Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Serious flight simulations have two major hurdles: how to convey realistic flight dynamics, and how to portray a convincing world to 'fly' in. The brand leader (Microsoft Flight Simulator) works using 'lookup tables' to produce flight dynamics coupled with a solid, no-frills flight dynamics engine. This means that each aircraft has an array of data that is looked-up (degree of aileron turn-rate, stability etc.) and reproduced for each flight. This is how big, expensive flight simulators are made. The data has to be as accurate as possible in the lookup table, but if it is, and the software engine is decent, you'll get a convincing flight experience. If the data is a bit crude, or the software engine oversimplified, then you will not. Also, if the data does not exist (such as for stalling etc.) then you're left with guesswork. X-Plane works differently. It uses a method that calculates, in real-time, the effects on each part of the aircraft. If you move an aileron, for example, it calculates the wind and other forces at work on the aileron and then moves the rest of the aircraft according to the physics calculations after combining the aileron calculations with all the other calculations for the aircraft. Each part of the aircraft has its own strength, flexibility, weight, etc. that all goes into the final calculation. If you get the physics calculations correct (including the modelling of air density etc.) you get a 'real' aircraft, not a lookup table. While that sounds great in theory, its not perfect. Physics calculations are not 100% accurate, and anything left out won't be modelled. So while in theory you should get a more accurate flight model compared to flight tables, in practise it doesn't always work out that way - which is why expensive simulators for real-world pilots use the lookup table system. If all simulators are approximations, a lookup table is less risky than an on-the-fly calculation. Nonetheless, X-Plane does produce better results than Flight Simulator X, by and large. Air is better modelled, flight characteristics feel more detailed, and despite the heavy calculations involved the frame rate is a lot smoother. Bear in mind you'll need a computer for gaming, not a laptop or lightweight. Even so, its pretty good on the frame rate if you find the right settings. There are many drawbacks to X-Plane, which is why I prefer Flight Simulator X. Some people have different priorities, of course, so you should weigh the following with your own sense of what you want out of a sim: I feel customer support and a sense of professionalism is important when buying an 'investment' product like a flight simulator. It can be a deal breaker, and for that reason I'm disappointed that the creators of X-Plane are not as professional or as organised as a company of this size should be. They have a scatty approach to their work that leaves me bemused. Big changes have been made in the past that break 3rd party addons (aircrafts, scenery etc.) sold by other developers which then take months of fixing. Many of these broken aircraft are for sale on the X-Plane website but are not updated after each X-Plane revision, making purchasing 3rd party products a lottery from them. You simply can't be sure that the version you're buying is going to work with the latest update, and don't expect to be warned if it doesn't. Whilst the customer service from their shop is excellent, their technical support forums are notoriously policed by heavy-handed moderators. Banning mildly negative comments is routine, and the support by third party developers carried out on the forum can be patchy at best. Their support forums are frankly the least professional support groups I've used to date, with a nasty tendency to bully people who don't toe the line. Sadly all portions of the forums are policed by the X-Plane moderators so arbitrary bannings plague even 3rd party forums. If you are a company looking to set up a support forum website, check out the X-Plane site as an example of how not to do it. It's just creepy. So much for support and professionalism. But there are also many technical flaws in the product. The world is badly simulated - it looks ugly and there is no way to interact with it. You can't crash into obstacles, for example, and a helicopters downdraught won't interact with nearby buildings, etc. Airports are almost non-existent, and the colour palette is distinctly raw and unconvincing. It may simulate aircraft as objects floating in air, but the world is poorly realised and uninteractive. You might wonder why crashing should be simulated, but the fear of hitting an obstacle is an important part of flying - or should be. Professional pilots take enormous precautions to avoid hitting obstacles and this fear of striking objects should be reflected in any simulator (especially in helicopters). This lack of care is shown in the Artificial Intelligence of the aircraft sharing this world with you. Jumbo jets take off from small grass runways, military aircraft visit tiny airfields and nothing quite makes any sense. There are few, if any, buildings at airports (unless you are prepared to pay about £15 for a single addon airport), and textures are bland and low-resolution. If you feel that you are not too bothered by a poorly simulated environment, think again. It breaks immersion, and makes the tone of the product feel somehow unsatisfying. The biggest downside to X-Plane is that third-party developers, by and large, won't touch it. Developing software for it is expensive (especially when new code comes out that breaks their existing aircraft and causes them to need redevelopment from the ground up). The user-base is less committed than Flight Simulator X users, and the cost of aircraft is commensurately cheaper despite costing as much time and effort to develop. Consequently, only a handful of dedicated developers bother with it and so you don't get much choice. There are some hopeful signs on the horizon - Aerosoft, a very professional company, is trying to get involved to take some of the shabbiness out of the product. The jury is out on how effective this will be, but I'm hopeful. Also, some of the third party developers are quite fantastic. Not all, but some are outstanding (Dreamfoil creations are a great place to start for addons). Its companies such as Dreamfoil that rate X-Plane an extra two stars - they elevate it to something far better than it should be. Without them it would be scraping along at one star. To conclude, you're getting a very different experience to Flight Simulator with X-Plane. It has something to offer, but X-Plane is too shabby and unprofessional at the moment to be enthusiastically recommended. Support and professionalism is utterly lacking, and nothing quite works or makes sense in the simulated world. Bullying forum moderators make the whole experience very unpleasant from a customer viewpoint. Give it time and you might just find a fine aircraft simulator beneath, but when its Microsoft competitor is so well supported by third parties and developed to perfection, why settle for X-Plane? X-Plane just seems like a missed opportunity. The guy who developed it took an opportunity and squandered it - but in the hands of someone with a greater vision, it might have been the finest product of its kind.