CaptCWGAllen

Dan Church the developer just issued an update. He shows how you can use desktop apps inside the VC without the need to remove the headset (e.g. chart look ups), also the ATC window can be used now. All this can be manipulated either through the mouse or you own hands using leap motion. Not yet showing manipulation of knobs and switches. He is now very close his stretch goal so if you are interested have a think as to whether you want to contribute to his kickstarter. I am currently using the FSX Alpha version (free) prior to the Beta release. It is mind boggling and that is in its current raw state.

Dan Church the developer just issued an update. He shows how you can use desktop apps inside the VC without the need to remove the headset (e.g. chart look ups), also the ATC window can be used now. All this can be manipulated either through the mouse or you own hands using leap motion. Not yet showing manipulation of knobs and switches. He is now very close his stretch P3D goal so if you are interested have a think as to whetehr you want to contribute to his kickstarter. I am currently using the FSX Alpha version (free) prior to the Beta release. It is mind boggling and that is in its current raw state.

I'm with you on this one Tony. I fly a Tomamhawk in RL and you do look out over the wing, but you are not looking to see if there are pretty reflections. When I fly in the sim the same is true - I am looking for a landmark, turning point, traffic etc. So I actually can't recall what reflections there are on the wing of the Tommy in RL although here must be some. Certainly I don't think - 'OMG the reflections are missing'. Also when I watch a video of FSX/P3D/Xplane I don't recall noticing whether one has relflections or not (although I am aware of it as this subject has raised its head before as one reason why some people would not use X Plane - as if that is the be all and end all - lol). Funnily enough it wasnt an issue that Robert Randazzo has raised at any point in building their first aircraft. Having said that, in one of recent the Flightsimcon 2015 videos (I assume the X Plane one but can't remember) Ben is lightly joshing with Austin and saying how he was pointing out to Austin which parts of a plane has reflections and which don't - so it is on their radar but not necessarily that high up - and for Austin is probably just a minor irritation - don't you just love him?.

Great stuff - thanks Tony.

Mind Blowing.........but don't hang up your TIR just yet. Without trying one for yourself it is difficult to describe what I saw. It certainly is not perfect. In fact it is far from perfect. Everything shimmers. There are no sharply defined lines. But.......... I cannot go back to the flat screen. The immersion factor from the perspective of a feeling of vastness, depth, height, movement (my stomarch lurched on occasion), speed (particlulary on approach or low passes) - it is jaw dropping. FSX is not renowned for volumetric clouds - but you get them - don't know why, dont know how - but they also feel real size - they are massive. I set up a thunderstorm over San Francisco using the preset. It was amazing. I was in the A2A Cherokee. It was being thrown around a tad - but it felt so real (apart from me not physically moving). But it plays tricks with your mind - phenomenal ones. A break in the clouds and you bank and look down through this hole in clouds and you feel like you are 4000' up. The ability to judge distance and height is uncanny. And flying above a layer of cloud with the sunsetting is stunning - you just want to keep flying toward the sun. You do not want to stop what you are doing.........it is mesmorising. But don't rush out and but one yet unless you are happy to compromise on the quality of the visual - but if you are just too curious for your own good (as I am) then I don't think you will be disappointed - but you have been warned - it is far from perfect. The headsets are development kits right now and pushing up the resolution with any decent amount of detail will give you an OOM in seconds (remember although the resolution might not seem that high it has to push out two slightly different images - half on each side of the screen) for the 3D experience. Then there is the issue of the pixilation. If you go to this link and set it to 1080 - that is sort of what you see - except that in the moving scenario all those pixels cause the shilmmering and lack of sharpness. I say that is all you see but I must emphasis that you also see this vast 3D world which feels real size, which unless you experience it it is so hard to imagine. http://vr.mkeblx.net/oculus-sim/ The consumer model (which is CV1 in the demo) will reduce this pixellation considerably. For basic point to point GA flying where you know where you are and you know where you want to go it is completely workable assuming you can do it by VFR and don't need to programme the GPS or play around with the radio nav too much (although you can lean forward just as in RL and twiddle those knobs quite accurately). For anything more complex it will take a lot of refining. But for me with this amazing piece of kit and the amazing work that this chap is doing to bring us Virtual Reality to the flight sim world https://www.kickstar...ref=hero_thanks I just want to fly around the world in my virtual bubble. Oh and one other thing - the system uses something called Timewarp - and basically if the screen in the headset is refreshing at at least 75fps then it has a way of guessing and merging any delayed frames from the sim itself. I had quite heavy settings over San Fran and the FSX framerate was dropping into the low teens from time to time, with the load of the object settings and a thunderstorm. But Timewarp did its job and the fight model stayed as fluid and smooth as oil. I think that this is the start of something very big for the flightsim hobby - I could be wrong but based on this early evolution it looks immensely promising. cheers Peter

Thanks for posting this. Looks very interesting and feasible - and quite far down the line. Donation duly made. Next stop purchase of DK2. cheers Peter

If you watch the Flightsimcon You Tube video where there is a panel discussing the future of flight sim Robert Randazzo states clearly that the future of flight sim lies (in his opinion) with how the platforms interact with the developers - he singles out Laminar as being amongst the best at this stating that he gets answers in minutes and hours or sometimes days if it is very compex, but things get changed and fixed very quickly (Austin is in the audience although you can't see him). There is another PMDG video filmed at the conference where he again talks extensively about X Plane and the fact that he now has a development team that have been through the learning process and indicates very strongly that the NGX/747 etc will follow. He also states in the last issue of PC Pilot that XP is probably the best sim platform in many ways from a developers point of view. He has clearly come to this conclusion through the devlopment process and by using the platform himself - there is a funny moment in the panel discussion where Froogle (Peter Wright) points out how he has changed his view based on an historic e-mail exchange between the two of them. My take on all this is that it is his intention to follow through on the development of more aircraft for X Plane - let's hope so because it surely msut help the size of the user base and that should, in turn, encourage more developers across. cheers Peter

Great decision - I use both XP10 and P3D 2.5 professional. If you ever want to fly in the UK W2XP GB Pro and Flight1/RC Simulations photoscenery will give you probably the most realistic and accurate portrayal of England & Wales available in a home sim - I am learning to fly in RL and use it to practice VFR. See these two links South Lake District (mountainous) https://youtu.be/sjATCkvvKGA East/South Coast - a little slow to get going but then shows a number of towns/ports, estuary to the River Thames, white cliffs of Dover etc in quick succession https://youtu.be/uq5pS7BLuwU cheers Peter

Not ready yet but http://maxx-xp.com/?page_id=23

I know, I know - one of the foibles of X Plane when there is no scenery available. Hopefully you enjoyed the rest of the scenery though! cheers Peter

Looking forward to it Tony

We were on approach to EGGP (Liverpool, UK) practising no-flap landings. From right came what we now know to be a flock of Racing Pigeons. There were three strikes - prop, windshield and co-pilot window. The latter one came straight through. Luckily my instructor had good reactions and raised his shoulder, which was subsequently found to have broken skin and massive bruising, otherwise it would have hit the size of his face. Being no-flaps we were on apporach at about 85 knots, so 15 higher than usual. My instructor, Lucas, was briiliant - mayday'd immediately (not knowing at the time what other damage might have been done nor whether any of the blood was his or not!) - we got down pefectly safely and the emergency services were right there waiting. Luckily no serious injury and an amazing real life emergency training scenario. The bird organ has no been placed that is where it landed - we believe it is probably the heart. Photos can be found here. http://1drv.ms/1IROeuV cheers Peter

The insinuaton by Dan and others 'in the know' appears to indicate that it is a big leap forward so hopefully it will have a lot of functionality. Like the visuals though! cheers Peter

https://www.facebook.com/Carenado?sk=wall

From facebook Stephen Pennell Have you managed to get round XP's default 3 layers of clouds limitation? Will we finally see taller cloud formations? Will it be able to communicate with other apps like Skymaxx Pro? Like · Reply · 5 hrs FS Global Real Weather This is a beginning. For X-Plane having custom weather as well as for FSGRW supporting X-Plane. We are in contact with Austin and are working on improvements. They may come slowly, but they will come.

Re seasons - there have been about 3/4 interviews now where either Ben, Philip or Austin has stated that the cacpabilty is now in 10.4 and that a 3rd party developer can pick it up if they wish. They also seem to imply it will be avilable as standard in 11. In each they seem to be saying that it will be dynamic - e.g. snow will fall and build up. Some of this argument is like saying why after all these years and with the muliti-billion pound backing of massive corporations hasn't FSX or P3D got proper night lighting or gone 64-bit. It's the way it was designed and it is very hard to change that. XP have laid the framework for 3rd party developers to achieve whatever they want to achieve (look at the area TruScenery are working on at the moment). There hasn't been the take up due to the smaller market but things appear to be gathering momentum. PMDG in their PC Pilot interview have said that XP is in many ways the superior sim, whilst also finding the licencing system within Steam a tad expensive by the sounds of things (but obviously supporting them wholeheartedly). P3D interests them for its commercial entry point - which interestingy they said was not possible through FSX. I also don't what this nonsense about FSX and P3D out of the box is about - to my eye they are awful out of the box - the seasons are unrealistic - particulalry th snow on the mountains, you cannot use it for VFR, the water in rivers and lakes is abysmal, the mesh is dreadful, my local airport might have buildings but they don't represent anything like the actual airport......and let's face it MS pulled out. Lets give a cheer for the XP teams achievements - they are different achievement to FSX but they are nonetheless as important if not more important to the flight sim experience (e.g. near as dammit every road, waterway, pylon an antennae in the right place, pretty amazing mesh out of the box easily improved on via AlpilotX's wonderful work, the autogen idea, first with HDR, first with 64bit, first with proper dynamic nightlighting and a flight model that is good enough that Cessna, Nasa and a few others use it for development purposes). Then let's give a massive cheer for a community that really does put a lot into improving the sim and enjoys doing so and without whom we would not have the added level of realism. It really is amazing stuff and they should be lauded. On top of that - I just love Austin's accessibilty and eccentricity - watch the FlightSimCon 2015 video - yes I know a lot it is old hat, but it is still wonderful in its eccentricity. At least he is still passionate after all these years and not driven answerable to some faceless corporation. Then take a look at the video I upload yesterday (Cumbria - it's only 6 mins - even if you don't like the video hopefully the music is okay) and tell me that XP cannot give you true immersion - yes there are some empty airports but actually once I am down I don't spend that much time driving around an airfield and virtually all the key ones have been completed anyway. Just as in real life, as happened to me last weekend, waiting on an accurate taxiway waiting for 30 mins for 3 Easyjets to take off and one to land is not that much fun. I prefer being up in the air. So 3 cheers for the underdog which started out as one man trying to build something better than Microsoft because the alternative did not help him learn to fly and by and large has achieved that goal. Hip Hip Hooray. I now await the tide of naysayers...... Peter

Pretty certain it does - haven't achieved that yet but be sure to use your cowl flaps as needed as I am sure it will fail - it also fails if you don't warm it up before giving it throttle! Have fallen out the sky a few times as a result. When the engine fails it also kills your electronics because of the volatage spike. Will also flood easily if you leave the fuel pump on for too long when priming. Have to fly it by the book!

https://youtu.be/sjATCkvvKGA

Awesome - will be on my buy list

Agree re W2XP - did a like for like San Fran with P3D Orbx here http://forum.avsim.net/topic/469612-a-question-for-x-plane-users-here/?p=3249408 Which shows that where there is data it is even more extraordinary. cheers Peter

Anyone getting microstutters? Am running 377.88 because it is smooth as silk with 10.36. No hit on frame rate though (but not using extended) as don't go above FL25 (will do once IXEG arrives though). cheers Peter

Loads of fixes in v1.2 now out. No GPS but actually I love it without.

Wow great shots Mitch - time to play with the Beaver.

Good to see you finding the positives again. At least the inland water and rivers don't have the sea rolling through them.