Simmo W

Good point Goz. and he's an artist no. 1, those textures are top notch. hehe, now he's blushing! and G, you must be a frigging genius, I downloaded blender for first time today, my gawd.....

Ha, I've always said Jav's LESA is the best scenery out there, see this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhRh8m4TimYp Now I know I'm right!

jav's quote-."Ok.. going now to buildings.... and stuff on airports.. that is really really really very important." Yay, thanks for letting us know you are now working on scenery for xp10! May the world be scattered with no. 32s everywhere...really good news for all ;D

Thems fitin words Theo! But NZ is very pretty, eg Milford Sound. Plus the fps perf would be sooo slick, only 3 large buildings in Auckland! ;D p.s. do you have adsl yet or still only have dial-up? Wait till you experience the amazing 3G mobile network too!

Yes I can attest to that z buffering/thrashing too. very frustrating when u get a beautiful long lens shot and all u see is skeletor! But some poorly made planes are worse than others, especially the freewares.

Rush, you should read the interview with Javier and of course all his updates, they're still programming the systems...

yes, magnificent Javier! Shuttle stunning, but that shot of the B52 at 4:15 is my fave. B2 looks interesting.

ooh yeah, the new shots look great. hopefully they randomize some of those buildings more, a little repetitive already.

Thanks Max. Nice vids, CRAAAAP flying & landings! I was banking rather extremely to get that vision, but I must say the raindrops make orientation a real challenge too. Good for IFR practice, which I obviously need a lot of. Now I'm landing so badly I've started to crack the runways AND taxiways

Hi Javier, regarding that incredible rain effect, when u get time, can u have a look at these issues? 1. when taxiing for awhile, I opened the canopy and noticed that even though the canopy was open, some rain streaks were stil rolling down the non-existent window. 2. would be a nice evolution one day- as u get faster, could the streaks go horizontal and/or move faster? Not urgent issues, will just make an amazing plane uber-amazing!

And another with engine sound and a full slow tour of a properly lit kmpi!

Hi Ola, Javier mentioned that this plane uses differential braking, so I've mapped left n right brake pedals to keyboard. so when you brake and press a key it turns much tighter.

Yes of course the Mentor! Spent too much time again, trying to get the darned lit aprons to work at KMPI. FINALLY did it Javier! A rearseat joyride video going into the extremely chuggy youtube right now, might take 4 hrs (well, it is 7 minutes long, sorry I broke the rule again).

Totally agree, especially after hearing the Mentor, love that engine wind up.

Just stunning, this plane is. On a rainy, misty evening, felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, I was watching another leap in immersion. oh, and music is by Javiers favorites, Chicane, their latest album Giants.

Thanks Oliver, but you are getting good too, like your gauge panning ;D You're right, I succumbed, am sucking up a 2 minute quickie at this minute, but need to be sure of copyright for the muzac. Sweet Mother of God this plane is good. I stumbled on some atmospheric effects in my first filming session, you'll see it. The possibilities for the raindrops are endless. And i haven't even gotten to the exterior yet. Anyone hesitating, don't. Ha, Mooney, shmooney, my 180 Youtube subscribers are about to go spakko (Australian for, 'rather excited').

Good one Oliver! one of my favourite tunes. I just bought her now, thanks for saving me time in whipping up a vid too, tonight at least.

ah, thanks for explaining the braking method, I've just bought her and was swearing at the turning circle of a BendyBus. I like the torque on t/o and easy to stall handling. Superb Javier! wonderful night lighting, it really is a work of Art.

http://xplane10.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/carenado-mooney-m-20-j-for-xplane-reviewed/ Chip put his heart into this one, so please appreciate the effort expended. simon

haha Chip. now I'll have to post it imminently, atriocious grammar unchecked :-) Thanks for the thorough review. Pity about the night lighting

Good to hear Eric, yes I saw Austins comments about blurry photoscenery and I think you've got to take the good with the annoying. I personally can't stand flying without G2xpl and in the (better be!) near future, Norcal/Oahu. I can't see how the ground will look recognizable without photoscenery or magically customized objects. my pc can generally run the autogen objects at very high levels, but with photoscenery I often remove all of them, as all those walmarts look comical. Watch my video of Toms falco and tell me Philip Island doesn't look gorgeous. I'm very excited at the accurate positioning of objects etc, combining medium levels of objects with photoscenery will be amazing, plus with those whisps of clouds...ooh I'm gettin all hot and bothered again.

sorry to cause real pain! I am naughty, but u need to feel my pain too, 24 hrs is a long time. I even posted another naughty message on my blog, chip will kill me.

I can't download. Can't get to my pc for 24 hours, how can I cope with waiting to fly this beauty?! hehe. Congrats Javier, and thanks for your thankyou in your Manual! I haven't done a video for over a month, soon to be corrected..

ok Andy, I should be able to make it between 1000am to 2pm ish [ 01:00 to 05:00UTC ] on Saturday (max 1hr full time, or else I eat into scenery or blog time). good luck in coordinating! I'm happy to fly anywhere, but better agree it by fri. night so I can research quick. I'm rusty on vatsim but no fear!

isn't it nice for us Aussies to get these updates at a civilized hour. Sweeeeeet! FromAustin I have a write-up a mile long of all the features already done for X-Plane 10, but let's save all those details for later. Other than a gajillion various flight-model and scenery over-hauls and a near-complete internal re-write to make the code more object-oriented 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, all of which are being developed now: In a sentence, X-Plane 10 will have a plausible, scalable, dynamic world. Here is what I mean: Orthophotos are garbage. I see this all the time. I am zooming along in an airplane looking that rooftops of WalMarts painted flat 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, pixellated, mis-colored, distorted roof of a WalMart 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 the WalMart painted on the ground, compounding the wretched orthophoto with an Escher-like rendering-error. This looks terrible, and is not even plausible. Enter the plausible world for X-Plane 10. We will build every city in X-Plane UP FROM THE FIRST BLADES OF GRASS. Here is how it works: We will start off with grass or field 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 3-D. 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 3-D 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 incredibly detailed road databases, and we have the algorithms to place parking lots, sidewalks, buildings, etc all alongside these countless roads. This means that our artificially-intelligent city-planning algorithm will build PLAUSIBLE cities. Cities where you would fly 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 3-D. Every city built from the first blade of grass. There will be no discoloration, blurriness, satellite mis-alignment or 2-D 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 fields. If you turn them up to max, then it will be a sea of 3-D 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 field that they have not put buildings on! This is the plausible world, and it is the first 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 3-D 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 reflections 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 3-D. The WEATHER system will be detailed enough that you will see cloud whisps right around your plane as you fly 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 fly 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. As well, the X-Plane 10 engine is DYNAMIC. I have now, for X-Plane 10, made it so that EACH FLIGHT MODEL RUNS ON IT'S OWN CPU. Here is what that means: If you have 20 processors, then you can run TWENTY AI PLANES WITH BASICALLY ZERO FRAME-RATE 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 flight models are running on ONE CPU, one after the other, in order. With X-Plane 10, each flight model can run on it's own CPU, all at the same time… if you have 20 CPU's, running 20 planes is no slower than running 1. Now, most of you don't have 20 CPU's, but if you have a quad-chip dual-core (per chip) Mac like I do, then that is EIGHT cores… and they can handle 20 flight models while hardly breaking a sweat… the frame-rate impact of 20 planes is small: We have eight cores splitting the work! 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 flying 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 pre-recorded 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 take-off, land, taxi, stop on the ramp, miss approaches and do touch-n-goes, 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 flight model as your plane, so you will see them move perfectly realistically across all phases of flight, from flying 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. 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 CPU's run up into action. NOW, if you only have ONE CPU and a LITTLE BIT of RAM, you will still be able to run version 10 just fine... 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 fields, and the air traffic 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 flight-model 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 CPU's and RAM (up to 4 Gig) that you can give it. If you want to see a few pictures, go here: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=47604 And click on the small pictures at the bottom to expand them to a nice big detail. OK next order of business: We are now starting to see the big commercial add-on developers from MSFS switching over to X-Plane. The most recent switchover is Carenado, with a really nice little Mooney. See it here: http://www.carenado.com/ecommerce/buscador.php3?id_producto=86 This plane has the detail in physical appearance that people are used to getting with the high-end planes for Microsoft, but now that it has been made for X-Plane, we continue the great visual detail, but now get it with the X-Plane flight-model… a HUGE step up. Any MSFS user that has ever flown a real airplane and then flies a nice add-on plane in MSFS, and then tries X-Plane to see the difference in flight-quality… well… any pilot gets it. The Mooney that Carenado is selling flies very nicely. It is a very nice plane for X-Plane, and the visual model and 3-D cockpit are of course great. We have recently hired someone to go convert ALL the MSFS add-on makers over to X-Plane, and the Carenado conversion is only the fist of many. Carenado already has their next 5 or 6 conversions from MSFS over to X-Plane planned. Look for some Pipers from them next. Anyhoo, as X-Plane gets ready to ship around the end of this year, you will want 4 gig of RAM and 4 or 8 CPU's if you want to crank everything up to see all of this, and you can expect more and more high-quality planes to start moving over from MSFS o X-Plane. austin PS: OK here is a little video that is maybe kind of cheesy to self-promote, BUT it's for about the best cause I can think of and gives a tiny little peek into my office while I talk about dogs and cats in the pound, of all things. It has nothing at all to do with X-Plane, but if anyone wants to see what I look like, this gets the idea across. And if anyone wants to get a pet, I can remind you to get it from a pound, not a pet-store... the pet will be just as good or better! <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xplane-news/