X-Plane is the ultimate general-aviation flight sim with accurate controls and cockpit details. With hardware-accelerated texture-mapped graphics, dynamic speech synthesis, full-planet terrain. X-Plane is a very realistic flight simulator that will allow you to pilot a good number of planes. It's so good that it is often used by airlines and pilots to check the behavior of certain planes in the sky.
X-Plane is considered by their own developers as the world's most comprehensive flight simulation game and we've gotta admit, a lot of work has been put in to this title which offers virtual pilots a very realistic flight simulator. Not to be confused with Microsoft Flight Simulator, this simulator is a newer variant of Microsoft's original game genre. Unlike other flight simulators, X-Plane features real-world airline such as the U.S. Air Force, NASA, United, Quantas and US Airways.
Enter the world of X-Plane with some of the coolest aircraft available at your fingertips to fly. Turbo-props, jets, single and multi-engine aircraft as well as gliders and helicopters. This simulator packs it all in.
It's really hard to describe how cool this game is without showing you some videos, we highly suggest doing a quick search on YouTube to get an idea about how the graphics look. With that said, the graphics here along with the realistic weather really make the game a pleasure to play. X-Plane comes with over 40 aircraft. The aircraft in the X-Plane demo is limited to 1 and only 5 minutes of flight, unfortunately.
What's really amazing about X-Plane is how many users they've taken from Microsoft. Reportedly, the actual physics and accuracy in X-Plane compared to Microsoft Flight Simulator is noticeable. Though as with pretty all products in this genre, getting the hang of flying a computer model airplane takes some time but X-Plane 10 promises to be much easier than 'the other sim'.
Piloting an aircraft in X-Plane, unlike in MS Flight Sim, is not just limited to Earth. You're actually able to run the simulation in space or even around Mars.
While I can't stop trying to compare this with Microsoft Flight Simulator, I just also have to say that the graphics here are much smoother than MS Flight Simulator X and the details are just so stunning from the moving parts inside the jet engine to the very complex textures. It just looks so great.
A very important aspect of flight simulation is the community behind it. The users who create custom content are really the heart of the community and in that aspect, X-Plane certainly doesn't let down. You're able to create and add literally any textures, sounds, airplanes and instrument panels that you want. You're also able to edit the aircraft which are included with the install, making it easier for the community to learn to and to create new aircraft.
Before wrapping this up, here's a video which gives you an idea of the graphics; it's centered on the Boeing 747.
X-Plane 10 10 on 32-bit and 64-bit PCs
This download is licensed as shareware for the Windows operating system from simulation games and can be used as a free trial until the trial period ends (after an unspecified number of days). The X-Plane 10 demo is available to all software users as a free download with potential restrictions and is not necessarily the full version of this software.
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- X-Plane 10 Download
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X-Plane - Latest Info and Details
X-Plane is a flight simulator for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows by Laminar Research. X-Plane is packaged with other software to build and customize aircraft and scenery, offering a complete flight simulation environment. X-Plane also has a plugin architecture that allows users to create their own modules and aircraft, extending the functionality of the software by letting users create their own worlds or replicas of places on earth.
It comes with five scenery disks, and one with scenery and the actual simulator. It allows flight from -70 degrees south to 74 degrees north. Switching the planet to Mars is an option that comes with the game, and although the air is thin, flight is possible.
FLIGHT MODEL
X-Plane differentiates itself by implementing an aerodynamic model known as blade element theory. Traditionally, flight simulators try to emulate the real-world performance of an aircraft by using lookup tables to find known aerodynamic forces such as lift or drag, which vary with flight condition. These simulators do a good job of simulating the flight characteristics of the aircraft they were designed to simulate (those with known aerodynamic data), but are not useful in design work, and do not predict the performance of aircraft when the actual figures are not available.
Blade-element theory is one method of improving on this. It is a way of modeling the forces and moments on an aircraft by individually evaluating the parts that constitute it. Blade-element theory and other computational aerodynamic models can be used to compute aerodynamic forces in real time or to pre-compute aerodynamic forces of a new design for later use in a traditional lookup table type of simulator.
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With Blade-element theory, a wing, for example, may be made up of many sections (1 to 4 is typical), and each section is further divided into as many as 10 separate sections, then the lift and drag of each section is calculated, and the resulting effect is applied to the whole aircraft. When this process is applied to each component, the simulated aircraft will fly virtually like its real counterpart does. This approach allows users to design aircraft on their computer quickly and easily, as the simulator engine will show immediately how an aircraft with a given design might perform in the real world.
X-Plane can model fairly complex aircraft designs, including helicopters, rockets, rotor craft and tilt-rotor craft. Famous real-world aircraft modeled in X-Plane include the V-22 Osprey, the Harrier Jump Jet, the NASA Space Shuttle, and Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne.
X-plane Forum
Blade element theory has shortcomings, as it can sometimes be difficult to design an aircraft that performs precisely as would real-world aircraft. However, as the flight model is refined, the simulator can better resemble real-world performance, and aircraft quirks and design flaws.