x-plane

RealScenery have released their State of Florida scenery package for X-Plane.

The new Florida scenery is available as two separate scenery packages for X-Plane 8 & 9, North Florida and South Florida. This is a scenery extension to X-Plane and allows you to fly over the actual terrain for a realistic flying experience. The new Florida scenery also supports the new “texture paging” capabilities of X-Plane 9.2 offering great performance for custom scenery!

Movies, image gallery, and downloadable demos are now available.

The State of Florida is home to many flight schools, airports, and aviation companies and provides great flying with X-Plane. We are now accepting orders. Please visit http://www.realscenery.com/ for more
details.

Features

• 7,000 images
• 58,500 sq mi / 151,500 sq km
• 26 scenery files
• Full support for X-Plane 8 & 9

EFISApp is a new program by Laminar Research that hooks to a copy of X-Plane to simulate the current Cirrus and Eclipse PFD and MFD with a high degree of accuracy. This lets you build a pretty accurate Cirrus or Eclipse Avidyne cockpit driven by X-Plane.

EFISApp runs on it’s own computer and monitor (the system requirement is very low… just a 1-GHZ machine with 512 meg of RAM and 16 meg of VRAM is just fine) and represents an Avidyne (typically Cirrus or Eclipse) PFD or MFD when hooked up by ethernet cable to another computer running a copy of X-Plane.

In X-Plane, simply enter the IP address of the computer running EFIS-App in the X-Plane Net Connections screen and X-Plane will drive the high-accuracy Avidyne PFD or MFD in EFIS-App! If you want, get TWO monitors for your computer, enter a wide-screen resolution into EFIS-App, and have one monitor show the PFD and the other the MFD! As well, X-Plane has no problem driving 2 or 3 or 4 copies of EFIS-App.

Using EFIS-App, you can finally have a very high-fidelity, high-res, stand-alone monitor for the Avidyne PFD and MFD running with X-Plane.

Right now, the interface to EFIS-App is mouse-driven… the knobs and line-selects are hi-lighted in red. In the future, we may have hardware bezels so that the interface to the PFD and MFD are exactly the same as the real airplane. As well, you can hook up any USB-HID device (any joystick) and assign any button to any function in EFIS-App, so you can easily build your own USB-HID hardware to drive EFIS-App to be just like the real airplane.

There’s a terrific free tutorial covering helicopter flight over on X-Plane.org.

Although obviously aimed at X-Plane users, there’s a lot of non-simulator specific information in there to make it very useful to anyone who’s struggling with helicopter flight, or would just like to learn more about the subject.

Many thanks to “brett s” - the author - for providing such a valuable resource.

X-Plane 9.20 is shaping up to be a major release with a tremendous number of changes being introduced almost weekly. Here’s the changes so far for Beta 7:

• Double HUD gone on f-22
• Cowl-flap open/closed commands
• Commands for various views in Plane-Maker
• Zoom-control speeds tuned just a hair in x-plane
• You can open flight plans in the FMS with the LD button all the time now
• Engines can be re-lit on the jets a bit easier after going negative-g and starving them for fuel
• Generic annunciators should activate with the annunciator test
• No more flight-director activation from getting a stall warning (unless, of course, the servos are engaged, at which point they WILL cut out to flight-dir only)
• Generic triggers show correct animation when combined with ATTR_cockpit_region
• Lighting on instruments in the sim tuned
• Auto-update of the beta works in the sim again. (You must get beta 7 first, then it will work.)
• Fixed transparency problem with ATTR_cockpit_region on Geforce 7 hardware
• Mouse wheel for Mighty Mouse is less sensitive
• All aspects of panel editor saved to prefs
• Panel editor layout reorganised
• New cursor options for generic instruments
• Generic instruments can have holes and other customization of hot spots
• Reload textures command also reloads panel background.

New Features for Panels

• Instruments can have custom help tips - now you can add help tips for generic instruments
• Instruments can have comments - use this to keep notes while you work in PlaneMaker
• PlaneMaker has error checking mode - hilites problems with generic instruments
• New command to reveal the selected instruments in the hierarchy - this opens the parent groups
• You can add an instrument by dragging its name
• Double-click the panel splitters to minimize panes

Bug fixes in Panel Editor

• Needles, pies and tapes from 902 planes will “clamp” correctly
• If you have ALREADY saved your plane in 920 format, you must manually fix this by adding more key frames
• Fixed crash while typing
• Fixed crash when adding instrument
• Preview of rotarie works even if key frame table is out of order
• Fixed labels for generic instrument conditions

X-Plane 9.2 has reached beta 6. I normally don’t report on too many of the beta’s, as there are just so many of them, but for this batch of releases, there’s a lot of additional functionality being added to the sim, so I’m making an exception.

Included in this release:

• Can view acf in wireframe and nite mode in plane-maker
• No more nosewheel steering too far just because of high hydraulic pressure
• No more erroneous chaff and flare deployments
• Panel-editor in plane-maker ok for huge application res and huge plane panel res
• Lo voltage warning comes on when the bus voltage is below the GREEN LOW-END VOLTAGE OF THE GENERATOR, as defined in plane-maker limits screen
• The electrical system (including annunciators) will function when above the REDLINE LO-END BATTERY VOLTAGE, as defined in the same page alpha and beta for flight-control systems properly determined, for proper artificial-stability and autopilot functionality and yaw-string display
• Speedbrake annunciator works, even if your plane has only body-mounted, not wing-mounted, speedbrakes
• Replays now show time in hundredths of a second… needed to test races at reno.
• Master caution and master arming not going off over little things any more like flaps or slats or afterburners being in use.
• Manifold pressure model fixed: was indicating higher pressures before in some cases
• Joysticks should always be read in the same order, so the axis you assign to not have to be changed from one startup of your computer to another
• Speedbrake drag fixed
• P180 panel won’t be off-screen in panel editor
• Panel editor won’t crash while typing