> If you're looking for a more accurate, 'real' simulator it has a lot to offer.

What do you mean by this? The MSFS 2020 flight simulation is on par if not better than X-Plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw-opH4f8Qg

> but if you're interested in contributing to a product you can improve and have fun modelling/texturing additional planes, cities etc this is a project to get involved with.

Again, MSFS 2020's SDK is already with all of the major third-party developers and will be publically available upon its release. A couple have even swapped to almost purely working on MSFS products instead of X-Plane or P3D.

X-Plane's flight model is decent though obviously things like turbulence, left-turning tendency at takeoff, and behavior during eg; crabs and front-slips could always be more realistic.

If you're going for extreme realism IMO one of the best tools out there is Pilot's Edge (https://www.pilotedge.net/). Real air traffic controllers tower some airspace (currently california) and it lets you practice things like getting flight following, IFR clearances, taxi instructions, etc. without burning $150/hr (cessna 172) (+$60/hr instruction) to practice radio work in your private pilot or instrument training.

Works with X-Plane and MS Flight Simulator X (though I'm sure when 2020 comes out it'll be supported).

X-Plane has been around so long it is kind of unreal - I remember buying a copy in ~2000 and it was already 5+ years old then. Pretty amazing longevity.

I guess there's a lot to be said for having a good community of users who love the product and want to help contribute to it to make it better. Active creators rather than passive consumers.

Sort of off-topic but I realized the other day that the transition from active contributors to passive consumers is when online gaming went off the rails for me. When people managed the online servers there was always an admin around to kick bad actors and to set the tone for that particular server. When you found a good one you saved it because you knew you would always get quality time there.

Matchmaking killed that.

I don’t think game publishers realized they were essentially firing a free workforce that was making their online play great. I think private servers is one of the reasons Minecraft has such staying power.

I think you can apply this same principle to so many areas of hobbies. As soon as you get more involved and be more of a creator than just sitting there and letting everyone else do things for you, you get so much more out of the experience.

X-Plane is beautiful in terms of graphics but gets lost when dealing with environmental details, such as other air traffic and dealing with traffic control.

Compared to 2020, X-Plane's graphics are pretty...bad. Their planes are great but the rest of the world is extremely bland. I love X-Plane but not at all for the graphical quality.

That's why you use VATSIM, together with XPlane. It doesn't get more realistic than that.