is it me or ATC sucks?

[DeadnCryin]

what the hell ? atc giving me wrong directions, wrong altitudes and keep calling me with diffrent id codes ?
please keep 1000 ? really there is a freaking moutin infront of me and i am at 2000 ?
how did this get posative review or am i doing it wrong ?

[richyfrommars]

Usually, there's a guy who comes into the conversation about ATC, and who proposes Pilot2ATC as the solution ... and I always hated this guy who proposes a $ 60 solution for something that needs to be free in every sim, and whose tuto videos on Youtube are anything but sexy ! But after buying Pilot2ATC a few weeks ago, I'm going to be that guy: Pilot2ATC has totally transformed a xplane that I found boring and meaningless at the base into an exciting and very instructive experience. It's simple, with this software, I really feel like a pilot in real life !
What bothered me about the Youtube videos on pilot2ATC, it was the artificial voices of the ATC, and well now, I managed to solve this problem , thanks to a tutorial on the forum pilot2ATC on avsim: now, I have the ATC voices that blend perfectly with the background RealATC (proposed on this same forum)... and me who responds directly with the microphone .... with my horrible french accent (thanks the perfect speech recognition of win10) .

[DeadnCryin]

O° a écrit :

Usually, there's a guy who comes into the conversation about ATC, and who proposes Pilot2ATC as the solution ... and I always hated this guy who proposes a $ 60 solution for something that needs to be free in every sim, and whose tuto videos on Youtube are anything but sexy ! But after buying Pilot2ATC a few weeks ago, I'm going to be that guy: Pilot2ATC has totally transformed a xplane that I found boring and meaningless at the base into an exciting and very instructive experience. It's simple, with this software, I really feel like a pilot in real life !
What bothered me about the Youtube videos on pilot2ATC, it was the artificial voices of the ATC, and well now, I managed to solve this problem , thanks to a tutorial on the forum pilot2ATC on avsim: now, I have the ATC voices that blend perfectly with the background RealATC (proposed on this same forum)... and me who responds directly with the microphone .... with my horrible french accent (thanks the perfect speech recognition of win10) .

lol

[Commander Freedom]

O° a écrit :

Usually, there's a guy who comes into the conversation about ATC, and who proposes Pilot2ATC as the solution ... and I always hated this guy who proposes a $ 60 solution for something that needs to be free in every sim, and whose tuto videos on Youtube are anything but sexy ! But after buying Pilot2ATC a few weeks ago, I'm going to be that guy: Pilot2ATC has totally transformed a xplane that I found boring and meaningless at the base into an exciting and very instructive experience. It's simple, with this software, I really feel like a pilot in real life !
What bothered me about the Youtube videos on pilot2ATC, it was the artificial voices of the ATC, and well now, I managed to solve this problem , thanks to a tutorial on the forum pilot2ATC on avsim: now, I have the ATC voices that blend perfectly with the background RealATC (proposed on this same forum)... and me who responds directly with the microphone .... with my horrible french accent (thanks the perfect speech recognition of win10) .

It's still an overpriced cheap 60$ addon doing the ATC that should be in the FLIGHT SIMULATOR in the first place, how dare they call it a simulator without a proper ATC? it's beyond me.

[cbfirefighter]

O° a écrit :

Usually, there's a guy who comes into the conversation about ATC, and who proposes Pilot2ATC as the solution ... and I always hated this guy who proposes a $ 60 solution for something that needs to be free in every sim, and whose tuto videos on Youtube are anything but sexy ! But after buying Pilot2ATC a few weeks ago, I'm going to be that guy: Pilot2ATC has totally transformed a xplane that I found boring and meaningless at the base into an exciting and very instructive experience. It's simple, with this software, I really feel like a pilot in real life !
What bothered me about the Youtube videos on pilot2ATC, it was the artificial voices of the ATC, and well now, I managed to solve this problem , thanks to a tutorial on the forum pilot2ATC on avsim: now, I have the ATC voices that blend perfectly with the background RealATC (proposed on this same forum)... and me who responds directly with the microphone .... with my horrible french accent (thanks the perfect speech recognition of win10) .

I agree. Been looking at Pilot2atc for a while now with FSX and Prepar3d. Finally tried it with Xplane 11 and it is awesome. But I still crave an ingame atc that can recognize the AI flights. This is where WOAI and the other two sims kill X plane

[heartc]

It is amazing to me that today there is no civilian flightsim around that does not suck in one way or another. I keep jumping around between FSX, X Plane and even the Open Source sim FlightGear. P3D is basically still the same thing as FSX and just a gigantic money grab by Lockheed Martin, a typical example of someone buying the copyrights on the works of others and reselling it for their own pockets. Heck, the now defunct FSW did more work on the ancient FSX code, and that is saying something.

Those three (FSX, XPlane, FlightGear) combined would resemble something like an acceptable sim, but each one by itself falls terribly short in different significant areas:

FSX:

- FSX has a generally poor FM, especially when moving towards and beyond the normal flight envelope. The terrain graphics suck, landclasses suck. Icing not simulated except for pitot tube. Wind effects and various other weather related aspects, like haze, poorly done.

- It's also a dinosaur.


X Plane 11:

- X Plane 11 has terrible performance for me (and, judging from various forums, not just for me). While I don't have the latest hardware, I could run X Plane 10 maxed out and had wonderful performance (and no crashes which was one of the reasons I switched from FSX to XP10).

X Plane 11 runs like a dog by comparison, even with graphics turned down which makes it look worse than XP10 for me. It's not even a graphics card issue, but mostly a RAM one: I have 8GB of system RAM and XPlane 11 usually exceeds that so it has to access virtual memory which leads to stutters. I see nothing in XP11 however that would justify such an increased memory requirement when compared to XP10. It basically still looks the same. All those FSX guys who now came over to XPlane 11 because "the graphics have improved" must have overslept on XP10, because I could achieve the same or even superior results (maintaining performance) in XP10 already. Now, in fact, I cannot use various addons I used in XP10 anymore because it exceeds the RAM requirements due to the higher base line RAM requirement of XP11 (HD mesh for example and weather enhancements), so XP11 actually looks worse for me than XP10.

- ATC sucks, as discussed here already.

- The water physics are a horrible joke and have even gotten worse from XP10. In fact they went like this: Good in XPlane 9, poor in XPlane 10, horrible in XP11. The problem is that since XP10, the waves are simulated too steeply and with too short intervals as soon as you have winds around 5 kts, which makes your float plane rapidly bounce up and down and often even capsize even when just SITTING on a lake.

The origin of the problem is that with XP10, Austin became fascinated with "aircraft carrier bobbing in the water", but unfortunately, his code does not differentiate between the open OCEAN and a benign in land LAKE. The problem has been pointed out multiple times over the years, but apparently, for Austin, a bobbing aircraft carrier is more important in a civilian flightsim than all those general aviation float and amphibious planes which are now basically useless in any weather with winds greater than 5 kts. The problem has even escalated in XP11, since in addition to the exaggerated waves, the friction of the water has about doubled for no apparent reason, which leads to your float plane stopping in about 10 meters after landing and possibly overturning on its nose or even ripping off the floats.

- Ground handling of the airplanes from on medium winds is wrong. They get thrown around and are hard to turn because the wind effects on the airplanes in the yaw axis is exaggerated, which also becomes apparent in

- exaggerated yaw motion in turbulent winds.

- Default clouds still look pretty horrible.

- Vector data in default scenery is horrible, which makes rivers and coastlines look horrible. I understand there has to be limits to this data for size considerations or because the source data is limited itself, but there should be SOME interpolation going on in the sim engine that smoothens out those sharp angles. FSX actually did that to some degree, while XPlane just doesn't bother at all.


FlightGear:

Well, it's open source and free, so I don't want to be too harsh on its shortfalls, but they are

- Terrain graphics that often look like something out of 1995, color palette is mostly awfull. Can be rectified somewhat with various shader settings and 3rd party shader addons.

- No icing simulation except for 3 planes (787, Extra 500, Piper Seneca II).

- ATC possibly even worse than XPlane, or about the same.

- Horrible sharp angles with roads, rivers and coastlines, just like XPlane.

- Ironically though, it - as a freeware product - has an amazing sky environment and weather simulation that is far superior to both XPlane stock and FSX stock and even includes things like dynamic swaying of trees in the wind, dynamic snow line based on current METAR, accurate weather vaning of airplanes sitting on water, allowing for realistic float plane operations (docking etc).

- Pretty fantastic floating / water model.


Now compare these three sims (especially the two payware products) with a flightsim from 1999, Flight Unlimited 3:

- Fantastic weather model, including dynamically changing weather based on weather fronts

- Accurate icing effects for both pitot and surfaces

- Fantastic ATC

- All planes have a damage model by default

- Fantastic graphics for its time that imho can still hold up today, especially vs the terrible ground mess that is FSX and the repetitive and often absurd Autogen of XPlane. Though, admittedly, it only simulated a limited area (KSFO Bay Area in FUII and KSEA area in FUIII, though third party additional sceneries exist).

- RAIN DROPS on the windshield in all airplanes and they look and behave fantastically - something, to this day, no other civil flightsim has achieved and you only get it in a few payware 3rd party planes if you are lucky. OK, cockpit was 2D, but then again, we are talking 1999 here. I think in 2018, it should be possible for a flightsim developer to put raindrops, frosting and icing on windshields of 3D cockpits, no?

- Fantastic water physics, floating model. Only FlightGear is about on par here.


I think for the relatively high price and high hardware demands of flightsims, we should get a product again that does not terribly suck in one area or another, don't you think? Especially since I believe that at least some of the issues mentioned above are not due to technical limitations, but just simple laziness or complacency, which are tried to be mitigated by the hype train of the marketing department ("Oh look! We have slightly improved the slipstream effect of the propeller!" Yeah, but you still have horrible sharp angles all over the world that make me puke all over the screen while my floatplane is turning over on its back from just sitting on a lake in 10 knot winds.)

[Phoenix591]

The atc is being improved in the 11.30 update, its on the beta branch if you want to check it out

[heartc]

Thanks. Ironically though, I'm still on XPlane 11.05 since the comments on various forums unanimously state that performance has actually gotten worse with more current updates.

[RedLightning]

heartc a écrit :

- The water physics are a horrible joke and have even gotten worse from XP10. In fact they went like this: Good in XPlane 9, poor in XPlane 10, horrible in XP11. The problem is that since XP10, the waves are simulated too steeply and with too short intervals as soon as you have winds around 5 kts, which makes your float plane rapidly bounce up and down and often even capsize even when just SITTING on a lake.

The origin of the problem is that with XP10, Austin became fascinated with "aircraft carrier bobbing in the water", but unfortunately, his code does not differentiate between the open OCEAN and a benign in land LAKE. The problem has been pointed out multiple times over the years, but apparently, for Austin, a bobbing aircraft carrier is more important in a civilian flightsim than all those general aviation float and amphibious planes which are now basically useless in any weather with winds greater than 5 kts. The problem has even escalated in XP11, since in addition to the exaggerated waves, the friction of the water has about doubled for no apparent reason, which leads to your float plane stopping in about 10 meters after landing and possibly overturning on its nose or even ripping off the floats.

Save as a lua script .. do not know where I found it.. but it takes care of the wave problem at least for now.

------------------------------------------

function wave_set()

-- Wave never higer than 0.2
DataRef("wave", "sim/weather/wave_amplitude", "readonly")
if wave > 0.2
then set ("sim/weather/wave_amplitude", 0.2)
end
end
do_often ("wave_set()")

-----------------------------------------

[heartc]

Thanks! I will try that out at the next opportunity. I know there is also a plugin released by the "Epoch Air" virtual bush airline, which, on the click of a button, will decrease the wave height down to a minimum, but the problem with that is that at the same time, it also interferes with the real weather download by reducing the wind strength, and it seems like from then on, the real weather download and the plugin are constantly "fighting" each other, with rather hilarious results.

It looks like the code you provided there does not do that, so that's promising.

[RedLightning]

heartc a écrit :

Thanks! I will try that out at the next opportunity. I know there is also a plugin released by the "Epoch Air" virtual bush airline, which, on the click of a button, will decrease the wave height down to a minimum, but the problem with that is that at the same time, it also interferes with the real weather download by reducing the wind strength, and it seems like from then on, the real weather download and the plugin are constantly "fighting" each other, with rather hilarious results.

It looks like the code you provided there does not do that, so that's promising.

Glad it might help... funny about the conflict with the plugins. :) Would love to have seen that one.

Still even with the waves clipped.. the simulation of it is horrible..

[willow >w<]

castrol a écrit :

Flying at 5000 feet......After the 50th time of ATC telling me to decend to 5000ft, I have put this sim back in the cupboard. So many bugs...this is on a par with TSW. Released too early.

Did you set your altimeter?

[old tail dragger]

ATC put me into a mountain in El Paso. I was on final to LGA when I was told to turn right and never told me to do anything after. I don't use ATC!!! I fly without it. When you get to your airport just fly 180 degree side approach and land, forget the control tower. As for take off, do your own thing. I got tired of ground stops, just taxi right through the waiting planes.

[PvWolf666]

I don't think ATC in X Plane will ever match P3D/FSX. Its the one downer I have.