OK THIS IS GETTING GOOD.
 
Go here:
 
http://itunes.apple.com/app/efis-a [...] 83263?mt=8
 
This is EFIS-App for iPad.
 
Here is how it works:
 
You get an ipad or two or three, and configure each one to be an EFIS of one sort or another. (We have only a few EFIS options now, with more coming over time). Then, you velcro those ipads to an instrument panel in a cockpit that you make out of plywood or something. Then, you get a copy of X-Plane and a typical projector at officeMax or something. Hook your desktop mac or PC up to the projector and set that projector up over your head projecting onto the wall in front of your little cockpit with ipads-for-instruments.
 
Now, in X-Plane, on your desktop mac or windows machine, turn on the 'efis app for ipad' option, and X-Plane will communicate with the ipads, letting the ipads be very nice EFIS's for X-Plane.
 
You now have a flight sim with amazing visuals projected in front of you, cool EFIS instruments on the panel, and the best flight model in the industry. This is rapidly leaping into the $250,000 class of simulator for the cost of a single computer, a projector, and a few ipads.
 
This is the beginning of the homebuilt cockpit revolution, where it is very very easy to build a homebuilt cockpit with basically zero hassle... efis-app for ipad always works with x-plane perfectly. And with X-Plane, the scenery is great and the flight model is the best.
 
We recently built a sim like the one above to give to my local high-school and it worked perfectly... get out the plywood, saw, paint, computer, projector, a few ipads and some CH products sticks and yokes and get to work! You can build a flight sim really easily now that will deliver really amazing performance.
 
austin
 
ps: one of the efis displays in efis-app is a prototype for the avionics display that i plan to put in my REAL lancair evolution... hit a button and the plane lands itself! this will be in my REAL plane!
 
even if you just want to put the ipads in front of you because you do not feel like building a real cockpit, grab a few ipads and a copy of efis-app and make yourself a cool sim!

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/ [...] roducto=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!
 
http://projectssite.net/projectpet/video/

OK I ain't done with you yet!
 
ONE more thing: X-Plane 9.61 RC2 is here now
 
Grab it by running your installer, and BE SURE TO CHECK THE BETA BOX to get the latest.
 
This has a few tiny little internal tweaks to catch and solve crash-reports quicker, and a few new datarefs.
 
Anyhoo, grab 9.61 RC2 and have at it and let me know how it goes!
 
OH ONE MORE THING: RUN AIRFOIL-MAKER AND RUN THE BATCH CONVERTER TO UPDATE ALL THE AIRFOILS IN ALL YOUR PLANES TO THE LATEST FORMAT. This applies to both aircraft desiogners and simply end-users.
 
X-Plane 10 WILL SUPPORT ALL OF THE FILE FORMATS OF X-PLANE 9, but there are some airfoils still out there since version THREE!!!!!!!
 
So, RUN THAT BATCH-CONVERTER IN AIRFOIL-MAKER NOW to update all your airfoils to the version-9 format. This will insure that they will work just fine in version 10! (and it will not hurt anything at all to update all your foils to the x-plane 9 format now).
 
This is good for designers, so they have up to date airfoils that they can work with now, knowing that they will work with X-Plane 10.
This is good for end-users, so you have up to date airfoils on all your current planes, knowing that they will work with X-Plane 10.
 
So EVERYONE should run the batch converter in airfoil-maker to get all your airfoils to the latest format!
 
austin

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.

OK I have given you the rundown on the plausible, scalable, dynamic world for X-Plane 10.
 
I have given you the run-down on the system requirements: LOWER than X-Plane 9, because of it's more efficient use of RAM and CPU, but desiring ALL THE RAM AND CPUS YOU CAN THROW AT IT (4 gig of RAM, 16 cores, is what I have, and recommend, to run this incredible world at high detail)
 
Now lets talk about the weather and airplanes.
 
First, check out Javier Rollon's latest airplanes here:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-5-boe6QCY
 
This video does NOT show X-Plane 10, (it was shot in X-Plane 9, in fact) but shows some of the AIRPLANES of version 10. The 747, KC-10, X-15, B-2, and Space Shuttle are a sampling of what we have done so far. And there is more in store.
 
Now the weather:
 
X-Plane 10 will have weather systems that are unlike anything I have ever seen in any simulator, and I have the prototypes of these systems running now. Here is a word on detail: The weather is far, far, far more detailed than the 2048x2048 radar texture I can use to visualize it, but let's just assume for a moment that the weather was only detailed to a resolution of 2048x2048 pixels. Since of course the weather is 3-D, assuming equal vertical detail, the weather would be 2048x2048x2048 pixels. That is 8.6 GIG. To give you an idea of how much RAM that is, a 32-bit operating systems can only ACCESS 3 GIG! In other words, IF the weather was only 2048x2048x2048 data-points, it alone would use 3 times more RAM than all of the memory we have for the entire sim... and in fact the weather is much, much more detailed than that.
 
So, how do we do it?
 
The answer is: We use PROCEDURAL weather. Rather than trying to MEMORIZE each bit of air and cloud, we instead develop a fiendishly complex little ALGORITHM that tells us what the turbulence, cloud, precip, etc, will be for any given bit of air.. and then promptly FORGETS what it told us... one-millionth of a second AFTER we used that data to jostle the plane, paint color on a radar texture, or draw a bit of cloud or rain. Using this PROCEDURAL approach to weather, there is NO LIMIT to how far out the weather can go, and how detailed the weather can be in close around the airplane. You will see this when you fly through clouds that have detailed shapes right in close to your airplane, and then zoom the camera out to orbit to see that the weather can encompass a sizable flying area (bigger than the entire map region you are used to seeing in X-Plane 9) with NO REPETITION. With the complexity of the algorithm (based on perlin noise and other things) the weather looks really realistic... In X-Plane 10, I have seen fronts and cells and cloud patterns that look just like what I have seen in reality. This weather is plausible. As well, because it is procedural and can be evaluated at any scale, it is totally scalable.
 
For the final little bit of icing on the cake, we now have the new weather system connected to the real-weather downloads so that X-Plane 10 sets up REGION-WIDE weather that follows the real world. UNLIKE X-Plane 9, which set the WHOLE WORLD to the weather of the NEAREST AIRPORT, X-Plane 10 reads in all the airports in the flying region and sets the weather at EACH AIRPORT WITH A REAL-WORLD WEATHER-REPORTING STATION .. and then interpolates the simulated weather between these airports. You can see REAL WEATHER FRONTS moving across the REAL world in X-Plane 10... as it happens in reality, with the real-weather download on. The math gets a little tricky, but the results are simply stunning... and you will be VERY hard-pressed to ever see the same thing happen twice.
 
Go here to see a map of a typical random weather situation in X-Plane 10.
 
http://www.x-plane.com/wxr.png
 
Look at it and you will understand what I mean by 'plausible'.
Now, if your monitor is 2048x2048 or bigger, drag that image out to full-size. You will see what I mean by 'scalable'.
 
The terms are pretty simple, but what we are doing with them in X-Plane 10 is just amazing.
 
austin
 
ps: ok one more thing.. I gave a cool full-cockpit X-Plane sim to my local high-school... check it out here:
 
http://publish-it-online.com/publi [...] =12520&l=1
 
The interface to the image is pretty bad, but see if you can figure out how to zoom in on it a bit.. THIS is the type of cockpit that you can build with EFIS-App and a few iPads and a copy of X-Plane or two.. that sim is power by 2 ipads and 1 imac with a projector.. THAT'S IT! And it works GREAT. You can build something like this yourself! For cheap!

apple desktop intel... with 8 dual-core cpu's