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| Downloads: |
33,604 |
| Developer: |
Laminar Research | More programs by this producer |
| License: |
Demo |
| Price: |
59 $ to buy  |
| OS: |
Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later |
| Binary format: |
 Universal Binary |
| Size: |
2.83 MB |
| Download time: |
56K: 6m 53s 64K: 6m 2s 128K: 3m 1s 768K: 30s |
| Last Updated: |
April 16th, 2008 02:12 |
| Category: |
MAC HD :: Games |
| X Plane description |
 Download |
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X-Plane is a really comprehensive and powerful flight simulator, and has the most realistic flight model available for personal computers.
Welcome to the world of props, jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well as gliders, helicopters and VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier.
X-Plane comes with subsonic and supersonic flight dynamics, sporting aircraft from the Bell 206 Jet-Ranger helicopter and Cessna 172 light plane to the supersonic Concorde and Mach-3 XB-70 Valkyrie. X-Plane comes with about 40 aircraft spanning the aviation industry (and history), and several hundred more are freely downloadable from the internet.
X-Plane scenery is world-wide, with scenery for the entire planet Earth AND MARS! (thanks to the Mars Orbiting Laser Altimeter, which mapped that planet's elevation) You can land at any of over 18,000 airports, as well as test your mettle on aircraft carriers, helipads on building tops, frigates that pitch and roll in the waves, and oil rigs.
Weather is variable from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind, turbulence, wind shear, and microbursts!
Rain, snow and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders! Real weather conditions can be downloaded from the internet, allowing you to fly in the actual weather that currently exists!
X-Plane also has detailed failure-modeling, with 35 systems that can be failed manually or randomly, when you least expect it! You can fail instruments, engines, flight controls, and landing gear at any moment.
While X-Plane is the world's most COMPREHENSIVE flight sim, your purchase also comes with Plane-Maker (to create your own airplanes) World-Maker (to create your own scenery), and Weather Briefer (to get a weather briefing before the flight if you use real weather conditions downloaded from the net).
X-Plane is also extremely customizable, allowing you to easily create textures, sounds, and instrument panels for your own airplanes that you design or the planes that come with the sim.
X-Plane's accuracy (in flight model), scope (in aircraft and terrain coverage), add-on programs (in aircraft and scenery editors), user-customizability, versatility (in aircraft type and weather conditions), downloadable aircraft, and downloadable scenery makes it the ULTIMATE flight simulation experience for Macintosh AND Windows platforms.
X-Plane's flight model can handle flying wings and fly-by-wire systems, as needed for a B-2 simulation.
Here are some key features of "X Plane":
· Element Break-Down
Done only once during initialization, X-Plane breaks the wing(s), horizontal stabilizer, vertical stabilizer(s), and propeller(s) (if equipped) down into a finite number of elements. The number of elements is decided by the user in Plane-Maker. Ten elements per side per wing or stabilizer is the maximum, and studies have shown that this provides roll rates and accelerations that are very close to the values that would be found with a much larger number of elements.
· Velocity Determination
This is done twice per cycle. The aircraft linear and angular velocities, along with the longitudinal, lateral, and vertical arms of each element are considered to find the velocity vector of each element. Downwash, propwash, and induced angle of attack from lift-augmentation devices are all considered when finding the velocity vector of each element.
Propwash is found by looking at the area of each propeller disk, and the thrust of each propeller. Using local air density, X-Plane determines the propwash required for momentum to be conserved.
Downwash is found by looking at the aspect ratio, taper ratio, and sweep of the wing, and the horizontal and vertical distance of the "washed surface" (normally the horizontal stabilizer) from the "washing surface" (normally the wing), and then going to an empirical look-up table to get the degrees of downwash generated per coefficient of lift.
· Coefficient Determination
The airfoil data entered in Part-Maker is 2-dimensional, so X-Plane applies finite wing lift-slope reduction, finite-wing CLmax reduction, finite-wing induced drag, and finite-wing moment reduction appropriate to the aspect ratio, taper ratio, and sweep of the wing, horizontal stabilizer, vertical stabilizer, or propeller blade in question. Compressible flow effects are considered using Prandtl-Glauert, but transonic effects are not simulated other than an empirical mach-divergent drag increase. In supersonic flight, the airfoil is considered to be a diamond shape with the appropriate thickness ratio... pressures behind the shock waves are found on each of the plates in the diamond-shaped airfoil and summed to give the total pressures on the foil element.
· Force Build-Up
Using the coefficients just determined in step 3, areas determined during step 1, and dynamic pressures (determined separately for each element based on aircraft speed, altitude, temperature, propwash and wing sweep), the forces are found and summed for the entire aircraft. Forces are then divided by the aircraft mass for linear accelerations, and moments of inertia for angular accelerations.
Requirements:
· Macintosh CPU PowerMac G4 or G5 1ghz+ or Intel
· RAM 512 meg
· Disk Space 10 gig
· DVD
· 3-D CARD OpenGL
· VRAM 16 meg
· Monitor 1024x768+
· Joystick/Yoke USB.
Limitations:
· The demo version will stop the joystick after 10 minutes.
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What's New in This Release: · Frame-rate improved! DSF meshes are optimized on load - saves about 50 MB of RAM, can increase frame-rate up to 10% when shaders are off in areas with lots of mountains and few objects. Enhanced use of VBOs increases frame-rate. There are COUNTLESS frame-rate optimizations that are too numerous or proprietary to mention here.
· ALMOST NO DELAY IN SCENERY-SHIFTING! (but you need a multi-core or multi-processor machine to fully realize this benefit!) Now you can fly around the entire planet without every having a significant pause to load scenery... you can look at continuously-varying textures across the whole Country from San Diego to New York and ditto that world-wide. Imagine: You get into a light plane in San Diego and fly it clear to New York, watching the terrain change from the green coastal conditions to the deserts of the SouthWest, then transition to the fields of the midwest, then forests of the Northeast, then the cities of New York, right down to Central park greenery. It's ALL THERE, and you can watch the whole thing in one continuous flight, with hardly a delay to load scenery if you have a dual-core or multi-processor machine. It is simply stunning, just like doing it for real.
· As well, QUICKTIME MOVIES are now much, much faster, also using multiple cores, to give you much higher framerate during QuickTime movie creation.
· AMAZING NEW PLANES with INCREDIBLE DETAIL: We now have a new Cessna 172, Piaggo Avanti (you have been waiting for this one!), ASK-21 glider, and even a Cirrus-jet! Be sure to load the Cessna, Avanti, and Cirrus jet in the 'General Aviation' folder, and hit the '|' key to check them out! The Cirrus Jet, as a matter if fact, is the SAME .acf file that Cirrus used in-house with their copy of X-Plane! (We also have first-drafts of ALL the Vans RV homebuilts, so if you are an RV pilot, you can use these as a quick-start to modelling YOUR RV!)
· Aircraft panels can be up to 2048x2048. Those who want to every bit of detail on a B-36 or B-52 cockpit: Your time has come! Check out the 'Example Airplane WideScreen' in the 'Instructions' folder. Use the left and right arrows to see the whole screen, or run in a res of up to 2048x1024 to see more at once! Now you see you can make very wide-screeen airplanes! Of course, if you make the left half the panel the pilot's side, and the right half the copilot's side, and split your output to two monitors running 1024x768, then you get a pilot and copilot display from one computer, and one copy of x-plane! kind of convenient.
· It gets better: If you want 3-D cockpits, the 3-D cockpit has 3-D lighting for panel texture, to really make flight with 3-D cockpits immersive! Get in the Cirrus Jet and hit 'control-o' to see this. Then use the mouse, arrow-keys, and page-up/page-down keys to move around the cockpit while flying. Try it as well in the Cessna 172 or Avanti. The 3-D clicking into 3-D cockpit tracks a lot better as well, so you can do full flight operations in 3-D... a real experience in the Cirrus Jet! (It's inside the 'General Aviation' folder)
· Custom liveries! Look at the 'Example Airplane WideScreen' in the 'Instructions' folder. You can make all the custom liveries you want, with all the names you want! Then, in X-Plane, go to the 'open liveries' menu item (right under the 'open aircraft' menu item!) and select the livery you want!
· Moderate User-Interface overhaul. Every single menu and window has been re-evaluated for optimum placement. Every windows has been re-evaluated for optimum organization, with many changes. The interface has a mildly different look and feel, and much re-organization to be quicker and more friendly to use. This has included countless changes, including: Fonts are now bigger and clearer... in fact this is the font that was designed specifically for (the real) Charles De Gaulle airport!. All interfaces to enter DIRECTION are are now done with round compass-rose type interface. Interface to assign keyboards is now a dream: Every function can easily be seen at-a-glance. Any function can be assigned to any joystick button as well. So now any function can be assigned to any key and any joystick button.
· Generic Instruments! In Plane-Maker, Hook ANY variable to ANY digital readout, handle, needle, tape... ANYTHING. You could, for example, have digital oil pressure or hydraulic quantity gages... Just choose the generic LED instruments (in the generic folder in the instrument list in panel-editor of Plane-Maker) and select whatever variable you want to attach to each digital readout! Using this technology, you can finally view any variable you want on the panel! This really lets you make your own instruments. Now, I am adding a new variable and dataref: EFIS PAGE. This is an integer that can go 0 to whatever, and you can hook it up to a generic instrument rotary. So, your generic rotary instrument can run the EFIS PAGE variable to any value. Great. NOW, the NEXT thing you can do with generic instruments is set the instrument to only be VISIBLE when a certain dataref is a certain-value. Let that dataref be the EFIS-PAGE variable and you can make multi-page EFIS systems!
· Look in the airliners in the 'Heavy Metal' folder in the 'Instructions' folder. You will see a file ending in 'icon.png'... this is an image of the airplane that will be visible whenever you scroll thru the aircraft-selection window in X-Plane. Now you can see what each plane looks like when deciding what plane to fly!
· Complete new electrical system model. In Plane-Maker: You can now set the bus and amperage of many electrical systems, to get your plane's electrical system just right! As well, set the actual watt-hours of the battery in the SYSTEMS window in Plane-Maker. So now you can now get every amp of every system set just right for your plane, and each system on the right bus, so you draw just the right power from the generators or buses, and lose just the right systems when buses go down, after electrical failures. It's in the SYSTEMS window in the DEFAULT menu in Plane-Maker.... [ read full changelog ]
Softpedia guarantees that X-Plane 9.00 is 100% CLEAN, which means it does not contain any form of malware, including but not limited to: spyware, viruses, trojans and backdoors.
This software product was tested thoroughly and was found absolutely clean, therefore it can be installed with no concern by any computer user.However, it should be noted that this product will be retested periodically and the award may be withdrawn, so you should check back on this page from time to time. |
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