@Hielor:
Remember what you claimed:
And also not really a serious contender, compared to FSX or X-Plane.
I'm not arguing that Flightgear works better for you. I'm not arguing it is superior in everything. But I am arguing that it is a serious contender these days and you can't dismiss it.
My experience with FlightGear is also limited to a single attempt several years ago, when despite having a strong computer that could run FSX at good framerates, FlightGear ran at ~10fps. Maybe I should give it another go, to be fair.
So basically you don't really know?
Ah, the X-Plane fallacy. Having marginally better flight dynamics doesn't (or at least, shouldn't--they perhaps fall for the hype) actually matter to the majority of desktop simmers.
Well, the base planes I've tried from FSX were really bad, to the point that I really got annoyed about the lack of obvious dynamical effects which have to be there. Probably if I invest in a few addon packages, than I get something that works better in FSX - point being, why should I shell out money to get FSX to a state which FG can deliver for free?
It may not be that important for you or the average simmer (whoever that might be) - but it does matter to me quite a bit.
You basically just started your points with "if you completely ignore all the bad parts and look only at the good parts..." By that metric, Microsoft Flight was actually pretty good (ignoring the absurd pricing scheme).
You have to acknowledge the essential differences in structure between a commercial and an all-volunteer project. If you create an airplane for FG, it will be tested whether it's running bug-free, but it won't be reviewed for accurateness of flight dynamics or for beauty of cockpit. The reason is that different people like to do different things with FG and some prefer a simplified helicopter over the real simulation which they can't get off the ground. For the project, both uses are equally legitimate.
The implication is that FG has a huge range of options. There's three different rendering pipelines to begin with (for legacy support, for good scenery and weather visuals, for dynamical shadows), three different native flight dynamics codes,... it's basically a toolkit (it's even been used as a rendering backend in a post-apocalyptic game).
Which means that if you want to do anything in particular, for instance experiencing realistic flight, then you have to configure the toolkit for your purpose before using it. Selecting the group of planes that has the features you want. Setting the options like you need them.
FSX is eight years old. There is no excuse at all for FG being behind it in anything at all. FG (and X-Plane) have had eight years to catch up to FSX, and it's completely inexcusable for FSX to be better than either of them in anything.
I don't have the numbers ready for FSX, but I do know for the abandoned Flight! project. In terms of man-hours per year of people coding, they had about 100 times more than FG. If I had a full-time graphics artist at my disposal, I could do amazing things much faster. Alas, if I have to do it myself, it's not nearly that fast.
I think it's quite an achievement to be competitive with a multi-million $ enterprise as an OpenSource all volunteers project as such.
The situation leans even further towards FSX when you look at the huge library of available addons, both free and payware. It's not just planes and airports, either--look at things like FSPassengers, which breathe new life into FSX simming. The addon options for FlightGear pale by comparison.
In fact, FG hardly has any addons because the whole point is that everything which works gets distributed with the next edition of the FG core - we aim to create a state where there are none. You don't ever need to manage mutually exclusive addons, you don't need to install additional scenery, because by and large it all comes from one central scenery server, and you get the addons delivered with the base product. Different philosophy. So if you're looking for addons, no wonder you don't find any.
Addons are really a suboptimal way to improve a product - the better way is to improve the product itself
Not in the case of FlightGear. I'll do the same for FG that I do for X-Plane --Let me know when it does everything better than FSX, without excuses, then I'll consider switching my civilian flight simming over to it.
I don't want you to switch anything - quite evidently you're getting from FSX what you like in a flightsim. I do want you to acknowledge that FG is a serious contender - better in some areas, worse in others.
@Urwumpe:
I think in terms of realistic flight dynamics, DCS with a AFM-based aircraft is the reference. The dynamic behavior is really well done (by changes in AOA, slip) and the effects of wind and payload are really as you should expect. Ground effect is there, effect as it should in theory - I am no pilot to compare.
Since we can't do real-time computational fluid dynamics, flight dynamics is cast by almost everyone in the professional business into coefficient schemes - a wing is characterized by lift and drag functions which are multidimensional lookup tables as functions of AOA, Reynolds number, ...
Computational cost of these schemes is low by modern computer standards, they're just differential equation solvers. They can be benchmarked (JSBSim from FG for instance is tested against some NASA flight dynamics tools), but the accuracy for any given airplane lives and dies with the data tables. Which means either real wind-tunnel data or offline computational fluid dynamics on a really accurate 3d model of the wing.
It's largely an exercise in data-gathering or waiting for 1000 hours for a fluid dynamics code to go over your modelled airfoil. Flightgear has some good planes here since it's often used by university researchers for some project - and then the data flows back. And there's tenacious perfectionists who spend years digging up data and refining tables...
---------- Post added at 07:58 AM ---------- Previous post was at 07:37 AM ----------
And while we're doing screenshots - less WOW!, more muted colors just as reality has:
How to do clouds:
How to do water, and its interactions with wind, and how it changes with the light:
How to light and shade clouds in low sun:
Atmosphere visuals to the edge of space:
...and back:
More clouds:
Scenery closeup - that's on Iceland:
And that's in the central Karakoram range:
And there's also nice cockpits - A-10 approaching Srinagar.