X-Plane

X-Plane has been updated to version 9.2 Beta 1. In Austin’s usual excitable tone, he describes the update as:

TONS of new stuff, almost entirely tons of various feature-requests people have sent in, and tons of new features to improve FAA-Certified flight training in multi-computer systems.

austin

PS: SEE WALL-E! IT IS AMAZING! JUST AMAZING!!!!!!!!!!!!

Capitalisation and exclamation marks courtesy of Austin

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Robin Peel has released the latest of his regular updates to the X-Plane Airport and Nav Data database.

New data is available for X-Plane 8.61 and later.  This is data cycle 2008.06.  This data works with the very latest X-Plane release (currently X-Plane 9.02) and includes many new global airport details, especially in the USA (including many airports in southern California and the Pacific North West).  In this release the following airports look especially good: KLAX, KLAS, KSNA, KAPC, KTIW, CYHZ & EHAM.

As always, get the new data from my website at: http://www.x-plane.org/home/robinp

Robin Peel has issued the following announcement regarding the updated Airport and NavData for X-Plane:

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

• for X-Plane 8.61 and later, including 9.00 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.
In this release the following airports look especially good:  ENZV, KDTW, KLAX, KOAK, PANC and VHHH.

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 9.01) but you will need to move and rename some of the files
(details are on my website).

As always, get the new data from my website.

The Windows and Mac versions of X-Plane 9 are now available from the FlightSim Pilot Shop.

X-Plane is a comprehensive and powerful flight simulator available for the personal computer. X-Plane simulates anything that flies: from single-engine fixed wing props to multi-engine jets; gliders to dirigibles; helicopters to spacecraft to VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier.

X-Plane has the most realistic flight model available for personal computers. It comes with subsonic and supersonic flight dynamics, simulating aircraft from the Bell 206 Jet-Ranger helicopter and Cessna 172 light plane to the supersonic SR-71 and Mach-3 XB-70 Valkyrie.

X-Plane comes with 29 aircraft spanning the aviation industry (and history), and several hundred more are freely downloadable from the internet.

X-Plane includes scenery for the entire continental U.S.* You can land at any of thousands of airports, as well as test your mettle on aircraft carriers, helipads on building tops, frigates that pitch and roll in the waves, and oil rigs. Weather is variable from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind, wind shear, turbulence, and microbursts. Rain, snow and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders! X-Plane can download real weather data from the internet, allowing you to fly in actual current conditions!

X-Plane also has detailed failure-modeling, with 35 systems that can be failed manually, or randomly when you least expect it! You can fail instruments, engines, flight controls, and landing gear at any moment.

X-Plane includes Plane-Maker which allows you to create your own airplanes, and World-Maker which lets you create your own scenery. Also included is Weather Briefer which produces a weather briefing based on actual weather conditions downloaded from the net.

X-Plane is extremely customizable, allowing you to easily create textures, sounds, and instrument panels for your own airplanes that you design.

Austin Meyer has issued a newsletter detailing the current state of play with X-Plane 9:

We are working furiously on FAA-certified updates to X-Plane and EFIS-App these days… chief areas we are improving are getting Eclipse Jet and Canadair Regional Jet instrumentation into EFIS-App… if anyone wants an all-out Eclipse or Canadair sim, then we will be the go-to guys for sure! We may do a full Cessna MUSTANG sim shortly as well. Go here to learn all about FAA-Certified X-Plane.

As we develop the high-end FAA-certified stuff, in addition to the fully-accurate instrumentation in EFIS-App and systems in X-Plane, we wind up really focusing on

• higher frame-rates, with NO STUTTERING
• optimization to use as many CPU cores as you have (including all 8 if you have them) to minimize load-time and frame-rate stutter
• developing new rendering options, like spherical projection, cylindrical projection, and edge-blending, to do immersive simulation environments
• tighter syncing of external visual displays to the master machine, to give tightly-synced wrap-around displays
• tightening up the RAM, VRAM, and CPU requirements to run smoothly on as many machines as possible.. it’s all about the frame-rate… a recent re-organization of the internal instrument drawing code cuts the VRAM requirement down by 10 meg with a typical entry-level cockpit… many times that for an advanced cockpit.
• countless new failure modes and joystick-button assignments to make the simulation as detailed as you could like.

Anyway, as we move into the 9.x run, chief hilights we can we expect to see are increases in performance through more optimization, possibly lowering the system requirements, and more options to blend
external visuals, FIS-App instrumentation, and Instructor Operators Stations in X-Plane into a seamless, FAA-Certified unit. I will of course announce 9.10 beta at this list when it is ready.