X-Plane 9.30rc2 - Fly an airplane in this OpenGL-based 3D environment. (Demo)
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 about 40 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 -60 and +74 degrees lattiude. We also have MARS scenery! (thanks to the Mars Orbiting Laser Altimeter, which mapped that planet's elevation) You can land at any of over 18,000 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!
X-Plane also has detailed failure-modeling, with 35 systems that can be failed manually or randomly, when you least expect it! You can fail instruments, engines, flight controls, and landing gear 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) World-Maker (to create your own scenery), and Weather Briefer (to get a weather briefing before the flight if you use real weather conditions downloaded from the net).
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), user-customizability, downloadable aircraft, and downloadable scenery makes it the ULTIMATE flight simulation experience for Macintosh.
- GPWS annunciator stays lit up for as long as the GPWS system is activating... it does not just pulse.
- If you hit the fire extinguisher, the engine is recovered normally when you open a new plane or reset the flight.
- A handful of new gps commands to control the software Garmin-430.
- Various fail-at-speed-altitude failures should be operational.
- Twin fuel gage instrument can now handle it properly when people put the fuel tanks on the wrong sides of the plane in Plane-Maker. (Obviously, the LEFT tank should be tank #1, and the RIGHT tank should be tank #2, in twin-tank planes... a number of people have been breaking this rule... the new fuel gage should be smart enough to handle that).
- Multi-IOS should work as intended.
- The control-o view lets you get a bit closer to the ground, as needed for some really low airplanes.
- Map mode is transmitted from master to external cockpits.
- Ramp-start option applies to initial start of the sim as well.
- Conditions under which rain is encountered are tweaked a bit.
- 1 more decimal for wing sweep and dihedral in Plane-Maker.
- Shadows won't be clipped from inside the 3-d cockpit.
- Shadow fades out at night.
- Shadow angle is fixed for AI planes.
- Frame rate will not jitter as much on OS X 10.4 with ATI hardware and heavy rendering settings.
- ARC on engine ECAM in Cirrus shows up in 3-d cockpit now.
- Generic rotary now works correctly when mode is "rheostat".
- Allow_rosetta flag allows plugin authors to test ppc plugins on an x86 Mac.