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Comment by RachelF | Hacker News Reader

X-Plane is a good alternative.

Unless you want realistic scenery or an up to date g1000 implementation (I love X-Plane really but because of these two points I keep going back to MSFS - maybe there are some add-ons I haven’t tried?)

When did you last try it? The scenery and GPS/FMC has come a long way in the last 20 years I've been an X-Plane casual, but not so sure how much of that was in the last few.

I’m comparing X-Plane 12 to MSFS 24. MSFS 24 is a great aid and near picture perfect when preflying real world routes, with 3D buildings and everything, and the latest G1000 implementation is pretty complete too. But X-Plane still wins on physics realism and systems fidelity. I’d be happy if there was a way to combine the strengths of the two in one simulator somehow..

I don’t know much about MSFS plugin system so I don’t know if this is possible but you can easily extract data from X-Plane and then send over to MSFS. So that you use XP as physic and model engine, only MSFS as out-the-window view.

Basic things like latitude/longitude/altitude/heading should be straightforward. But then you might have problems with mismatch scenery, like missing airports/runway, different terrain heights, etc. And then the weather synchronization is another can of worms. Matching what you see with the physic model can be challenging.

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