Interview with Austin ("Computer Pilot" Magazine, Free Download!)

[woweezowee]

http://www.computerpilot.com/

[Testpilot]

Thanks for sharing!

[Kesomir]

Copy paste Austin!

[dpny]

All I see is an ad for the magazine.

[GrahamH]

All I see is an ad for the magazine.

Click on the picture to start the download.

[Simmo W]

Yes, can anyone paste the int into here?

[Claude D]

Computer Pilot: Thanks for your time Austin. First up, can you tell

our readers a little more about yourself? What is your background,

how and why did you come to create and develop X-Plane and

what keeps driving you on to expand and progress the X-Plane

simulator more and more?

Austin Meyer: Back in 1988 or so, after I had gotten my instrument

rating in the calm and friendly skies of Columbia, SC, I found

myself in San Diego, CA, working for duPont Aerospace, a small

aerospace tech firm working on some excellent but unusual designs

that I cannot discuss in detail (though I will say that one of the

projects that they were working on is the well-known NASP, or

National Aerospace Plane... a single-stage aircraft that can, in

theory, take off from a runway and fl y clear to orbit). Tony duPont,

the president of duPont aerospace and my boss at the time, was the

founder of the ingenious NASP concept. While the Space Shuttle

and other conventional rockets use rocket engines to blast up to

their 18,000 mph orbital speed, doing most of their acceleration in

space where there is no air to slow them down, the NASP breathes

air to run its engines, so it must do most of its acceleration in the

atmosphere. This use of the oxygen in the atmosphere makes the

vehicle much more effi cient, but it also means that the aircraft must

be flying at many thousands of miles per hour in the air, which

makes the plane HOT! Circulating the cool fuel through the skin

of the NASP to keep it from melting is one of the possible ways

that this hypersonic fl ight might be achieved. I must admit I am not

sure why the craft would not use well-insulated tiles like the Space

Shuttle does... certainly those one-of-a-kind, hand-fi tted, thick,

always-coming-unglued tiles are expensive and a constant hassle

for the Space Shuttle... Of course, circulating fuel to keep the skin

cool has its drawbacks too! The SR-71 Blackbird uses its cool fuel

to keep its skin from melting, and in fact is limited to much lower

speeds than Mach 3 when it is almost out of fuel because there

is no fuel left to absorb the heat! Open the SR-71 in X-Plane and

rather than seeing a red LINE on the airspeed indicator to indicate

maximum allowable speed, there is a whole red ARC! That big

red region is the speed range that you can only operate in if you

have enough fuel in the tanks to soak up the heat from atmospheric

friction! Now you know.

Anyway, enough about the NASP... that summer in 1988 in San

Diego I took an instrument currency flight to keep my IFR skills

up and had a hell of a time getting up to speed in the crowded, fastpaced,

hectic ATC system of San Diego after the relatively slow

and laid-back ATC operations in my home state of South Carolina.

After FINALLY getting my IFR skills honed after about three or four

fl ights I decided that I wanted an instrument trainer to keep my IFR

skills up on the personal computer. Microsoft Flight Sim was running

on the little baby Macintoshes back then, but there were a few things

I wanted done differently and I knew MS would not change the sim

just to suit me... so I started a flight sim called, at the time, “Archer-II

IFR”. I used it to keep up my instrument currency.

A Bachelors degree of Aerospace Engineering at Iowa State

University soon followed and during my engineering studies there

I expanded “Archer-II IFR” to be able to simulate almost any

airplane imaginable by simply plugging in the blueprints for that

airplane, and letting the sim then fi gure out how the plane should

fl y based on those blueprints. I used the sim to test out various

aircraft designs I had conceived (result: Cessna, Piper, Lancair and

Mooney do just fi ne without me... my designs were too difficult

to fly safely) and I renamed the sim to “X-Plane”, in honor of

the series of aircraft tested at Edwards in the ‘60s and continuing

through today.

! Today, X-Plane is still written and developed on the Macintosh

(as it has been since day one) and ported to Windows and Linux

machines to allow cross-platform sales and distribution. Engineers at

countless aerospace companies use X-Plane to do design evaluation

and simulated fl ight test. Eight-year olds try their own designs in

X-Plane and countless youngsters gleefully crash their simulated

F-22s into the ground at Mach-2. Most X-Plane customers are

pilots, or people who want a sim that has a level of realism that is

appropriate for pilots. Some airline pilots take X-Plane with them on

their (real) overseas flights on their laptop computers and simulate

the fl ight back to America while on their layover at hotels in Europe.

Many airline and freight pilots keep their currency up on X-Plane

to breeze through their bi-annual flight currency checks. Countless

private pilots use X-Plane to help keep up their currency when time

and money constraints keep them from making it out to the airport

as often as they would like. I have gotten a handful of orders from

the D.O.D., the C.I.A., NASA, countless aerospace companies, and

even Microsoft. But the majority of the X-Plane customers, I think,

are simply people who want to experience the joy of fl ight on their

personal computer with a copy of X-Plane.

Many pilots have regular access to old Cessnas, but what would it

be like to get dropped from the wing of a B-52 in an X-15 and head

to the fringes of space at 4,000 mph? Or, to fl y a full reentry in the

Space Shuttle? Or take the SR-71 to 70,000 feet and Mach-3? Or

fl y a rocket plane on Mars?

X-Plane will tell you.

Computer Pilot: X-Plane has always seemed to play second fiddle

to Microsoft Flight Simulator in terms of popularity. How did the

disbanding of the ACES team (developers of Flight Simulator X,

2004, etc) affect sales and interest in X-Plane? What was your

strategy to capitalize on this event to draw new customers to the XPlane

simulator, and how will you further extend this strategy in the

near future to keep X-plane as a viable consumer option given the

announcement of Microsoft FLIGHT and other sims?

Austin Meyer: It really did not have any effect… as far as our

development of X-Plane is concerned. Our goal has always been to

build the best simulator possible and not worry what others may or

may not do. X-Plane will really start to dominate the marketplace

when people see X-Plane 10, and start using it. I really have not

done anything at all to “capitalize” on the Microsoft closure… I

simply continue to build the best sim that I can

Computer Pilot: X-Plane has always been known to deliver far better

fl ight physics and modeling than the Microsoft Flight Simulator

series. How important do you see this aspect being moving

forward, given that current trends in technology and simming/

gaming are very visually focused and this appears to be a more

important aspect in consumer purchase decisions?

Austin Meyer: I honestly could not care less what anyone SAYS is

most important to consumers, in the past, now, or at any point in

the future. And I have NEVER made X-Plane for any particular

demographic. Now I would never hire a “focus group”. My goal

with X-Plane is exceedingly simple: Make the most bug-free, fast,

realistic, fun fl ight simulator that I possibly can. Who will actually

BUY it? Me. And maybe a million other people… Or not… It

makes no difference. My workmanship and focus on accurate flight

will be the same no matter what.

Computer Pilot: We do know that X-Plane 10 will feature some vast

improvements in the graphics engine to make the virtual world look

much more real than in previous versions. Are there any aspects

of the visual X-Plane world that have received more attention and

focus in development then others, and what are the reasons behind

focusing on these particular areas of the graphics engine?

Austin Meyer: For one, the X-Plane 10 engine is DYNAMIC. I have

now, for X-Plane 10, made it so that each fl ight model runs on its

own CPU. Here is what that means: If you have 20 processors, then

you can run twenty AI planes with basically zero framerate hit.

Crank the number of planes up to 20 in X-Plane 9 and watch what

happens to the frame-rate. Try it now: Set the number of planes

to 1 and look at the frame-rate. Then set it to 20 and look again.

See the hit? That is because all of those fl ight models are running

on ONE CPU, one after the other, in order. With X-Plane 10,each

fl ight model can run on its own CPU, all at the same time… if

you have 20 CPUs, running 20 planes is no slower than running 1.

As well, we have optimized the RAM-use of each airplane to be

considerably lower. This means that there is less RAM impact to

having 20 planes fl ying at once, making it much more feasible to

have 20 planes at one time. So, X-Plane 10 will use less RAM, and

give more frame-rate, than version 9 when loaded up with planes

(all other settings being equal, of course).

So why do I care about all these OTHER planes so much? Well,

we have hired a full-time programmer just for the new ATC code

for X-Plane 10. This new ATC will control ALL the planes in the

sky, including yours, to deliver incredible ATC realism. Using prerecorded

WAV files, you will hear the controller giving instructions

to the other planes, and see them following those instructions on

your TCAS and out the window. The other planes will all takeoff,

land, taxi, stop on the ramp, miss approaches and do touch-andgoes,

all while taking commands from ATC, all of which are

audible on your radio. Of course, all of the other planes will use

the same accuracy fl ight model as your plane, so you will see them

move perfectly realistically across all phases of fl ight, from fl ying

right down to taxiing. Put in a strong wind or turbulence and see

how they handle it. It might not be pretty, but it will be realistic. Set

enough wind and an icy runway, and they will all blow right across

the ramp. Watch out!

Computer Pilot: One of the standout features of the X-Plane series

has been its ability to be run on “older” systems, and to run well

on these systems. Will X-Plane 10 also be able to run smoothly

on more dated systems given that the new advancements in the

visual engine could potentially tax older hardware, particularly

video cards? What steps have been taken to ensure performance on

a wide range of systems, something which the Microsoft line has

struggled to achieve for many years?

Austin Meyer: Even if you only have one CPU and a little bit of

RAM, you will still be able to run version 10 just fi ne. In fact, you

may see it even run faster and with less RAM than Version 9! BUT,

you will have only one airplane, and the cities will be simply grass

fi elds, and the air traffi c controller will have very few people to

talk to. BUT, if you get the 4 gig of RAM to load up the rendering

options, the 8 CPU cores to run 20 AI planes with full fl ight-models

at once with minimal frame-rate hit, then you will start to see the

whole world enrich and come alive. But there is no way that is

happening with 2 GIG of RAM and one CPU. This type of world is

all about parallel-processing: A lot of stuff happening at once. No

surprise it will eat up all the CPUs and RAM (up to 4 Gig) that you

can give it.

Computer Pilot: What do you consider the SINGLE most important

new feature or upgrade with X-Plane 10, and how do you think this

aspect will affect the experience of the end user?

Austin Meyer: Plausible world: It will spell the end of the blurry,

low-res, pixelated, fl at, distorted, out-of-place, mis-colored orthophoto

that has dogged fl ight simulation with still-life cars on the

roads and ugly roofs painted fl at into the ground for so long.

Here is the full description:

Other than a gazillion various fl ight-model and scenery overhauls

and a near-complete internal rewrite to make the code more objectoriented

and thus easier to modify and debug, let’s look at the

fundamental requirements I have laid out for my team for X-Plane 10:

In a sentence, X-Plane 10 has a plausible, scalable, dynamic world.

Here is what I mean:

Ortho-photos are garbage. I see this all the time. I am zooming along

in an airplane looking at rooftops of buildings painted fl at onto the

ground. And the rooftops are blurry. And pixelated. And with a

magenta or purple tint. And with big blurry shears right through the

middle of them when they fall between offset satellite passes. It looks

just terrible. Then, to make the 2-Dimensional, blurry, pixelated, miscolored,

distorted roof of a building painted on the ground look even

worse, if you throw in some REAL roads or auto-generated buildings,

they invariably fall ACROSS the roof of that building painted on the

ground, compounding the wretched ortho-photo with an Escher-like

rendering-error. This looks terrible, and is not even plausible. Throw

on a bunch of roofs of cars photographed, fl at and motionless, onto

the roads, the result is just so awful I cannot believe anyone would

want it in a fl ight sim.

Enter the plausible world for X-Plane 10. We will build every city in

X-Plane up from the fi rst blades of grass. Here is how it works: We

will start off with grass or fi eld textures for the entire world, including

the cities, and then build up from that. We will take each individual

parking lot and place it on top of the grass. We will place each

building on the parking lot, in 3D. At no point will the painting of the

roof of a building appear on the ground. This will NEVER happen.

Every building will be a real 3D building, planted by an algorithm in a

location that is at least physically possible. Do we know where every

building on earth is? Of course not! But we do have an incredibly

detailed road database, and we have the algorithms to place parking

lots, sidewalks, buildings, etc all alongside these countless roads.

This means that our artifi cially-intelligent city-planning algorithm

will build plausible cities. Cities where you would fl y over them

at 5 miles per hour, 10 feet above the ground, in a helicopter, and

NEVER see anything that looks ‘impossible’. Everything will be

completely 3D. Every city built from the fi rst blade of grass. There

will be no discoloration, blurriness, satellite misalignment or 2D

Escher illusions… all of the cities will be completely plausible. If

you turn down your rendering options to zero, then New York will be

empty green fi elds. If you turn them up to max, then it will be a sea

of 3D roads and buildings at a level of detail that you could drive in

a driving sim, and Central Park will not be an overlay. It will simply

be a part of the fi eld that they have not put buildings on! This is the

plausible world, and it is the fi rst step towards a really detailed and

convincing virtual reality.

As well, X-Plane 10 will be scalable. While you will be able to taxi

right down the roads, with plausible intersections at every crossing

and only 3D buildings off of either wing, you will be able to zoom

out all the way to space and see the landmass from orbit. You will

see the refl ections and lighting of the land and sea from space, with

smooth transitions all the way from space to sitting in someone’s

front yard, never with any sudden switch-over to a different rendering

technology. Everything is done with level of detail that delivers

smooth transitions from street-view to orbit, all in 3D. The weather

system will be detailed enough that you will see cloud wisps right

around your plane as you fl y through clouds, but will go hundreds

of miles in every direction without any repetition. This will let you

have fronts and thunderstorms, areas that are VFR and IFR, clear and

cloudy, all at once, depending on your location. If you want to fl y like

you would in reality, you will work through/over/under/around those

thunderstorms and fronts getting from one place to another, since the

weather is NOT homogenous or repetitive. It scales from local detail

around your plane clear out to region-wide fronts and storms visible

from orbit - totally scalable across a tremendous range.

So, THIS is the plausible, scalable, dynamic world that we are

building for X-Plane 10, all of which sits on top of an object-oriented,

RAM-optimized, CPU-optimized, multi-core-capable code base. You

will see these results as X-Plane 10 reveals incredible detail, motion,

and accuracy at all scales, while the activity bars on ALL your CPUs

run up into action.

Computer Pilot: It looks like a number of well known third party

developers for the MSFS lines are now also producing and releasing

aircraft for X-Plane, which is great! What are your plans to support

these developers with X-Plane 10 given that the success of the MSFS

series is largely due in part to these same developers expanding the

base simulator product with very high quality aircraft, scenery and

utilities?

Austin Meyer: I always love it when people make add-ons for X-Plane,

and I myself, and my employees, work with those people to make

their add-ons great, and make sure that X-Plane does everything

they need it to do to maximize the power of their add-ons. Aerosoft

(Germany) will be participating very heavily in X-Plane 10, in ways

that we will announce when the time comes. Plus we have more and

more third party developers becoming interested in developing for XPlane

10 each day.

Computer Pilot: What other general new features or enhancements of

X-Plane 10 do you think will catch the user’s eye, or simply make

their jaws drop?

Austin Meyer: See the multi-processing side of the plausible-world,

mentioned above.

A big thanks to Austin Meyer for his time. It sure sounds like X-Plane

10 will offer some very interesting features and be the biggest step up, in

many regards, in the simulator’s history. You can follow along with

X-Plane 10 developments at the official website – www.x-plane.com

[Ben Russell]

[Simmo W]

Thank you Claude! And welcome to this much friendlier forum.

My iPhone isn't downloading that magazine at all, hence my request. Hmm, nothing new in the interview I feel, I recall hearing most of it before or in all the news articles. Will be good to hear reactions to FS Weekend.

[Simmo W]

Thank you Claude! And welcome to this much friendlier forum.

My iPhone isn't downloading that magazin

[Kieran]

The .pdf was in a .zip folder, that would probably be the reason for you iPhone not downloading.

[Maniac12]

Nice, but when I read this magazine, there is just one or two things about X-Plane..