X-Plane 9 Final released

by mark.avey on April 16, 2008

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!)”