starflight

Personally I'd never run XP, especially sceneries, off an external drive. Load times would be much longer, since even over USB3 it won't come close to the data read rate of an internal hard drive, never mind an internal SSD.

Looking very good! This would probably be waaay down the list of things to do, but will you be removing the shiny from the tire textures?

For Android, very likely never. Laminar got sued by a patent troll for using a core license activation API provided by Google themselves, and Google refused to stand behind and support Laminar or any of the developers who were using the API on good faith. The author of X-Plane, Austin Meyer, also released a product call XAvion, and he says this about its future plans (naturally assumed to apply to X-Plane on Android too): "We have significant experience with iOS and Android operating system development and sales, and the frivolous patent-infringement lawsuits that are commonly filed against Android developers (including Laminar Research) amongst countless others. Our experience in these areas make it clear that we will NOT be developing for Android until the frivolous patent-infringement lawsuits that are so commonly filed against Android developers are dealt with by Google or by legislation" http://xavion.com/app/future-plans/

I have an i7 3770K auto-overclocked to 4.1 GHz, and after benchmarking 1-screen and 3-screen setups (single XP across 3 screens, and even 3 XP instances on 3 screens), X-Plane performs better when the i7's Hyperthreading feature is DISABLED in the BIOS, which more or less eliminates its only advantage over an i5. The i7 does generally have more cache and slightly higher single-thread performance over a comparable i5, but if I'd known for sure about the Hyperthreading impact on XP when I built my system last year, I probably would have saved the $100 and went with an i5. My system's dedicated to XP10 though, if you're planning to run other things on it then you might still benefit from an i7.

Surely everyone eagerly awaiting this, has had to wait a bit longer than expected in the terminal as ground staff finish fixing up the plane for flight? At least LES won't be replacing the co-pilot's chair, which was the explanation for the delay they announced on my last time out

Looking forward to seeing (well, hearing) a preview about the sound engine.

Note you're comparing two entirely different graphics technologies. Your 2009 iMac has a dedicated or "discrete" GPU--a mobile version of a more powerful desktop GPU, but dedicated nonetheless. The Mac mini (and any Macbook less than 15") only has a GPU integrated with the processor, and uses system RAM for video memory. Integrated GPUs are a crutch for budget systems, or systems too small to handle dedicated GPU and their heat. It will handle the fancy OS animation effects, common video formats, and basic games. For what it is, the HD4000 isn't actually *that* bad, but just like you don't want to run a marathon on crutches, you don't want to try serious games or X-Plane using an integrated GPU. It can technically be done, but you won't like the results

I'm really hoping so. Michael Chang's profile says he lives in Toronto, but I hope the reason it was posted "early" (on their FB page first) is that it was already April 1 where some of the other FSXP developers live. Considering there are announcements today that Aerobridge and even X-Plane itself are stopping further development... (All we need to complete the heart attack now, is chris k announcing he's cancelling development of the Toronto airport and scenery...)

Remembering also that this will be freeware, while FSDT and ORBX charge a chunk of coin for their work.

What or who would define "need it the most" though (hypothetically of course)? My home region (Ottawa, Canada) is missing pretty much the entire Ottawa river. Someone put out a draped polygon fix but it's a glaring omission out of the box.

We all know there's serious shortcomings to the current shipping base scenery, like missing bodies of water and old OSM data. There's talk of "re-cutting" the scenery with more accurate data, and I'm sure new XP sales after that hypothetical re-cut will have the new scenery on the DVDs. I know this is very much putting the cart before the horse, but what might existing owners need to do to get the new scenery? Download (HUGE, even with torrents), get new DVDs (free or paid upgrade), etc?

To pan around the cockpit, you can map your hat switch(es) in Buttons:Basic to some of the general commands at the right-most column: up/left/right/down, tilt up/down, and pan left/right. There are separate "fast" options for each; eg I like to pan left/right quickly, but tilt up/down at a slower speed. You need to switch to 3D Cockpit Cmnmd view (shift + 9, but can assign to a button too) for fully free movement rather than 45° left/right increments. These work to move the view around the plane in external view, too.

This looks amazing, looking forward to its release! This discussion has been almost all about how your 787 will look, I'm curious what attention is being given to the sound? Eg custom, or will it mostly just use the XP defaults?