X-Plane 9 status update

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.