X-Plane

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.

Austin over on the X-Plane forum is looking for testers for his new XAddonManager.

I’ve developed a little tool for installing, uninstalling, enabling and disabling Scenery Packages and Plugins (and possibly one day aircraft). It is aimed at both beginner X-Plane users - to make it easy to install new scenery packages and plugins - and also for more advanced users, who might want to enable and disable stuff while testing. The application will install a package directly from a zip file, and tries to be a little bit intelligent about working out the structure of the zip, although this could probably be improved over time.

If you’re interested, head over to the forum and drop Austin a line.

There’s an interesting article on the Phoronix web site regarding running X-Plane 9 (Beta 18) on a Linux machine with an ATI graphics card. After some initial problems, mainly related to the rendering of water with the ATI card, their conclusion is that "it pretty much just works". So, all you Linux owners out there, go get yourself simming now

Tags: x-plane linux

AlpilotX has announced the release of Europe V9.1.0 Scenery for X-Plane:

With X-Plane 9 came some exciting new features, but also a new Global Scenery - with native forests included - which made it necessary to re-cut the complete Europe Forests scenery. Partially repositioned road/railroads and even more the new, more detailed, and in wast numbers included building objects were the main reason. In the meantime, Alber Laubi (my artwork specialist) completely overhauled the tree texture set and also perfected their positioning via the forest definition files. After all, I have to say, that it was worth the effort, and the screenshots tell the same story.

Many of you might now also ask, why to bother with our trees, when there is already a native forest included with the new Global Scenery. Well, the answer is simple. The Global Forests - as I call them - are much more general in their nature. This is true for their far smaller diversity (for example like distinguishing between conifers in Finland and Greece) but also for their much rougher placement/detail (the reason for this is, that they are based on much coarser data than what CORINE provides). To have a better idea, I tried to compare some airports for yourself via screenshots . Maybe they help you to better assess the difference.

Robin Peel has updated his X-Plane NavData package to take into account the latest version of the sim:

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

Please ensure that you download the correct version! Both data sets are identical in content (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 beta 9), but you will need to move and rename some of the files (details are on my website). This update includes many new global airport details (especially in France), 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.

Please join me in thanking those who keep contributing to the X-Plane database. Helpful feedback is always appreciated.

Tags: x-plane navdata