CapnSplat

Yeah, "big news" might have been a bit of an overstatement, especially considering Angle of Attack has been providing training courses for a while now.

Took me a while to track down the source. For what it's worth, this announcement tease comes from X-Plane Pilots, not X-Pilot/X-Aviation. Had never heard of the former before just now.

This was nestled in at the end of the 777 SP1C update: This may or may not hint at an update on PMDG's X-Plane projects, but let's keep a weather eye on the horizon nonetheless.

From the "12SEP14 - General Update on Many Topics" thread: Unfortunately, not much that we didn't know already.

Seems like a great area for some carrier ops. :smile:

Beautiful screens! Thanks for sharing! N.b.: with the exception of the planes and the clouds, all of the addons Don Quixote listed are freeware/donationware.

Excellent screens! I should really look into downloading some photoscenery; shots like these make the world look so believable. Thanks for sharing!

Fascinating post; I'm very interested to see where Outerra goes!

It's can work either way, really. You can choose to download lego-brick airports from the Gateway early if you choose, or you can wait for their inclusion in future official releases. EDIT: Oops, beaten to it.

Woah, nice rig you have there! The only thing I'd suggest as far as hardware goes is plan to expand your RAM in the near future; as a 64-bit application, X-Plane can and will use whatever you can throw at it. 8GB is enough right now, but when the visibility distance is increased in 10.3X, the devs have suggested that you'll probably be thankful for the extra memory headroom that 16GB affords. But more to your question: where to install X-Plane? As you noted, installing X-Plane on your SSD will decrease the loading times, but it generally won't affect performance. I have the sim installed on a 3TB 7200RPM WD Black HDD and, with my particular settings and suite of add-ons, it takes about 1-2 minutes to perform an initial load from the desktop, but once I'm in the air flying from place to place, scenery loads from the drive into RAM are almost always imperceptible. If you can live with slightly longer start-up times, I'd plonk X-Plane on a HDD. The other reason I suggest this is that you'll more than likely be doing some heavy writing to your X-Plane drive. For perspective, I have a rather modest X-Plane install that includes full global scenery, the full collection of HD scenery meshes, about a dozen high-definition aircraft with numerous liveries, several detailed airports, and a few HD texture replacements; all this clocks in at about 150GB, and that's without any widespread photoscenery or World2XP coverage. Depending on the addons you collect and the kind of scenery you prefer to fly over, it's not without the realm of possibility that your X-Plane install balloons out to 250GB or beyond. I've never attempted to use symbolic links within X-Plane, but I can't imagine that they'd help very much. If the major benefit of running X-Plane off of an SSD is the decreased loading times, you'd largely negate that by relocating all your intensive aircraft and scenery add-ons to a HDD. In my case, X-Plane easily spends the majority of its loading time reading scenery files, so bifurcating your installation this way may not do much to speed things up. Unfortunately, I can't speak to RAID arrays and X-Plane performance as I've not tried this myself. Hope this helps!

Now that is a detailed airport! Some Google-fu suggests that this is Aerobridge's handiwork, but there isn't much info on their site. Hope they haven't gone the way of the dodo. :unsure:

Lovely screen! The lighting looks fantastic.

Thanks for the kind words everyone! RoF is so good looking and its camera controls so flexible, it makes it easy to take some nice screens! I'll be sure to post more when I've got something cool to show!

Probably steering clear of me! (But seriously: I haven't seen any that I recognize yet, but I think you can encounter famous personalities in the career mode. Pretty cool.)

I've been having a great time with RoF so far! Not sure it's entirely fair to call it "abandoned" by 777 though. A month ago they released the Hanriot HD.1 and HD.2 and just yesterday I downloaded a hotfix. Perhaps it's taken a backseat to BoS, but my impression as a newcomer is that it's still supported. It's worth mentioning that Jason Williams of 777 foresees "reciprocal benefits" between BoS and RoF. Time will tell what those benefits are, I suppose; but this is probably a discussion not well suited to the screenshots forum!

The DCS: Bf 109 K-4 teaser trailer just went up on YouTube. Looks great! I wonder if the background music is going to be the Bf 109 theme. If so, sounds great too!

After being on the fence about it for a while, I recently broke down and bought Rise of Flight: Channel Battles Edition on Steam. Having (almost) completed the training campaign (turns out I'm total garbage at bombing...), I decided to cut my teeth in a few quick mission skirmishes. Herewith the results: First engagement: Well, that didn't go according to plan... Take two: time to dance with some SPADs! Bit of a close call with some errant debris: "I have you now!" First proper victory! I decide to check out an Allied plane and try my hand against some two-seaters. Turns out I massively underestimate these big planes and almost immediately get shot to pieces. Engine craps out and I've got to make a dead-stick landing in the English countryside. Autumn over Metz: This guy gets the jump on me, but I manage to turn the tables and put some rounds into his engine. After he crash lands, I thought I'd give him a few parting shots courtesy of Kaiser Wilhelm, but I end up snagging undercarriage on his wing. It doesn't end well. Lesson learned.

Super excited for this one; the Bf 109 is perhaps my favorite plane of all time. Can't wait to see how it flies in DCS!

Nice collection of shots! Toronto is one of my favorite places to fly in and out of. Well, in the sim anyway; never had great luck with Pearson in real life. New VC textures? Tell me more... ^_^

I've been having a great time with Elite: Dangerous as well! Can't believe that this seems to be the first topic on these boards about the game, but it's definitely worth a look for fans of the original Elite or space games in general.

I'm hoping that we'll hear something today as well. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I've got to work all day today, so I can't sit around furiously F5ing my browser. Waiting for news can be annoying indeed, but I imagine that whatever PMDG delivers will be worth the wait and a boon to X-Plane as an advanced simulation platform. Remember: when PMDG's X-Plane announcement does finally come, it should be for two separate products. Even if you don't like the classics, I'd hazard a guess and say that chances are good that at least one of the projects will be something with a glass cockpit.

Has PMDG released a statement to this effect, or are you just sticking your fingers in your ears?

I, too, am anticipating that the DC-6 is going to be announced for X-Plane. Or, at least, I'm really hoping that we'll see a cross-platform DC-6. The LES DC-3 is one of my favorite aircraft for X-Plane and it'd be great to see PMDG deliver a highly-detailed and complex simulation of its big brother. Just look at that cockpit! Bear in mind that PMDG has stated that their X-Plane announcement will also include news of a second X-Plane project, so even if their first product is a vintage bird, there's a chance that their next offering will be something closer to the bleeding edge of technology and modernity. This would strike me as a great way to test the X-Plane waters--something for everyone. Hopefully we'll be hearing soon™.

Continuing the burgeoning trend of making flight simulators available on Steam, the upcoming IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad can now be had from Steam Early Access.

An FMC may not make the actual act of flying from A to B more challenging, but the challenge of learning the ins-and-outs of an aircraft's particular FMC is what many, including myself, find enjoyable. Starting from the manuals and working your way up to being able to key in routes, do your fuel planning, reroute around weather, perform a diversion, etc.--it's a lot to learn and it can be very satisfying to practice with a high level of competency.