I spent a lot of the year being a little down on X-Plane 12. I had a brief period of time early in 2025 where I had some fun with it, enjoyed some of the new content, and then I crashed out and got sucked into some of the exciting things happening with other sims. That said, X-Plane 12 has made some serious progress over the course of the year and I’ve been spending more time with the sim. Let’s have a look at what’s been going right with this sim over the year and a couple of items that I hope we’re going to see in 2026.

Progress, steady progress

X-Plane 12 has had an unsteady couple of years but 2025 was a big highlight. It’s likely one of those moments where years of effort and direction have started to pay off and I think 2025 was one of those years.

Things started out strong with a new flight lessons module introducing players to flying and different types of situations. They also added a new physics based camera system, custom scenery for Salzburg and Barra, added a new demo area, improved weather systems and more. And that was just the first update!

Another big update was 12.2.0 where new lighting, clouds and weather rendering all came together with much improved visuals. The same update added “exposure fusion” which helped to resolve X-Plane 12’s overly dark cockpit issues.

Then there was 12.3.0 which introduced all new radar rendering technology, made big changes to the included A330-300, added a custom Dubai international airport, and added historic weather. Yeah, X-Plane 12 now lets you go back a full year in time to replicate weather conditions at that time.

The latest version, 12.4.0 beta is still in testing but it has also introduced a long list of updates for the sim’s A330, its SR22, added Tobii integration, improved X430, X530, and X1000 avionics, added the beautiful Bilbao airport, improved FXAA anti-aliasing, and more.

Laminar have really embraced adding new high quality assets to assist community members in updating airports in X-Plane with all kinds of new assets from airport specific markings to new higher detail vehicles, utilities, fences, and various other doodads.

There have been so many other changes but I can safely say that the sim has made steady progress.

What X-Plane 12 still needs to do

There are a couple of things that X-Plane 12 really needs to do this coming year to help propel the sim forward.

First, X-Plane 12 desperately needs a new scenery engine. The current system is so antiquated that its holding the rest of the sim back when it comes to visual quality and certain types of flying – particularly in the polar regions where the sim doesn’t have scenery yet.

We’re finally in a place where weather, clouds, lighting and other features are capable of matching the best in the industry and that is great. But it is put up against old repeating textures, jagged coastlines, mountain peaks that resemble triangles, and roads that look like they were drawn with a ruler. It doesn’t hold up well.

Now we know that a next generation scenery system is in development. I doubt Laminar Research will be able to secure a live streamed ortho setup the way Microsoft has, however, they don’t have to. Machine learning systems, really good assets (that they have already spent a long time developing), and scenery auto gen can give X-Plane a realistic, sharp, VFR relevant experience without all that.

Next up, there’s a lot to like about X-Plane’s interface but I do think they need to take a page from their competitor and develop a world map. Half of what makes MSFS so compelling for me is the ability to pull up a world map, look around, find an interesting airport, and then setup my flight from that. Often on a whim. It’s not something that X-Plane is good at by itself. You need to consult LittleNavMap, or Volanta, or SkyVector or some other service to get what you want.

Another thing they should take from their competitor is checklists. Yes, third party solutions exist, but it should be something built into the sim. It’s meant more as a learning tool than MSFS is and yet its that sim that I find I learn airplanes better thanks to the interactive checklist that walks me through the process and points to the buttons and switches I need to press. More work here integrating an extensible system for first and third party aircraft would be outstanding!

Another item is traffic. X-Plane 12 has spent a bit of time doing good work generating ship traffic, has great road traffic, and decent rail traffic. I really hope that the next big step forward will be a fully integrated live traffic system with generated aircraft at small, medium and large airports mixing in both airliners and general aviation. I get the sense that Laminar have been working their way towards that with all of the ATC improvements we’ve seen, so I am hoping that this will be one of the next steps. X-Plane airports have so much ground life, but no air life… and it is a flight sim after all.

Do these big items over the next year or two and I will finally feel like X-Plane 12 has hit its potential and done what it needed to do to compete in the market. It’s great to see this sim doing well, we need the competition and the different approaches to doing things, for the genre on the whole to remain healthy and I think that’s exactly what is going on.

If you’re looking for my state of the sim on Microsoft Flight Simulator, it’s right over here. And if you’re looking to hear direct from Laminar Research, do check out their blog section which has made huge leaps in quality updates over the last couple of years.