Here's a few screenies of the payware 787 in XP10:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Al

Interesting!

 

Is the FMC fully functional?

 

Are the VC graphics and textures fairly typical of X-Plane 10 payware?

 

...I know eye-candy is far from the be-all and end-all, but it does look a little crude compared to even older FSX payware!

 

I have considered X-Plane 10 a fair few times, but I still don't see it offering me anything that FSX doesn't at this stage - and oddly I seem to read a lot of griping about the flight dynamics and engine, which is odd considering I understood that to always be X-Planes USP?

I'm waiting for this to turn into an XP vs. FSX thread sadly...

 

Great shots though! Atleast there is a decent 787 out there.

It ain't no PMDG, and I'm not even sure it is all that accurate as far as systems go anyway but since what I know about the 787 could comfortably fit on the back of a matchbox when written in big letters LOL, it could be, although I'm fairly sure Boeing will have spelt hydraulic properly on the overhead of the real 787.

 

It was less than 20 quid though, so I thought I'd give it a whirl, and for that money it is worth a bash. It's definitely not representative of the very best XP payware you can get, and in fact is not even meant to be, it being pitched more in the 'lite' end of things. An example of the shiny fancy stuff you could get for XP would be the X-Aviation DC-3, which is as good as any DC-3 you can find for FSX.

 

Having said that, there are some nice touches, notably the co-pilot model, which is kind of cool to have in there. It has a working HGS, nav radios and the FMC it uses is this one: http://ufmc.eadt.eu/...l_FMC/Home.html Most of the switches in the cockpit do function, such as the APU, pressurisation and all that stuff, although the side mounted EFB display thingies are not functional, however, they are implemented in the sense that functionality could be added via a plug in, so they could be made to work if anyone wanted to have a stab at it, since the VC buttons are detected. It does come with two pretty good PDF manuals.

 

I'm not a massive fan of the X-Plane flight model personally, since I find it a bit too bouncy (for want of a better description), but with effort it can be made to function well with aircraft, again, the X-Aviation DC-3 being a good example of where that has been achieved, but if PMDG are looking at making completely convincing airliners for X-Plane, then they will certainly have their work cut out to tame that aspect of it. Nevertheless, the 787 has a reasonably good stab at flying as you might expect the real thing to, although that bouncy flight model means it would be easy to get a pod strike if your landing was sloppy, since XP does model runway slope.

 

The only really bad thing about XP, is the fact that most airports have no buildings modeled at all, which makes it look like a flight sim from 1989 in spite of the nice trees and terrain shapes, although to be fair, there are more payware sceneries showing up for it nowadays, so it won't always be like that. I just wish that you did not have to have disk one in your DVD drive to run it more than anything; I thought we'd got past all that stupidity years ago. The interface for XP could do with a makeover too, as it currently looks like something from a DOS game on Windows 3.1.

 

Anyway, for 20 notes, this 787 is kind of fun and I mostly bought it just to see the state of play for airliners in FSX, although I think the forthcoming 737 for XP will be more representative of what can actually be achieved, thus I suspect I might fly more miles in the FSX AeroSim 787 when that comes out in a few days or so than I will in this thing, but we'll see, after all, with MSFS now at the end of the road, you've got to explore these options, as indeed PMDG are also doing.

 

Al