brockguntersmith

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=315604561&mt=8 I just bought it this morning and had a chance to do a couple of landings with the Shuttle. Definitely not easy when you do anything other than final approach. Conservation of energy is very tricky. My only gripe so far is that when you land...you stick...no rolling, no parachute dragging you to a stop, as soon as the wheels touch down it tells you what a good job you did. A little refinement on this end would be nice. Also the HUD view during the launch and orbiting doesn't show real values for speed that correlate to the other read out superimposed on the view. Fun addition to the X-Plane stable of products available for the iPhone and iPod though. -> Brock

Indeed it is. Well, I just finished getting beaten thoroughly by the invaders. The lumbering giant robots are very different to control and fight with. I'm giving it a 3 out of 5 on the app store. I like the concepts...just not very polished game play yet. I do however look very much forward to future updates and am going to persevere and see if I can't get a little more into it.

ok, well, found "Giant Fighting Robots". Just bought it and giving it a shot now. I'm curious to see how well Laminar tackles an actual "game". TIME TO FIGHT SOME GIANT ROBOTS! :-) Still no sign of "Space Shuttle" yet. -> Brock

Found it most curious to see "Giant Fighting Robots" and "Space Shuttle" advertised on the 9.10 updates to the iPhone/iPod apps. ...I can guess at what the Space Shuttle app might be but... um ... Giant Fighting Robots ??? :-) Seems like a bit of a departure for Laminar Research. -> Brock

1 system, 3 video cards, 3 24" monitors. I'm going for exactly what you're talking about, 160 degree-ish FOV. I'm questionning how well it will perform since I won't be able to buy the crazy-uber high end cards for each slot, Apple currently limits multi-card setups like that to the slightly lower end cards I'm sure due to both the physical size of the cards and power draw. With a new 8-core MacPro, 12GB of RAM and 3 x NVIDIA GT-120 512MB cards, I'm hoping to be able to maintain > 100fps with volumetric clouds, tree hugger trees, insane objects...etc, for most areas that I fly in which is is the west coast of Canada and central Canada. -> Brock

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=315606850&mt=8 Grabbed it this morning before work. I love it. I hope more training scenarios are released. Would LOVE to see a scenario that does a catapult launch from a carrier and then landing. Doing a glider assisted take-off, flight and landing would be great as well and really show case all of the things you can do with the desktop version of X-Plane. -> Brock

You disgust me. In all seriousness thanks for posting your stats. The more stats we get posted, the easier it wil be to help address the innumerable inquiries as to "what machine should I buy for x-plane". More than that, I was forced to inform my wife of our my new found commitment to purchasing a new machine sooner rather than later. My Dual G5 has too long been my primary flying platform, with my Intel MacBook Pro being my secondary machine (obviously higher performance). As soon as Apple formally releases OS X 10.6 and refreshes the MacPros, I'll be all over them. My plan is for going the 3 video card route with 2 more 24" monitors to give a nice panorama. I'm normally not a "waiter", I dive in and buy when I need...BUT in this case I'm hoping GPU performance and selection will increase with the awesome new features in 10.6. -> Brock

The script should work just fine. I've attached to this post a bash shell script that will do everything the other scripts do, but just done as a text file with the bash path (that you may need to modify depending on your system setup). Just run it with: bash xplane_fps_test_bashscript.sh -> Brock xplane_fps_test_bashscript.sh.zip

Here's a version of the script that works with X-Plane running on the Desktop. It doesn't create the forder to copy of the reports into, but it does create the 3 nicely named log files that are time stamped. X-Plane_FPS_Performance_Test_Script_on_Desktop.zip

After learning about the command line tests you can runs to see how many Frames Per Second X-Plane runs at at various rendering settings, I thought I would create a quick little Automator Workflow ( http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#automator ) that executes 3 separate shell commands to execute the 3 levels of FPS tests built into X-Plane, and then create a folder marked with the date and time the tests were run and copies the results in there. I would recommend doing a restart of your computer, have nothing else running, and then run the Automator Action. You'll see X-Plane launch 3 times and then you can look in your X-Plane folder to see a folder named something like: Performance Test - Fri Apr 10 11/18/54 CDT 2009 With something like the following files: - Performance Test Results - Level 1 - Fri Apr 10 11/14/27 CDT 2009.txt - Performance Test Results - Level 2 - Fri Apr 10 11/16/34 CDT 2009.txt - Performance Test Results - Level 3 - Fri Apr 10 11/18/54 CDT 2009.txt If you look at the end of each of the files you can see the Frames Per Second your computer was able to achieve at each level. Level 3 is the highest rendering setting...using the 256 shared video on a MacBook Pro I got a measly 2fps, enabling the dedicated 512MB card I got between 35 and 39 fps. For those not on Macs, or Macs without Automator installed (I can't remember when Apple first shipped Automator), here are the shell commands that are run in sequence: ------------------ /Applications/X-Plane\ 9/X-Plane.app/Contents/MacOS/X-Plane --fps_test=1 cp /Applications/X-Plane\ 9/Log.txt /Applications/X-Plane\ 9/"Performance Test Results - Level 1 - `date`.txt" /Applications/X-Plane\ 9/X-Plane.app/Contents/MacOS/X-Plane --fps_test=2 cp /Applications/X-Plane\ 9/Log.txt /Applications/X-Plane\ 9/"Performance Test Results - Level 2 - `date`.txt" /Applications/X-Plane\ 9/X-Plane.app/Contents/MacOS/X-Plane --fps_test=3 cp /Applications/X-Plane\ 9/Log.txt /Applications/X-Plane\ 9/"Performance Test Results - Level 3 - `date`.txt" myfoldername="Performance Test - `date`" mkdir "/Applications/X-Plane 9/$myfoldername" mv "/Applications/X-Plane 9/Performance Test Results - "* "/Applications/X-Plane 9/$myfoldername" -------------- If I have the energy I'll rip out the pertinent performance info from each file and create a summary report that's nice and easy to read/post. :-) Enjoy. Brock Gunter-Smith X-Plane_FPS_Performance_Test_Script.zip

I would like to see (either as part of the main app, or probably more logically as another app) a benchmarking utility. Wouldn't it be nice if you could: 1. Double Click "X-Performance Tuner.app" 2. The app would run through a series of real XP scenarios, testing performance of your system, sharing those results with the rest of the XP world in generic form (OS + RAM + VideoCard + HardDrive + MoBo...) and then recommending settings that are suitable for your hardware. - I assume this would have to involve the main testing app launching and relaunching a helper app that systematically iterated through different graphics settings in a predetermined area + weather + plane to ensure you were actually testing the hardware consistently. It would be nice to actually see standardized benchmarks for which people could use to help make purchasing decisions and help see what frame rates are possible with different settings enabled (generally speaking since different areas with different geography and object counts will impact this). I should think this would also be tremendously useful for Laminar to be able to have hundreds of users around the world help test the performance of XP Betas on thousands of different machine configurations and help quickly compile performance data in a standardized manner. Heck, you could even do something like we do in the web testing world with automated testing...the app could compile sample screen shots during the tests so that it's easy to do very basic validation that rendering isn't broken on some systems by looking for artifacts, white square..missing elements...etc.