20 years of muscle memory down the drain

[Michael Blakely]

Just loaded X-Plane.
At the moment, all the controls are different.

20 years of Microsoft flight simulator muscle memory down the drain.

[Tom Pletzke]

Hi Mike,

Don't worry about the initial shock. X-Plane is very configurable and I was able to map most of my muscle memory from FSX to X-Plane. One of the best parts about X-Plane is that it is being updated. And more add-on's are available everyday.

[Theodore Martin]

Just loaded X-Plane.
At the moment, all the controls are different.

20 years of Microsoft flight simulator muscle memory down the drain.

Mike, what prompted you to move to X-Plane? FSX giving you problems....new computer for the holidays....curiosity?

[Michael Blakely]

This is a good story.

I bought a new computer about 1 year ago, pretty high end too. My wife wanted her own computer, and her apps are less demanding, so I built a new gaming machine for myself.

Well, then I got busy at work, and the machine was in the room my son (high school senior) did his homework in. By the time work let up, my son was in the habit of doing his homework in front of my new computer while skyping with study-groups, and running world of tanks or some other game in the background. He would camp out there for 6-8 hours a day.

When my son was about to leave for college, I bought him a laptop (evil snicker...) and told him he could either clean up 90% of the 800GB of games he loaded on MY computer, or I could just reformat the hard drive, his preference.

Last week, my son was home for Thanksgiving, and camped out at his old spot. I decided, if I don't load a sim and start using this computer, I may lose it to him. Then I thought about the great P3D and XPlane picures I've been seeing, and I though about how FSX doesn't use all 4 cores very efficiently, and I thought about how FSX is almost 10 years old, and that drove me to a new sim.

Choosing between P3D and Xplane was difficult. Ultimately, I decided that:
- The people in the X Plane forums seemed more satisfied and to be battling fewer problems
- X Plane had more of the plug-ins I wanted, including AI traffic, Boeing, and Airbus planes
- X Plane has less software baggage, and will evolve better than P3D over the next 10 years
- Laminar Research is more likely then Lockheed to support a consumer flight simulator for the next 10 years

My decision means giving up PMDG models, which is going to be hard, but so far I'm having fun.

[Tom Pletzke]

And you will be able to get the 777 world liner professional (shown on screenshot contest) and the plane I am still learning to fly. The A321 shown below.

[Michael Blakely]

I dealt with this last year. It takes awhile but well worth it. Mike is right, less baggage in X-Plane. The flight engine feels much better especially if you run 64-bit. The add-ons are expensive and sometimes too realistic (steep learning curve). Highly recommend watching the X-Plane store for sales and buying your planes that way. My most recent purchase was the JarDesign A320. Requires cold-start every time. Ugh.

FYI, PMDG is making a DC-3 for X-Plane!

Nice A320. I was never really happy with any of the FSX Airbuses. It will be interesting to see what this one is like.