BobdogG5 said:
While X-Plane is not as pretty or easily expandable as MS Flight Sim, you should take into account that it is certified by the FAA to earn Instrument Rating, Commercial and Airline Transport Certificates on 41 planes (in a full motion flight sim platform) since it's level of simulation is so much higher level than that of MS Flight sim; as far as I know MS Flight sim isn't certified at all (correct me if I'm wrong).
Like I said - X-plane is a great simulator as far as physics, flight modelling, etc.. It's more accurate since it draws its performance values from the actual shape of the aircraft instead of a series of facts and figures placed in a .air file lie
But as far as fun and immersiveness? It falls short.
I bought my dad X-plane 8 for this past Christmas. He'd been wanting a flight sim for his Mac for ages, and that was really the only option.
On Christmas day, I was very happy to find my parents had bought me the CH products flight sim yoke. I plugged it into my Windows laptop and it worked great right out of the box on FS2004. My dad tried it out and was absolutely wowed. The virtual cockpit, scenery, GPS, VOR's, AI traffic, ATC, etc.
He even practiced a cross-country that we were talking about taking to the Florida Keys (Marathon key, to be specific). All the way down, he was looking around the cockpit to admire the scenery.
Later that night, we installed X-Plane on his Mac. We tried really hard to like it. REALLY hard. I'd personally heard a million great things about it and was looking forward to it.
We loaded up the same type of scenario as we had on FS2004. Kendall Tamiami Airport, 8am, destination Marathon.
The first "wtf?" was when we plugged in the Flight Sim Yoke. The damn thing wouldn't work in X-Plane without the rudder pedals (which I had left at my house). We had to assign the prop RPM control to the rudder - otherwise the aircraft would go completely out of control. FS2004 has an auto-rudder checkbox.
The second "wtf?" was when we tried looking around the virtual cockpit using the hat switch. In FS2004, the camera moves around smoothly, showing the entire aircraft interior. In X-Plane, once you move past the instrument panel the entire aircraft disappears, so it looks like you're travelling through the air on a magic carpet. Total immersion killer.
Those are just a couple of things. I could go on and on. Like I said - it's an accurate simulator. B-52s, Triple-7's, etc fly like they feel they should, and the Cessna 172 is dead-on.
But the whole thing just feels unfinished, with little attention to detail, whereas FS2004 is a complete polished package. And, BTW, FS2004 has been certified in several countries as an FTD. Not sure about here in the states (though I don't see why it wouldn't be with all the hardware add-ons available - Project Magenta, full instrument panels, etc.):
http://www.popularaviation.com/ListNewsArticleDtl.asp?id=183
http://www.therealcockpit.com/pressrelavio.php
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Haven't yet been able to make it run. And you should calcualte for abou 48 hours of tedious config editing if you want anything other than your keyboard to control the planes. Also I might add that it might not be very satisfactory for someone regarding X-Plane 8 as "unfinished", as Open source produkts generally tend to look a little... ragged 