[diamondgeezer]

http://www.x-plane.org/Detailed/4982.shtml

[Corsair]

Sweet.

X-plane, by the way, is a very cool flight simulator. If you've got the system and the money for it. It's also a very moddable program I believe, you can make your own planes for it and stuff. I read that it's Microsoft Flight Simulator's biggest competition.

IMO, it may even be slightly better the MFS.

[magatsu1]

wounder what plane he was "flying" ?

[Xelion]

Matt
That’s almost twice the speed of light. I accomplished this with a 1000 pound plane with 80 million pounds of thrust.

1000 pound "plane", should it be like space jet and whats he doing flying it in the atmosphere at that speed..  I wonder how that would affect the atmosphere or even objects on the ground??

and now this SHAUN person is claiming he can go faster, honestly whats the hull made of I think the only realism they seem to be missing is the stress factor on materials the aircraft is composed of

Otherwise Cool site diamondgeezer

[StratComm]

That and the fact that at 37 thousand axial G's, the pilot would be a puddle of organic mass in whatever was left of his seat.  But hey, if the engine will do it...

[Drew]

Originally posted by StratComm
That and the fact that at 37 thousand axial G's, the pilot would be a puddle of organic mass in whatever was left of his seat.  But hey, if the engine will do it...

if he was going the speed of light, wouldnt he have a mass of 0?

[diamondgeezer]

No, cos as another forumite at X-Plane pointed out the programmer, Austin, completely failed to include the laws of relativity in the code. The trick with X-Plane is to remember that it's a shoddy Mac port. Austin will spend days coding, for example, a routine for generating unique snowflakes, but xompletely fail to do anything abut the sunsets which stretch 360 degrees around the horizon. If I had the pay version of this thing I'd be ripping in to him, but since I've got the free version I can't really complain

So there I was, flying a C-17 from London Heathrow down to Paris CDG. Pleasent enough flight, crusing at 21'000 feet. Just as I was about to think about turning to my final descent, my warning MFD popped up - number two had died. I looked out the port window and sure enough there was black smoke trailing from the engine. So right away I killed the fuel flow to it, but now my power was off-balance. I compensated by killing number three, called the tower to declare an emergency, and brought the huge-ass cargo plane down on my remaining two eninges. God it felt good

[aldo_14]

Meh.  Do it with 5 inch wide bulletholes in your fuselage and I'll be impressed

[J3Vr6]

I tried looking thru the X-Plane website but I'm at work and can't really investigate to my hearts content.  Can someone give me a summary of what the game is like?  Also:  Is it uber realistic?  Does it have real cities or are they BS ones?  Also, do the cities (if they're real) have buildings where they actually are in real life?  If I was to get the game and go to Miami, Florida will downtown look like the real downtown, arena's and all?

I saw one picture at the forum and it looked liek the ground was one big stretched picture...

[Unknown Target]

It's uber realistic, and I believe it runs simplified calculations every second on the current wind resistance to your plane, etc. Which is why it requires such a big CPU

[diamondgeezer]

X-Plane is about the physics. Not the pretty scenery or realistic sky colours. It's basically a big number cruncher. It's certainly accurate - the likes of Burt Rutan use it for testing new designs.

It ships with a few default pieces of media. The ground textures are all generic - you have fields, city, desert and snow, that kind of thing. Buildings are auto-generated, and look terrible. The idea is that Austin is a programmer and not an artist - he has one other guy who works with him to do the graphics stuff. If you want anything to look good you need to go to the community.

Without its community, X-Plane would not function. 98% of the aircraft you fly are made by the forumites. This also applies to the scenery - just yesterday I downloaded a London scenery pack, with satellite photo textures and actual buildings. I've also got an Italian Alps pack, one for SoCal and another for the French Riviera (mmm, purdy). There's another uber-hi res pack comming out for SE England - 4 meters to a pixel, which is unprecedented for X-Plane.

The moral of the story is that if you want the game to look good, you either need to download scenery packs and sky colour pallettes or make the damn things yourself

The main downside is that Austin, as mentioned, is in this for the physics, not the game. The frame rates are somewhat iffy on lower end boxes and problems such as 360 degree sunsets comepletely shatter the experience. Not to mention the fact that it's a rather unoptimised Mac port in the first place... however you forgive all this stuff as you're on a glide slope to a carrier deck in an F-14D

Now, if you'll excuse me this F4-N isn't going to catapult launch itself.

[J3Vr6]

Isn't flight simulator by microsoft super realistic also?  I've never had a computer that was fast enough to play something like that

[Flaser]

No. It is quite accurate however it's a game while X-plane is a full blown simulation by a fanatic.

MS Flight Sim uses a model that tells how the plane should move - so it has parameters for the plane.

X-plane on the other hand truly computes the airflow around the plane thereby truly simulating it.

[ZylonBane]

Originally posted by Drew
if he was going the speed of light, wouldnt he have a mass of 0?

*smack*

As your speed approaches C, your mass increases. So at lightspeed you'd have infinite mass.

[Unknown Target]

FS Flight Simulator is NOWHERE near super-realistic. Sure, it has proper engine start procedures and Control tower procedures (the latter only in recent versions), but is nowhere near realstic.
I have done FREAKY things in those planes, such as flying backwards, flying upside down in a helo, and even stalling the plane so it hung in mid-air (not falling, just hanging there).

And basically, all the flight models feel as if they're tweaked versions of the Cessna (which they probably are).

[diamondgeezer]

http://s.brignone.free.fr/Xplane/X-plane.avi

39MB, but it really shows off X-Plane's 1337 side

Hmm, wonder why that thing itn't autolinked or whatever you call it...

[ZylonBane]

http://s.brignone.free.fr/Xplane/X-plane.avi

Because you unchecked "Automatically parse URLs".

[diamondgeezer]

That was my first thought too. But when I edited the post I made sure the box was checked - still nothing. Nice try though.

[Setekh]

Your vB colour tags might be getting in the way of the parsing. *downloads from ZB's link*