X-Plane 10 Updated 1/5/12
X-Plane 10 with VFR Photographic Scenery, note the rich colours Newsletter Old
So how is X-Plane 10"Community pre-edition". ? This is both a difficult and at the same time not so difficult question to answer. I saw both X-Plane 10 and the author Austin Meyer of Laminar Research at the Flight Simulator weekend at Lelystadd in Holland on Saturday 5th - 6th of November. This was actually the first time that Austin had actually seen the whole program working together as an entity. Despite some teething problems on the Saturday with X-Plane 10 beta 5, by Sunday he had X-Plane 10 beta 7 in operation. This ran actually remarkably well in spite if some out of memory lock ups which will be fixed by the release date.
The memory lockups don't appear now
Please let us know that you want to order X-Plane 10 "Community pre-edition". ( it will be the Aerosoft version ) and we will put you on a list to make sure that you get it as soon as it is available. The cost Will be £59.95 including delivery and don’t forget that we have a deal on our high definition photo-scenery where you get the whole of England and Wales for X-Plane 10 "Community pre-edition". just £99.95 when ordered together. X-Plane 10 will come on eight double side DVDs and will need sixty gigabyte of storage, so it is just as well that hard drives are large and inexpensive!. At least 30 detailed airports and packages will be available for X-Plane 10 next year from Aerosoft. Many will be available by convenient download from www.rcsimulations.com plus disk versions may be ordered from our website.
Our intention is to add value added content to our photo-scenery in X-Plane 10 so that your experience of flying in the UK will be more realistic than has ever been achieved in FSX, Objects, trees and detailed airports to follow.
As with all versions of X-Plane this will be a work in progress and there will be regular updates to address problems as they occur and to add new features including almost certainly native 64 bit support within the lifetime of X-Plane 10.
Computer: The PC that Austin Meyer demonstrated X-Plane on had a 9500 ATI card and 4 cores, I think that the processor was Intel but I am not sure which one. He described it as a low end PC. He said that X-Plane 10 as demonstrated would out-perform X-Plane 9 give the same level of detail. To me given the graphic level selected it was very smooth indeed. The demo runs ok on my laptop and very well on my desktop
He did say that it would take a little time to optimize X-Plane 10 and that would be an early priority. As I said, it looked pretty good to me and when you look at the video that I have put on YouTube, I think that it will look pretty good to you also.
Clouds: You have never seen clouds like those in X-Plane 10 except in real life. They are actually 3 dimensional and when you see one in the distance it is an actual cloud. There is simply no fudging in this program. You actually get a real sense of speed when you are close to them. FSX and FS2004 simply are not in the same league no matter what add-you have or how artistic it is. X-Plane 10 simply leaves the weather in FSX for dead.
Point lighting: at night, street lights, light up the traffic that passes on the roads, Landing lights illuminate objects and buildings in a way that I have never seen before. Cities in the USA were lit up by a myriad of lights. It looked real, right out of the box.
Traffic in the air and on the roads: There is lots of it. The better your PC is in terms of processor cores, the more you can have. The world is not dead and sterile as in X-Plane 9 but actually seems alive with activity, cars, Lorries and buses, X-Plane 10 has them all and then some more.
Roads and buildings: X-Plane 10 uses Open Street Map to create as Austin Meyer Describes it “a plausible world”. What this means is that it kind of looks real where ever you fly to although there will be lots of scope for enhancement by third party software developers.
Aircraft: X-Plane 10 has had a number of the aircraft that X-Plane 9 came with, completely reworked including the Phantom F4 which featured in the X-Plane 9 video that I put on YouTube. I will be redoing this video to show off X-Plane 10 with the VFR Photo Scenery
X-Plane 10 has a default all new Boeing 747-200 series aircraft that is exquisitely detailed. I actually saw Austin Meyer walk down the virtual cabin whilst the aircraft was in flight, and look out a passenger to see the wing tips flexing and condensation coming of them! When you add to that that the aircraft was skimming over broken cloud which really gave the impression of flying at 250 Knots or so, Even the screens on the back of the seat appeared to be working. I have to say that I have never seen anything so realistic even in multimillion pound simulators. For those of you who like the glass cockpit based aircraft, I also saw demonstrated a third party add-on of a Boeing 747-NG. Although I didn’t see any systems in detail it but did seem the equal of most FSX add-ons.
Air Traffic Control: At the time of the demonstration, this was still to be added. It has, but there is still obviously work to be done
I could see aircraft waiting at the gate, taxing and taking off and landing but I couldn’t hear them. I understand that you will be able to listen in on the chatter between ATC and Traffic fixed! and that it will be realistic but based on lots of recordings from pilots and controllers, a bit like the Pro Flight 2000 add-on for FS2004 probably. At present, there are no SIDS and STARS but this will be part of the ongoing development. We are considering converting VoxATC6 to X-Plane and if we do, the result would be incredible. This would be a lot of work and would take a considerable effort to do but if X-Plane 10 gets the market share that it deserves, it is likely. Please let us know what you think.
Conclusion: You have probably gathered that I am impressed with X-Plane 10. I think that it is the future of our hobby and you can be part of that by supporting it, you won’t be disappointed, I certainly wasn’t. ! A demo is available from www.x-plane.com it is 3 GB in size.
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