After all these years of simming, and considering the currently available flight sims, I came to the conclusion that there's no such thing as the best, or the ideal simulator...it's just a matter of personal preference, as each sim has some goodie the others don't. As far as X-Plane goes, I wouldn't mind having those magnificent "smart shadows" and, of course, the awesome terrain textures which, true, sometimes are highly superseded by some made for FSX..but when these X-Plane terrain textures excel, they do it BIG TIME. In stead of presenting you with a lower quality "world" and less immersion when zooming in, they do...the opposite - just watch