Medellinexpat

@olderndirtI too have a lot of payware scenery. My guess is that much of it is not going to be updated and in many cases a new scenery, at best with a discount, will be released. Those scenery providers who are still active may provide updates but that a lot of older material won’t be. From those developers reporting on their XP11 products most seem to have one or more glitches in the packages. Some issues might get resolved by Xplane12 updates, say poor performance at night, but others like levitating buildings will be up to the developers. Boundless are a pretty good example listing discovered issues for their sceneries on the boundlessdirect site, through a link on their home page. One other issue is where you bought your sceneries from if you then need XP12 updates. The Orgstore is making them available pretty quickly but others, like the Inibuilds store aren’t built to have more than one version so purchasers from there are on wait until they change, if ever, their store.

Interesting review, I have been waiting to see what your thoughts would be. Personally I started the month saying that I would wait buying XP12. There just seemed too many reported issues, but then it is a beta. As the month went on I came to the conclusion that it was time to have a look for myself. When simulators change staying behind also has issues - for example was there any point in buying anymore XP11 content? The download from Steam was easy and (praying while it booted up) like you the performance was good. Getting my Thrustmaster controls working was painful, but that was issues around pedals and joysticks fighting with each other. For me the stock airports, at least during the day, seemed a big improvement in some cases better than some of the payware XP11 I had bought, but then a lot of XP11 content wasn’t great or by now very dated. The weather was a huge improvement, perhaps a little too choppy (is there calm air anywhere in XP12?) but a first flight from my local airport Medellin (SKRG) to Cartagena (SKCG) felt very like a real flight I had taken a week before. There is generally a change between the weather on departure, high in the Andes and arrival on the Caribbean coast and it was all there. Like you I found there were things I no longer needed. I have liked you Activesky but it felt good not to have to deal with it anymore. A flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco made me wonder whether I really needed Orbx anymore. From height the default scenery, while not ‘see your own house’ seemed a big improvement. The Taimodels Paris you mention I have and downloaded the XP12 version from the store. Impressive. But even better was Verticalsims XP12 version of Syracuse (KSYR). X-CODRs KDEN XP12 version worked right out of the box as well. I bought X-CODRs scenery enhancement package and those stock airports looked even better. On payware aircraft the Toliss fleet seemed good upgrades and for me stable. Flight Factors 757 and 767 seemed better in XP12 and are old friends. I have yet to fly their upgraded A350. AD Simulations CRJ700 seemed nervy, that may be joystick set up. Zibo for me better in XP12 but perhaps a new fresh install rather than update over update in XP11 helped? SSG’s 747 was the first aircraft that looked a little heavy on the frame rates in XP12 but then again it was no lightweight in XP11. Just about everyday there is some XP12 version release. There is always something to try. I feared all these updates might be a chore. It is not. Traffic Global had a messy release (there are posts on how to fix it) and it spawns so much ground traffic and annoyingly over your parked aircraft. But it does work and for me seems more stable than the XP11 version (perhaps it is happier without other plugs ins like Activesky)? Simbrief runs, Navigraph updates work but how I miss the moving map. The base XP map is still pretty sad. Avitab works without issues, Better Pushback mostly. X-Organizer is up and running to help with scenery ordering and useful with helping manage the transition. Bottom line, yes it is a beta. Yes there is some weird stuff. Late evening at KORD had some very strange lighting, cartoon sunset quickly fading to a grey murk. But for me a pretty basic XP12 is better than my heavily loaded XP11. I think it is going to be rather good….

Small error there CRJ-400. I am using 12 and have been impressed with how quickly the commercial aircraft developers, like in this instance, are providing beta packages. GA developers have been quiet, have any provided a 12 beta version? Scenery developers deserve less credit as well with few releases and thats not because there aren’t issues with 11 packages in 12. The utilities group is more varied. XOrganizer has a nice working package for example, allowing you to link to content you want to bring in to 12 easily whereas Navigraph in some posts indicated they had 12 beta compliant packages but then stated that it had not been released because they did not support betas. Groan. Good that the org store is making this 12 beta content available so quickly. At some point I think the store is going to need to separate out 12 content (or at least working beta) from that for 11. I would have thought that 11 content is selling slowly how and any help pointing people towards developers actually reacting to the release of the 12 beta would be useful for both buyers and the store

Actually Steam pricing is often country dependent. I live in Colombia and bought XP12 today. The cost was COP 82,500, which is around $19. The download, of the base package and the geographic sceneries was very good. I have seen posts on other forums suggesting that buying from Steam makes no sense, but in certain geographic regions Steam is much cheaper.

On Taimodels’ LFPG worth noting that it is a free upgrade for existing XP11 users on the Org.store. I also notice that a couple of their Japanese sceneries I have also now how free XP12 versions. I guess they are working through their existing content. When we talk about releases for XP12 of existing sceneries there is an interesting an important point. Does the release for XP12 have any real changes or is it perhaps a corrected or just ‘certified’ as not having issues in XP12? Kudos to Taimodels anyway.

Thank you Stephen for a detailed, focused review of 12 together with some useful pictures. For me moving from 11 to 12 was a no brainer. However, and more will be known about this later, backward compatibility seems to be less that I was expecting. I did understand that some aircraft would likely be impacted but it almost seems universal with reports of issues, such as landing gear problems, with many add ons. Even more frustrating are the reports of issues with Payware scenery, Boundless for example responsibly reporting on different issues with several of their packages. Now Boundless will fix the issues, but other developers? Having 12 be an incremental upgrade from 11 is fine, and was advertised as such, but if backward compatibility is to a large degree lost that breaks that concept. At some point I need to make a decision, not yet, but at some point. If much of what I have bought is going to be flawed in 12 what ‘investment’ (an odd word I know) do I have left in Xplane? That opens up the question about whether my next simulator should be 12 or is it time to consider MSFS as a better bet for future use? Many developers are not going to fix their old 11 packages and my guess is that future updates of 12 are not going to fix many of the glitches that are now appearing. Time to watch and see what happens but my automatic decision to move to 12 is now one of watch and wait. Any chance of a more detailed article on how airports now look in 12 vs. 11?

SFO Definitive was interesting is that it demonstrated, at the very end of XP11, exactly what could be done with pay ware scenery. It will be interesting seeing some examples of how the new standard XP12 airports look. Equally, given that in XP11 there was a lot of free content, one wonders what XP12 means for freeware development.

XP12 doesn’t overwrite XP11 so provided you have enough disk space there is no reason you cannot have both. Then, leaving your XP11 unchanged and then add things to XP12 as they are updated or demonstrated to work. At some point you will decide that XP12 is good enough to replace your XP11 usage and then consider deleting the XP11 instance. You are not going to lose everything. Equally some things are not going to be updated and will have issues in XP12. One of the things that is surprising me is how much payware does seem to require changes. The aircraft packages I was expecting but scenery seems to be impacted as well. Boundless have posted an update on their site about known issues with their sceneries in XP12 which they are fixing. If they are representative, and many of their sceneries are pretty new, making the transition if you have a reasonable amount of payware is going to quite an involved process

Beta early access, no need to run at this point. Interesting watching all the forums with peoples experiences and issues. At this point I’ve yet to work out my transition strategy. What to keep, what not to try to move. Try and keep 11 alongside 12? Thinking about what may be positives - for example is the overhead of Activesky still needed? Bracing for the negatives, what might not work or get updated. Moving over will be something of a hassle but there are positives to a clean sheet of paper. Interesting questions as well, which payware airports will still be worth keeping and which may be destined for that virtual dustbin. Does Orbx still make sense or still work with decent performance? Performance will of course be key, but generally those new tidy set ups generally do not perform badly against the huge old version on your disk with multiple plugs ins, sound sets you really did not need, or the 43 liveries you for installed for your 767. And of course the knowledge when you find that it runs fine on you rig the little thought planted in the back of your mind about how much better it might be if you upgraded your video card, CPU etc. You might not spend the money today, or tomorrow, but the fuse is lit.

Bought this today. It should almost be mandatory for other scenery developers to study this to see what can be achieved. Truly excellent.

I bought this recently. A very pleasant aircraft for casual flights. Would strongly recommend it and can only envy the now lower price.

Agree completely with your comments on SAM. One positive it seems pretty stable these days - gone of the days when the farewell wave on the crash log would be some reference to SAM. Its intentions were always good, but the idea of rolling everything into one App, and with that huge intrusive control screen it always made it seem clumsy. Let’s move the jetway - and then have to quickly get out of the control screen to see the jetway now half way back to the terminal. Commercially it was quite clever with the sale of the add on modules but out of interest how often do you see follow me cars at airports these days? SAM is of course threatened by XP12. Are there going to be moving jetways in base XP12? Will new shiny wet pavements kill off seasons files (not that they were ever a big thing). But then of course many developers now have made their sceneries dependent on SAM. No latest copy of SAM and your new payware international airport is reduced to Boeings and Airbuses grazing in a rather large field. So if developers don’t remove that dependency SAM for better or worse is going to be with us way into the future.

Hear you. One of the good things about Laminar (or the frustration) is that it is not a big corporate shop. Watch those presentation videos and we all know we are not going the mainstream route. Give Austin the chance and he will wobble on about everything that interest him and skip anything everyone else might ask. We all know that when released XP12 will instantly be benchmarked, at least in look against MSFS and we all know what the result of that will be. But for the faithful the improvements might open up the pocketbooks and keep them loyal. What XP12 cannot afford is lots of issues on release. MSFS other than the eye candy and the corporate campaign was hardly a tidy release but people like Microsoft are set up to manage those bumps. Laminar aren’t. The worst outcome is a repeat of the MD-11 saga. Years of built up anticipation that Rotate did nothing to manage (instead maintaining radio silence) and then when it came, part broken, a flurry of upset first adopters.

I have recently, thanks to Org store sales bought several new GA aircraft and have been flying around the summer skies of the UK and California, or at least the Orbx representations of them. And it has been very pleasant indeed. It might be my imagination but some of the recent Nvidia drivers also seem pretty good. Which led me to the thought that XP11 is really not bad at all, and (unlike many video games and simulations) I still have a lot more to do, to learn and improve - although my landings seem a lot more consistent these days. Then when I come online I read all of the calls for more news and a release date for XP12 and I wonder why. Perhaps XP12 out of the box will be better, but then like many releases it might take a few iterations. Now in XP11 unlike in MSFS I cannot really see my house, nor fly around a more accurate version of say London. But then XP11 does many other things better to compensate. And then there’s all my investment in XP11, not just the money but the time and the tweaking and learning it to a decent depth - although there is always more to learn. So yes, XP12 would be nice, if only to get developers some much needed new sales. But in the interim I’ll just virtually fly, rather than seeking snippets from forums and videos. How does Guernsey to Swansea sound for this afternoon for example? Pleasant enough weather, but a little wet in the arrival perhaps?

I guess one argument that prices in XP12 might be higher is inflation. Many of the aircraft that may be updated were originally released and priced a few years ago so this might justifiably be an opportunity for developers to reset levels. Upgrade fees will be interesting. I have enough aircraft that in total in might be an significant sum. That might have some impact on sales of newer releases at least for a while as people find the money to upgrade their existing loved ‘fleet’. Plenty of people might have, say, fifteen pay-ware aircraft. Let’s say all of them were updated at $15 each. That’s $225 which puts the ‘upgrade’ price of the new base XP12 package into perspective.

Stephen that is a nice sentiment but in reality will developers see it as a pool of money to fund development over the life of XP12 or will they see it as a one off payment to make the product compliant with XP12? I guess it may vary between developers. As for the question asked here should you purchase now, or when the aircraft is available in XP12 that is an interesting one. Lets say the current XP11 version is hypothetically $69. Lets say the upgrade fee will be $15. Will the developer, when XP12 is up and running and the upgrade done, make the price for new buyers to be $84 ($69+$15) or $69? My guess is the latter, but that is a guess. I think we are going to see a lot of variety between developers. Some will not upgrade, some will upgrade just to make it work in XP12 and some will upgrade and add XP12 features. One thing I guess is pretty certain, anyone staying with XP11 is unlikely to see either updates, bug fixes or any help if some other issue (like a Windows platform change) introduces new problems. Presumably once XP12 features are added back compatibility is lost?

Interesting timing in releasing this now ahead of 12 but if you read the developers thread in the forums payware section he does explain how that is covered. My biggest issue is that the package does change some of the native Xplane files which I am generally cautious about, although again the developer makes it clear that changing them back is no big deal.

As always an interesting article. On Inibuilds they always managed the message well. If you give vloggers exclusive access for reviews what do you get in return - good reviews. Make your forums only open to customers and then close threads before they get difficult and you start the magic of people believing that your products are without fault. Have a friendly discord and you get your fan base out telling the world that the A310 is the gold standard. Its not hard. Its planned, but its not difficult. On the other side we have Laminar who manage this side of the business incredibly badly. Strange whirling light presentations, long winded interviews talking about the philosophy of XP12 rather than pumping up the new features. Personally I am not looking forward to the release of XP12 because with it will come a tidal wave of sewage, online posts complaining about everything from the known (that it will not be a free upgrade) to the unknown - that it now runs like a slide show on a ten year old laptop. XP11 to XP12 - an incremental update. Manage the expectations. Now Inibuilds are on the other side and not every developer can be happy. Why did MS choose Inibuilds, with no track record on this or any preceding MS platform to be included as a default aircraft? Why did an A310 get chosen, hardly an iconic aircraft? If the MSFS A310 is study level (which I doubt) what does that say to the MSFS community about the cost of complex addons? PMDGs $70 or Inibuilds $0? Did Inibuilds get paid by MS for the inclusion or is it the other way around, a developer paying (or offering for free) an aircraft to get a lot of publicity and exposure with the community? In effect product placement. Half way through the year and the one group of people to feel sorry for is Xplane developers. With the wait for XP12 sales can’t be great. If I can pick up a big discount on a recent Thandra release on the org store it may be good for me, but it is also telling me life is not good for developers at the moment.

Going back in the Inibuilds forum in August 2021 they were saying about XP12 ‘We don't have any information on the new simulator. If we have the means and ease to port the product over to the next sim, we will definitely consider it since we understand the current user base will be shifting over to the next generation. Don't take this as confirmation, as we know nothing. For the time being, all of us are sitting tight, and receiving the same information.’ And they referred later inquiries in September to the same post. Remember the A310 was released in July and people were asking the question before buying. I wonder if MSFS had not come knocking whether they would have found that they had ‘the means and ease’ of porting their products over?

This is on the Inibuilds forum and suggests that they are going to walk away ‘We appreciate every single customer for their business and support during our product releases for X-Plane 11. These products were for X-Plane 11 and marketed as such. We have no comments on X-Plane 12, aircraft wise, to make currently, and our focus is very much on Microsoft Flight Simulator. We entered this business to provide the best quality add-ons. Entering a long-term relationship with the fantastic team at Microsoft Flight Simulator, allows us to do just that but to a much wider audience in Microsoft Flight Simulator.’ i would suggest Stephen that your review, in the introduction, states clearly that this developer has yet to make any commitment to supporting XP12 and that as a result buyers should consider this purchase only for use in XP11.

Good that Toliss came out with their upgrade strategy for XP12. Maybe I am a bit dense but trying to understand what is free and what isn’t to me isn’t clear. The A340 upgrade is free. The A321 Neo is free. The A319 has a fee. The A321 is only free if you have the Neo, or has a fee whatever? On updating through SkunkCrafts there’s a note from Toliss on the Xplane forum about two .acf files that while running in XP11 need deleting after the update as they are for XP12 For the revised liveries - always an issue - Toliss seem to have engaged the livery painters pretty early allowing them to start work on the needed changes Lastly good to see a developer making full use of Simbrief.

Interesting, not a developer I had focused on - it would be nice if org store had them as one of the splits under GA aircraft. Looking at their wares, other than the two you mention here, their releases seem to be 2017 or earlier. Any story around the five year hiatus?

I did find this on fsnews.eu ‘As part of one of their development updates, iniBuild’s Ubaid has confirmed that iniBuild is looking forward to bringing their addons to X-Plane 12, however, can’t share any specific information as the company does not yet have access to X-Plane 12.’ The problem is that the article in question seems to be being updated from time to time so I am confused when he said that. Anyone know?

I have not seen the performance issues mentioned here (were those FPS measurement before or after the Ortho creation) but will agree that like other recent FeelThere Xplane releases it isn’t very special. However Dubai is an important point on world air routes these days so as a choice of subject it makes a lot of sense. On ‘ I would highly recommend first looking at other options in the Org store before going for this rendition’ what are the other options for OMDB? I can’t see any other on the Org store. What am I missing? All I can see under the United Arab Emirates is this OMDB offering by FeelThere and OMMA by Taimodels

Olderndirt generally I think you will be happy (not that I have any inside knowledge) but its likely that one or two developers won’t play ball either because they no longer have an interest in Xplane or their products are so long in the tooth (maybe originally XP10) that it just doesn’t make sense. Its not just about having product that works completely in XP12 but also product that can take advantage of XP12 features, not just on release but going forward. As an example replacing the rain on the windscreen feature that Librain used to provide. Developers who had 3rd parties do development for them - step forward Carenado - where that development arrangement no longer exists are the kind of people to worry about.