Interview with the makers of X-Plane

[Frank N. O.]

http://www.macologist.org/viewtopic.php?t=1911

Very interesting reading!

Frank

[chris]

Indeed interesting, especially this bit:

So anyways, X-Plane is not good enough for truly rigorous engineering research & development, say above 80% the speed of sound, but it is good enough for engineering below that point. But as a flight sim for PCs, nothing else comes even remotely close.

We in FS2004 with SSTSim don't seem to have any difficulties in having the plane fly accurately to the performance of the real thing. Compared to the charts, it does exactly what it should do and behaves in quite a realistic fashion.

I heard about a Concorde in X-Plane, on their own official site and I'd love to see a comparison to see how it stacks up against SSTSim, which I know was developed with input of various Concorde pilots and various engineering people involved with Concorde over the years.

It's also notable that one of their examples, Boeing has also requested demonstrations of FS2004 aircraft, like the PMDG 747 for instance. It's also worth noting that in FS, the performance of the instruments depends on how they are programmed as well. Some developers have realised huge improvements in instrument performance by simply implementing instruments in non-standard ways, and with highly efficient coding.

On a side note, and unrelated, you won't get me flying on a Bell 609 tilt-rotor plane.. :eek: (if it is anything like that V22 Osprey).

[Frank N. O.]

Good points, especially with the instruments. Too many people (although normally not here) misunderstand add-ons as the full benchmark of what a game/sim is capable of and that's wrong since a add-on doesn't need to be made to sim-specs, it could easily be arcadish if the creator want that.

I don't know the X-Plane Concorde but I doubt it's made to anywhere near the std. of the Altitude SSTSim Concorde so a comparisom probably won't be useful in any extenct.

Chris did you read about the new world-scenery project? It looks interesting imho.

On the sidenote, I'm not interested in it either, an X-Wing might be interesting if it can work but not a tilt-rotor.

Frank