Flight simulation again
Sep. 26th, 2024 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinA few years ago, in the depths of COVID shutdown when I was probably hankering for a view of the big world, I went on a tangent about flight simulators. At the time Microsoft had just put out a spectacular ground-up reworking of Microsoft Flight Simulator, but I didn't have a machine that could run it, so I sprung for X-Plane 11, the most advanced one available for the Macintosh.
My MacBook Pro was already old and feeble at the time and could just barely run it. It worked, but the frame rate was pretty choppy under the best of circumstances, and the UI was kind of glitchy, and I could forget about running it on more than the laptop's built-in display--it would just get unusably slow.
Well, I recently got a new MacBook Pro with an Apple Silicon M3, and Apple's handy Migration Assistant dutifully hauled all of my old garbage over here where, remarkably, nearly all of it just runs without any trouble even though Apple has switched to a completely different processor architecture (for the third time)! I think the biggest thing that I did have to upgrade was Sagemath, but that's no surprise--that thing is a bear.
Amazingly, X-Plane 11 running under Intel emulation on this ARM-based computer is way smoother than it was running natively on the old one (this may be more down to this computer's relatively powerful GPU than anything else). And I can use a big external monitor as a second screen with no trouble at all, which makes flight simming a lot more fun.
X-Plane has had a version 12 out for almost two years now, which is Apple Silicon-native on Macs; I don't think my old computer could run it at all, but my new one can. I did download the free demo (which is the full product but limited to 15 minutes of flying around Portland, Oregon) and give it a try. The online consensus about it seems to be that, while it looks significantly better than X-Plane 11, it's not enough better to really be impressive in a world where Microsoft Flight Simulator exists, and for most people who bought version 11 it's not enough of an upgrade to justify springing for the rather high price.
(The pilots among them also debate whether X-Plane 12's flight model is better or worse, but this is so far beyond my expertise that I couldn't usefully comment. It does seem touchier--it seems much easier to crash the plane if you just mess around. But that might be realism!)
I think that's basically correct. The other thing I noticed is that X-Plane 12 is demanding enough that on its default settings, it makes my new computer stutter a bit. I'd probably have to dial back some of the bells and whistles to make it buttery smooth.
For now, I think I'm satisfied with running version 11 on this machine. And for pure sightseeing jaunts using realistic streamed scenery, I'm still better off using the toy flight simulator in the ancient "Google Earth Pro" app, which makes no pretense of very realistically simulating an airplane.
My MacBook Pro was already old and feeble at the time and could just barely run it. It worked, but the frame rate was pretty choppy under the best of circumstances, and the UI was kind of glitchy, and I could forget about running it on more than the laptop's built-in display--it would just get unusably slow.
Well, I recently got a new MacBook Pro with an Apple Silicon M3, and Apple's handy Migration Assistant dutifully hauled all of my old garbage over here where, remarkably, nearly all of it just runs without any trouble even though Apple has switched to a completely different processor architecture (for the third time)! I think the biggest thing that I did have to upgrade was Sagemath, but that's no surprise--that thing is a bear.
Amazingly, X-Plane 11 running under Intel emulation on this ARM-based computer is way smoother than it was running natively on the old one (this may be more down to this computer's relatively powerful GPU than anything else). And I can use a big external monitor as a second screen with no trouble at all, which makes flight simming a lot more fun.
X-Plane has had a version 12 out for almost two years now, which is Apple Silicon-native on Macs; I don't think my old computer could run it at all, but my new one can. I did download the free demo (which is the full product but limited to 15 minutes of flying around Portland, Oregon) and give it a try. The online consensus about it seems to be that, while it looks significantly better than X-Plane 11, it's not enough better to really be impressive in a world where Microsoft Flight Simulator exists, and for most people who bought version 11 it's not enough of an upgrade to justify springing for the rather high price.
(The pilots among them also debate whether X-Plane 12's flight model is better or worse, but this is so far beyond my expertise that I couldn't usefully comment. It does seem touchier--it seems much easier to crash the plane if you just mess around. But that might be realism!)
I think that's basically correct. The other thing I noticed is that X-Plane 12 is demanding enough that on its default settings, it makes my new computer stutter a bit. I'd probably have to dial back some of the bells and whistles to make it buttery smooth.
For now, I think I'm satisfied with running version 11 on this machine. And for pure sightseeing jaunts using realistic streamed scenery, I'm still better off using the toy flight simulator in the ancient "Google Earth Pro" app, which makes no pretense of very realistically simulating an airplane.