X-Plane 9.00 Beta-2 is here for Mac and Windows

The title says it all. Austin Meyer - X-Plane’s author - has issued the following press release relating to the new version of X-Plane (it’s a very long press release, so I’ve only posted the highlights here - see the X-Plane beta site for more info):

OK here is the feature-list… if this doesn’t rock your world, nothing will.

Specs

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)

So, umm… now you know!

Big New Features

Frame-rate improved!

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! (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!)

Aircraft panels can be up to 2048×2048. Those who want to every bit of detail on a B-36 or B-52 cockpit: Your time has come! Check out the ‘Example Airplane WideScreen’ in the ‘Instructions’ folder. Use the left and right arrows to see the whole screen, or run in a res of up to 2048×1024 to see more at once! Now you see you can make very wide-screeen airplanes! Of course, if you make the left half the panel the pilot’s side, and the right half the copilot’s side, and split your output to two monitors running 1024×768, then you get a pilot and copilot display from one computer, and one copy of x-plane! kind of convenient.

It gets better: If you want 3-D cockpits, the 3-D cockpit has 3-D lighting for panel texture, to really make flight with 3-D cockpits immersive! Get in the Cirrus Jet and hit ‘control-o’ to see this. Then use the mouse, arrow-keys, and page-up/page-down keys to move around the cockpit while flying. Try it as well in the Cessna 172 or Avanti.

The 3-D clicking into 3-D cockpit tracks a lot better as well, so you can do full flight operations in 3-D… a real experience in the Cirrus Jet! (It’s inside the ‘General Aviation’ folder)

Custom liveries! Look at the ‘Example Airplane WideScreen’ in the ‘Instructions’ folder. You can make all the custom liveries you want, with all the names you want! Then, in X-Plane, go to the ‘open liveries’ menu item (right under the ‘open aircraft’ menu item!) and select the livery you want!

Moderate User-Interface overhaul. Every single menu and window has been re-evaluated for optimum placement. Every windows has been re-evaluated for optimum organization, with many changes. The interface has a mildly different look and feel, and much re-organization to be quicker and more friendly to use. This has included countless changes, including:

Fonts are now bigger and clearer… in fact this is the font that was designed specifically for (the real) Charles De Gaulle airport!
All interfaces to enter DIRECTION are are now done with round compass-rose type interface. Interface to assign keyboards is now a dream: Every function can easily be seen at-a-glance. Any function can be assigned to any joystick button as well. So now any function can be assigned to any key and any joystick button.

This is really only scratching the surface. Head over to the X-Plane beta site for the full list of changes.

• X-Plane 9 Final released
• X-Plane 9 Beta 3 released
• X-Plane being used for "real world" pilot training
• X-Plane 9.2 Beta 1 released
• X-Economy - Beta testers needed