By: Anthony 'Shepherd' Underwood
Date: 2005-10-14
X-Plane 8 is the latest release from Laminar Research. By their own admission they know what type of product they have. Their description is as follows.
“X-Plane is the world's most comprehensive, powerful flight simulator, and has the most realistic flight model available for personal computers.”
I would have to agree with that statement in their search for depth and realism that far excels what other flight simulators have available.
Before we go into the review let’s look at the system specifications first.
Windows 98/Me/2000/XP; 600 MHz processor; 4 GB of free hard drive space; 16 MB VRAM 3D supporting the OpenGL API; DVD Rom
I picked this up from their website and feel it is an important statement for any potential user to look at.
The Lowdown:
X-Plane 8.x is a 3-D accelerated program, which means that it needs a decent CPU and a 3-D accelerator card to run. 3-D accelerator cards are designed specifically to do high-speed graphics, so they work many times faster than your CPU ever could. The 2 languages of 3-D accelerator cards are OpenGL and Direct-3D.
All Laminar Research software uses OpenGL. You must therefore have a 3-D accelerator card that can run OpenGL to use our latest software.
As I have an average machine this started to worry me weather or not I was going to be able to get a good view or feel for the game. I also spoke with some other friends who were thinking the same thing and they have some real rocking machines to game on. Once I got it downloaded and figured out how to get it going I was surprised at how well it did look, but I have to admit I was sad to see the dated feel of the graphics.
I set this aside myself as I recall reading an article with the founder of X-Plane Austin Meyer and from that I got the feel they he has always been looking for more feel of the aircraft than for the world details. I mean the guy had a plane in his living room during development to get the real feel of flying. So with that in mind I set myself about flying.
X-Plane 8 offers a really good variety of aircraft that FS2004 does not offer. Another great thing about X-Plane 8 is everything that is a add or a mod for FS2004 pretty much comes with the game here, which is wonderful for the consumer and the guys just starting out. I mean if you don’t know what to do or where to go, you can easily be turned off by the genre.
Being a former Marine I was very excited to wrap my hands around the Osprey and see what I could do with it. So I selected it and off I went to fly. Wrong! X-Plane is not an arcade game; it is a true life simulation of flying. It is the most in-depth and advanced flight simulator on the market and you should take it as such. X-Plane offers it users a wife variety of information and values to change, and resources to utilize to bring the immersion factor into their flight simming.
First you have to know that I use FS2004 and I am assimilated to their default keys, even when I fly other games this is a barrier I am always facing. Nothing was the same and when you switch from any other to X-Plane 8 you will need to spend some time in the manual. This is something I am not prone to do, because like many I like the instant gratification of flying.
When you first get the game up you’ll see many menus at the top of the screen. This is where you will make changes likes screen resolution, world detail and object details. From there you can set up performance and control options and you should be a good bit closer to success in flying. Once more let me warn you that to by pass this will result in frustration.
So I went out to fly the OV-22. Thanks to the flight model in X-Plane this is one tricky bird to fly. One real problem with FS2004 is often you have to over load or under load an aircraft to force it to have some true to life performance issues, but you will not have that problem with X-Plane.
X-Planes website describes how they do this in the following way.
How it Works:
X-Plane reads in the geometric shape of any aircraft and then figures out how that aircraft will fly. It does this by an engineering process called "blade element theory", which involves breaking the aircraft down into many small elements and then finding the forces on each little element many times per second. These forces are then converted into accelerations which are then integrated to velocities and positions... of course, all of this technical theory is completely transparent to you... you just fly! It's fun!
X-Plane goes through the following steps to propagate the flight:
1: Element Break-Down
Done only once during initialization, X-Plane breaks the wing(s), horizontal stabilizer, vertical stabilizer(s), and propeller(s) (if equipped) down into a finite number of elements. The number of elements is decided by the user in Plane-Maker. Ten elements per side per wing or stabilizer is the maximum, and studies have shown that this provides roll rates and accelerations that are very close to the values that would be found with a much larger number of elements.
2: Velocity Determination
This is done twice per cycle. The aircraft linear and angular velocities, along with the longitudinal, lateral, and vertical arms of each element are considered to find the velocity vector of each element. Downwash, propwash, and induced angle of attack from lift-augmentation devices are all considered when finding the velocity vector of each element.
Propwash is found by looking at the area of each propeller disk, and the thrust of each propeller. Using local air density, X-Plane determines the propwash required for momentum to be conserved.
Downwash is found by looking at the aspect ratio, taper ratio, and sweep of the wing, and the horizontal and vertical distance of the "washed surface" (normally the horizontal stabilizer) from the "washing surface" (normally the wing), and then going to an empirical look-up table to get the degrees of downwash generated per coefficient of lift.
3: Coefficient Determination
The airfoil data entered in Part-Maker is 2-dimensional, so X-Plane applies finite wing lift-slope reduction, finite-wing CLmax reduction, finite-wing induced drag, and finite-wing moment reduction appropriate to the aspect ratio, taper ratio, and sweep of the wing, horizontal stabilizer, vertical stabilizer, or propeller blade in question. Compressible flow effects are considered using Prandtl-Glauert, but transonic effects are not simulated other than an empirical mach-divergent drag increase. In supersonic flight, the airfoil is considered to be a diamond shape with the appropriate thickness ratio... pressures behind the shock waves are found on each of the plates in the diamond-shaped airfoil and summed to give the total pressures on the foil element.
4: Force Build-Up
Using the coefficients just determined in step 3, areas determined during step 1, and dynamic pressures (determined separately for each element based on aircraft speed, altitude, temperature, propwash and wing sweep), the forces are found and summed for the entire aircraft. Forces are then divided by the aircraft mass for linear accelerations, and moments of inertia for angular accelerations.
5: Get Back to Work
Go back to step 2 and do the whole thing over again at least 15 times per second. Aren't computers great?
It seems to me that they have sat down and broken this down to a science on how to make a flight simulator for pilots and simulator pilots as real as possible.
Inside the cockpit you will notice a real feel to the cockpit. In FS2004 you may seek a mod cockpit, but for X-Plane 8 you will not be looking for any such thing, because the greatest details have already come with it. You get a real good feel for being in the pilot seat in all that you can see in the cockpit and from the cockpit. I did have some issues with reading some of the dials, but I adjusted for this by taking more time to read the instruments. I was very happy with this part of the game.
X-Plane 8 has one heck of a weather model. It allows you to define any and all weather conditions that we as humans have experienced. It also allows you to just check a couple of boxes and it will give you the currant conditions for wherever you are and wherever you may be going. One huge bonus here is it does give you a very real looking weather map, something I have not seen in other flight sims and the cockpit also comes with this weather radar as well. For the other major flight simulator I have not seen this, possibly it comes with the payware planes for it, but not the stock version.
One last word on weather, if you want to really feel like you are in the soup, this is the one for you. The sounds, the visual cues it all adds up to making you feel as if you are right in the middle of a storm or the best day to fly ever recorded. The sound work for X-Plane 8 really shines at this point.
X-Plane 8 models your ability to work on any aspect of your piloting skills, from regular flight to emergency procedures. I have spent a good many nights flying the Space Shuttle and have yet to be able to land her in the correct manner. Yes, I did say the Space Shuttle; it comes with the game and has a real flight model too.
One last advantage you should know about X-Plane 8 is the ability to build your own aircraft. This will for sure interest anyone who has wanted to learn to model aircraft but has not known how. I have not toyed with this yet, I mean if I can’t fly what Austin made into the game, why try my own yet right?
Austin Meyer started making his own flight simulator to build as much reality of flight as possible into a game for people who liked to fly. What started out as a lone guy doing the best he can is now X-Plane 8, what I would say is simply the very best flight simulator on the market for anyone who wants their flight simming to be as real as it can get. If you are that die hard gamer then this is the one for you.
Now back to trying to land that Shuttle