X-Plane is the world's most comprehensive, powerful flight simulator, and has the most realistic flight model available for personal computers.
Welcome to the world of props, jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well as gliders, helicopters and VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier.
X-Plane comes with subsonic and supersonic flight dynamics, sporting aircraft from the Bell 206 Jet-Ranger helicopter and Cessna 172 light plane to the supersonic SR-71 and Space Shuttle. X-Plane comes with 35 aircraft spanning the aviation industry (and history), and several thousand more are freely downloadable from the internet. (See www.X-Plane.org as a good place to start).
X-Plane scenery is world-wide, with scenery for the entire planet Earth between 74 degrees north to 60 degrees south latitude. We also have MARS scenery! (thanks to the Mars Orbiting Laser Altimeter, which mapped that planet's elevation). On Earth, you can land at any of over 33,000 airports, as well as test your mettle on aircraft carriers, helipads on building tops, frigates that pitch and roll in the waves, and oil rigs.
Weather is variable from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind, wind shear, turbulence, and microbursts! Rain, snow and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders! Real weather conditions can be downloaded from the internet, allowing you to fly in the actual weather that currently exists at the location of flight!
X-Plane also has detailed failure-modeling, with multitudes of systems that can be failed manually or randomly, when you least expect it! You can fail instruments, engines, flight controls, landing gear, or dozens of other systems at any moment.
While X-Plane is the world's most COMPREHENSIVE flight sim, your purchase also comes with Plane-Maker (to create your own airplanes) Airfoil-Maker (allowing users to create airfoil performance profiles), and Weather Briefer (to get a weather briefing before the flight if you use real weather conditions downloaded from the internet).
X-Plane is also extremely customizable, allowing you to easily create textures, sounds, and instrument panels for your own airplanes that you design or the planes that come with the sim.
X-Plane's accuracy (in flight model), scope (in aircraft and terrain coverage), versatility (in aircraft type and weather conditions), add-on programs (in aircraft and scenery editors), customizability, downloadable aircraft, and downloadable scenery makes it the ULTIMATE flight simulation experience for Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms.
BE SURE TO TURN ON THE BETA option in the installer before you run it to get the beta!
The demo contains a limited scenery area to keep the download size reasonable. It will run for 10 minutes before it begins to ignore the user's input, at which point the simulator must be restarted to fly more.
Version 10.10b6:
- Red/White Flashlight added!
- "Mouse-Look" Re-implemented in a new way...Double right-click and the mouse will lock-in as camera control in any view. Change views or right click again to disable it.
- Quick-Look view prefs have been renamed from *_prefs.txt to *_view_prefs.txt. If you already had quicklook commands set, they will not be used until you rename them in your aircraft's directory.
- Additional improvements to terrain textures. Albert hopes to have these finished by the end of the beta run.
- WE ONLY CALIBRATE JOYSTICKS WHEN THE JOYSTICK WINDOW IS UP NOW! So, to calibrate your joysticks, you have to go to the joystick window... you cannot just wiggle your joystick around to let X-Plane automatically find the joystick extrema... you have to be in the joystick window!
- Flight model refined a hair: There will be no measurable difference for any reasonably conventional flight, but now we handle sideslip angles of even 90 degrees, or backwards flight, on wings with crazy dihedral and sweep and incidence angles,with more geometric perfection... even though this does not represent a flight regime where you ever operate in a conventional airplane, we still nailed the theoretical geometry down just get mathematical perfection there.
- Also, the supersonic dynamics improved a hair in computing drag over the fuselage.
- My Evo is now in the EXPERIMENTAL folder. There s no external model, and the panel is a joke, but it FLIES right. Of course, we will improve this over time to be a good model of the aircraft!
- Fixed quick-look views so they no longer reset back to "center" when changing views in cockpit
- Fixed a bug causing ATC to crash if "AI Flies Plane" is selected
- Fixed a bug causing ATC to crash if an airport without a proper flow was selected.
- Scroll wheel now works in all sections of the quick-flight and open aircraft dialogs.
- Fixed powerlines that fly up at DSF boundary near EHRD.
- 747 airspeed indicator fixed.
- Sectional map shading and water fixed.
- Water fixed in HITS instrument.
- Camera instrument fixed.
- Datarefs for object drawing location are now in OGL coordinates. This fix makes v10 work the way v9 did.
- Control-click acts like right click for Mac users with old one-button mice.
- Fixed jitter and shake of cloud shadows when HDR is enabled.
- Fixed ATTR_lit_level to properly scale lights during the day.
- Plane-Maker now has a popup UI to show/hide objects and the visualizations of interior and exterior lights. Since the exterior lights are now drawn as cones (with small discs at their source point) the 3-d view can get messy. Simply turn off the visualizations you don't want to see, or hide your objects to get a better view of what is going on.
- ATTR_cockpit can be used in any attached object. This has always been true (despite warnings in the docs) but the implementation only worked some of the time.
- The cockpit object can now be marked as glass, as well as interior or exterior. Mark it as glass if you need to use panel texture in your windows. X-Plane will attempt to guess whether the cockpit object should be glass on older airplanes to maintain compatibility.
- Spill lights only affect the interior if they are attached to an interior object; they only affect the exterior and world if they are attached to an exterior object. Use this to fix problems like landing lights flooding the cabin or cabin lights illuminating the runway below the airplane.
- Wing landing lights added with independent control switches for left/right
- Revised Autopilot and annunciator panel so all modes work, including APPR
- ADF 1 added
- HSI now uses Nav 1, Nav2 and GPS
- Nav 2 VOR added
- Flight model improved
- Wing Ice light works
- Clock added to yoke
- Instrument night lighting fixed to work. No more lit instruments when power is off.
- Avionics fun doesn't come on when power is off.
- Dash annunciators improved and work properly
- Taxi light added to nose gear, aligned and working properly.
- Mac OS X 10.5 or later
- a 2 GHz, dual-core CPU
- 2 GB of RAM
- a DirectX 9-capable video card with 128 MB of on-board, dedicated video RAM (VRAM). See here for compatibility and graphics cards.
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