, they'll elect to start all over. I would imagine (maybe?) that the MS2020 announcement would have blown up any XP development roadmap, but maybe not...

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Quoting: Mountain ManIf 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.

Quite right, but the MS 2020 team says they are paying a lot of attention to this with the upcoming release, with something like a thousand points of flight dynamics on the surface of every plane, or something like that. Per early reviews from hands on by journalists a few weeks ago, the "feel" of flight is outstanding, and things like stalls, turbulence, and weather effects feel utterly real and likely better than XP 11...

Quoting: Mountain ManBut before you declare MS Flight Simulator 2020 the king of graphics, the trick is actually very simple: orthophotos... 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.

It's not just a hunch, they've announced that they'll be streaming Bing Maps of the ENTIRE PLANET as high res orthos, 2 pedabytes worth from their server. Their advanced algorithms will figure out what buildings look like in 3D and fill in the details. Journalists were picking random points like the neighborhoods they grew up or where they went to college and found uncanny 3D realism, not just flat stretched orthos but convincing 3D locations that finally allows for true VFR flying. Early report back is that even in non-streaming lowest settings, it's an enormous advance over what exists today...

And I've used lots of orthos. They're great 4,000 ft and up, but are lacking at lower altitudes, where the MS 2020 model shines. Competition is exciting!

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