It’s time to have your hands on X-Plane 10 and test it yourself. Grab the downloadable demo, visit the screenshots as there are some more you may have not seen yet like airports preview with ground vehicles and static objects.
As usual, X-Planes works on PC, Mac and Linux. The final product should be on the market at Christmas.
Update: In an e-mail sent out to advertise the new demo of X-Plane 10, Austin Meyer recommends the following to show off the capabilities of the team’s latest release:
“Fly north from KSEA to downtown Seattle if you can, at low altitude, at night, with HDR on in the rendering options screen, and maybe full-screen no-HUD view… there is a lot of exploring to be done, much much more to come!”
Why not give it a try and let us – and others – see the results on the simFlight Screenshots and Video forum?
0 Responses
XPlane 10, quick impressions :
Just finished trying the demo. Well no need to say that XPlane as an ultra convincing flight model simulator is as superb as ever, no doubt about that. The best that is avail and affordable for PC…
Now this been reminded, I can speak about the main improvements in V10 and it is basicaly in the scenery and environment aspects:
The “plausible world” with its 3D everything from streets to bridges to lanes etc is very innovative and true to the 3D urban life… Yes, it looks somehow like a clean cut sim city world but its concept is much more advanced that the autogen on flat textures… Also I do not know to what level it can be customized to match real landclass data. So it could be limited only to the roads database vs land distribution that determine the aproximate type of buildings to plant around the roads, yet I am not sure about that…
While urban areas are complex, 3D oriented and variated, the vegetation, on the other hand, seems dull and limited IMHO (compared to FSX or to Flight screens…) The forests and parks seem having limited sorts of tree types and height?… Something looks monochromatic and plain in woodlands compared to the cities…
Now there was a visible improvement in the ambiant light. In V9, as soon as few clouds are spread in the sky, the ambiance used to become gloomy even in the middle of a sunny day.
Although I still feel some darkness caused by clouds, it is improved over V9. There is also the gamma settingsn to try + some sky color types and settings to choose from…
Also volumetric (particles?) clouds feel much more realistic than FSX when we fly through them or low above them… I think they are generated in much more true to life than FSX and the transition between covered areas look smooth and realistic…
Now I do not know if I got the concept correcty, but I heard Austin saying that AI a/c are based on the amount of mutli threads or CPUs or something like that… Or perhaps I misunderstood the whole idea… I say this because I saw only 5 United 747s at the gates and some trucks and G/A twins… I do not know if I got the AI concept thing right or could also be the fact that the demo is limited in terms of many things…
I love the airports that follow the terrain in Xplane (been there in previous versions I suppose). The sloped runways are wonderfuly true to life in their look and feel! FSX is way behind in this scenery aspect that should have been part of MS FS since a while now… Yet it never happened…. Anyways once you try and get the realistic feel of non flat airports and runways in Xplane, you will be very frustrated about the fake flat carpet layouts in FS…
Finaly performance wise, I boosted all rendering / visual setting to the max on my I7 2600K O/C to 4.8 GHZ and the performance was still very acceptable (but not very smooth near the demo airport, KSEA ). Still need to do more tests with the complete version when I purchased it…
All in all the faithful fans of Xplane will be very well served with V10 simply because a huge value was added in terms of scenery and environement to the already very fancy and sophisticated simulation of flying objects (for PC)
Cheers
I hope everyone has at least an i7 2600k processor running at more that 4.5Ghz because you are going to need it and a top of the line GPU. Otherwise you may as well not bother upgrading from XP9 or FSX for that matter.
They still haven’t fixed the strange flight model behaviour where the plane bounces like a puppet on a strings even in minor turbulence or up/downdrafts. You have to be more on the ball when flying in turbulence in XP than real helicopter pilots have to be in the hover.
After 10hrs of downloading I ended up looking at a bouncing app icon. Nothing much to tweak or do here, so moved to trash… Poorly tested demo I would say as I have a stock Mac.
Yeah. Their servers really couldn’t cope with that, could they? The number of people reporting 24 and 36 hour download times is very high!
Anyone else on Mac had problems? I’ve not heard of any with the Windows version at all – other than the comments that you need a supercomputer to put the sliders up.
XPlane 10, quick impressions (take 2 : XP10 by night) :
A note to the people who are having a hard time getting xplane 10 demo, I recommand you go for the Torrent link on the xplane 10 demo website. From my end (PC though), the demo came in fast and smooth and no issues at all during the launch or the tests. It seems a solid build to me here…
Now I did a quick general aviation session in the demo by flying low and slow at night (around the KSEA area) and I had to rush the tour as I have 10 minutes only before the controllers go stiff and dead (demo limitation)…
I can testify that with the HDR option enabled in the renderings settings, as recommanded by Austin, XP10 is the most realistic experience of night flying over urban areas one can have on a personal computer…
The 3D “plausible world” is just so true to life by night that I think it looks better than during the day!
One can fly and admire the 3D feel of neighborhoods, streets and highway lights, moving vehicles with headlights illuminating the roads, Highway signs, the smooth pole lights revealing the detailed and sleeping suburbs etc etc etc… The experience is real and breath taking at times (when we descend and fly so low over the city)…
Once we see the huge advancement in scenery simulation especialy for the general aviation fans, we certainly feel frustrated to go back and fly another sim with its flat painted night textures that can look good from high alt but fake and uninteresting for g/a pilots….
Also in XP10 at night we can apreciate the lovely 3D dynamic and rotating beacon lights in the aircraft (at least the one I used) and the nicely illuniated runways compared to the annoying ones in FS with their oversized vasis and papis, strobes etc… Also the a/c landing lights projet on the ground the right dose of illumination in front of the a/c…
Certainly XP10 uses more recent graphic rendering technologies compared to FSX and it is using it at its best to render awesome night ambiences in the already detailed urban areas…
MS Flight screens show beautiful landscapes, mountains and vegetation but I wonder how it can compete in the simulation of cities and their night versions…
Now that the bar is raised by Laminar in the urban scenery simulation with all its subtle and realistic night ambiance, I’d like to say to MS, please no more flat painted textures for the nights of MS Flight!
Cheers
I’ve been trying best to like this sim, but I just can’t. The night time scenery is beautiful. Far superior to FSX. I don’t know what MS Flight has to offer for night scenery as yet. FPS might be a problem though. The city of Seattle has been left out of the scenery. My guess is because it would be a hit on the FPS and would discourage potential buyers. I’m running a 2.6ghz I7 processor and the NORMAL setting is the best I can run with a lot of the scenery missing. My biggest disappointment is the quality of the aircraft. First you can’t zoom back….it feels like you are sitting way too close to the instrument panel. There is almost no 3D effect to the panel. It looks very MSFS 2002/2004. I’m guessing to keep the FPS down. The user interface takes some work and time. The plus side is that it’s very customizable. The down side is that it takes a ton of time and experimentation to get it right. If you are new to XPlane…..its going to take alot of time. If the aircraft were of the same quality visually as FSX I would buy it. Flight dynamics are better than FSX. I fly helicopters mostly and a novice will have trouble flying the choppers without much practice time. I’m sticking with FSX with hopes that FS Flight will be more CPU friendly.
The graphics in MS Flight are the same and worse than FSX.
There is a VC in XP, if you know the right key combination to get into it, but only a few aircraft have it and even then I find it less than helpful.
I was hoping that XP10 might have picked up a few more “standard control” functions from, well, pretty much every other sim since DOS days? No, however, the hat switch still can’t be used to just “pan around” and the mouse wheel still can’t be used to change on-screen gauges or controls.
I also disagree regarding the “realism” of the towns and buildings. I have never, in my life, seen a green square surrounded by a thin strip of houses as being the standard “building block” of a town. Likewise, the demo has apparently random bits of disconnected road all over the place.
It all looks very pretty again, but it… looks like XP9 to me, with some shinier graphics. Hopefully the demo is cut down a bit and it’ll look better at release. Right now Im very under-awed!
Looks great but it runs at <10 fps on my MacPro. What are the realistic min specs to get this running 30+ fps with decent quality? Thanks.