X-Plane

Fantastic news for X-Plane cockpit builders - Flight Illusion are to make available an interface to enable their gauges to work with X-Plane 9.1:

X-plane and Flight illusion are proud to announce the upcoming development of an interface to drive Flight Illusion gauges directly from X-plane. Many X-plane pilots and cockpit builders have asked since years if there would ever be a driver for these gauges. X-plane developer Austin Meyer is even doing better by adding direct support for flight Illusion hardware into X-plane. Setup for the gauges will be accessible on a tab in the JOYSTICK AND EQUIPMENT window. Austin Meyer expect the support to be available as of version 9.1 (expected in 3 months) and will be downloadable on www.x-plane.com .

More news and updates to follow soon.

alpilotX has released their USA Forests Scenery for X-Plane 8 and 9:

The long wait is over, and finally we have released the forests for the whole USA! Now you can fly from the Adirondack regions to the Everglades swamps, from the Chihuahuan semi desert to the Sierran Redwood (and Sequoia) forests up to the Cascades Wilderness. All covered by our very detailed and very versatile forests which release the much more coarse ones from the original V9 Global Scenery. To give you rough numbers, here are the words from Albert Laubi who did all the texture and forest definition work:

“This custom made plant cover of the USA now consists of 38 given ecoregions with 351 individually designed forest definitions and 5735 assignments out of 193 different trees* and shrubs :-). Combined with stunningly exact forest outlines, this extraordinary scenery gives the USA a very plausible look and to you the joy of a superbe view from the cockpit.”

So it will definitely bring your X-Plane flying experience in the USA to a new level!

I highly recommend you to visit the new screen shot section USA West Forests 9 to get an impression of what the new scenery will do for you!

Austin Meyer and his team have released X-Plane 9 release candidate 3, which Austin has declared as “final”. I think (although I’m not entirely sure!) that this means this release is the one that will be shipped on DVD’s.

If you’ve been getting all the beta’s, grab this now to get yourself up to date.

Now we’ve got the final, I’ll get to work on a review.

New For X-Plane 9.00

We now have:

• 867 instruments
• 25,737 airports
• 25,866 navaids
• 88,367 fixes
• 18,008 scenery files (each file is one degree of latitude and longitude)

There’s a massive list of enhancements and changes from version 8. Far too many to mention here in full, but here’s a taster:

“Frame-rate improved. DSF meshes are optimized on load - saves about 50 MB of RAM, can increase frame-rate up to 10% when shaders are off in areas with lots of mountains and few objects. Enhanced use of VBOs increases frame-rate. There are COUNTLESS frame-rate optimizations that are too numerous or proprietary to mention here.

ALMOST NO DELAY IN SCENERY-SHIFTING! (but you need a multi-core or multi-processor machine to fully realize this benefit!) Now you can fly around the entire planet without every having a significant pause to load scenery… you can look at continuously-varying textures across the whole Country from San Diego to New York and ditto that world-wide. Imagine: You get into a light plane in San Diego and fly it clear to New York, watching the terrain change from the green coastal conditions to the deserts of the SouthWest, then transition to the fields of the midwest, then forests of the Northeast, then the cities of New York, right down to Central park greenery. It’s ALL THERE, and you can watch the whole thing in one continuous flight, with hardly a delay to load scenery if you have a dual-core or multi-processor machine. It is simply stunning, just like doing it for real.

AMAZING NEW PLANES with INCREDIBLE DETAIL: We now have a new Cessna 172, Piaggo Avanti (you have been waiting for this one!), ASK-21 glider, and even a Cirrus-jet! Be sure to load the Cessna, Avanti, and Cirrus jet in the ‘General Aviation’ folder, and hit the ‘|’ key to check them out! The Cirrus Jet, as a matter if fact, is the SAME .acf file that Cirrus used in-house with their copy of X-Plane! (We also have first-drafts of ALL the Vans RV homebuilts, so if you are an RV pilot, you can use these as a quick-start to modelling YOUR RV!)”

X-Plane.org is reporting that new airport and nav-aid data is now available for X-Plane:

Two new sets of “official” airport and nav-aid data are now available:

• for X-Plane 8.61 and later
• for X-Plane 8.10 - 8.60

This update includes many, many new global airport details, with an increasing number of highly detailed airports that leverage the new WorldEditor tool (WED) and the new airport features supported in X-Plane 8.61 (see KSFO, KDFW, KSLC, KLGA, EBBR …). I was unable to load all the submissions that I received, but these will be added very soon - perhaps in early May. I have to leave for a business trip this weekend, so if you do not see your submission in this update, please be patient for a few weeks.

Please ensure that you download the correct version! Both data sets are identical in scope (but with slightly different formats). If you are using X-Plane 8.50 or 8.60, please upgrade to 8.61 to use this data. The data for X-Plane 8.61 and later works with the very latest X-Plane release (currently X-Plane 9.00 rc3), but you will need to move and rename some of the files (details are on my website). We also hope to include this new data as a part of the installation of the next update to X-Plane 9.0.

As always, get the new data from my website here at X-Plane.org.

The Space Shuttle X blog hosts a number of different Shuttle textures for use in X-Plane.

This site is obviously a labour love and some of the screenshots look fantastic.