Matthieu LABAN
.NET, My Life, Flight Simulation and Real Flight...

 
About Me :
25 Years old developer and aviation
enthusiast living in Santa Clara, California.
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mlaban at gmail dot com


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Some thoughts about X-Plane 
Posted : 7/30/2009 4:41:00 PM by Matthieu Laban
Category : Flight Simulator Project 
Post Comment  Comments (2)  

I've had some more time to play with X-Plane in the past week... And I have to say, I'm mostly disagree about what X-Plane fans are saying about it...

Here are some things that come to mind about X-Plane...

Flight Model
That's the one thing we hear all the time about X-Plane, that the flight model is so realistic, it blows FS to the ground... I understand that it is used by numerous companies to test their designs, but what I'm not clear about is the claim that you can just put a plane in X-Plane and it JUST WORKS (all caps, X-Plane style ;))
 
I haven't created planes in X-Plane, so I can't really say much about the creation process, but I can comment about the behavior of the C172 SP that's included by default.
 
I don't think it's that realistic, it feels way too light, the P-Factor is over-exagerated, at low speed, the plane is way too responsive, the stall doesn't seem that realistic... I've got a few hours on G1000 equipped 172SP's so I can relate to the real thing... and this is not cutting it...
I loooked around the internet for comments, and one guy on twitter wrote something like "yeah, the stock 172SP isn't that realistic, I never liked it either..."
 
How can something that you just plug in not be realistic? It should be right, shouldn't it? It's using the blade theory (tm), how can it behave incorrectly? Is it due to all those parameters that you need to adjust in the airfoil maker application? 
 
Again, since I haven't experimented with plane creation, I can't say much, but this seems rather odd to me that a basic plane such as the 172 would not be super accurate...

The UI
This is the worst thing about X-Plane... The UI is horrendous... 
  • The menus are hard to navigate through (way too small)
  • The numeric text boxes all have those up/down arrows to modify numbers, and they are super annoying
  • The airplane selection window shows this weird hierarchy of directories and file extensions... very unfriendly and it has a horrible browsing experience
  • The airport selection window has this weird filtering mode where the selected entry ends up in the middle of a list box... with empty space over and below it...
  • The views don't satisfy me at all, the external view is missing the mode with a fixed point around the airplane, which doesn't turn with the airplane but stays at a world constant heading. (no big deal though...)
I'll have to play more with it, I remember myself not liking Flight Unlimited 2 when I first got it, so perhaps the same thing will happen with X-Plane.
What's new with Infinite Runway? 
Posted : 7/8/2009 7:46:00 AM by Matthieu Laban
Category : Flight Simulator Project 
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It's been a while... I haven't posted about Infinite Runway for about a year...

After some side work on other things, I realized that I continually wanted to go back to the coding on Infinite Runway. It's not making any money... but it's what I like to do...

One thing that made me seriously thing of going back to flight sim development is the fall of Microsoft Flight Simulator. It surprised the entire community... and it's a real shame...
It follows the list of cancelled flight simulators like Prop Pilot, Flight Unlimited, Fly!... (RIP)

One person though seems pretty happy about MS FS being cancelled...Austin Meyer, the developer of X-Plane.
He put up a special page up on his website to help orphan FSX users transition to X-Plane...

I never really paid too much attention to X-Plane... I always remained with my first impression that this simulator was nowhere near the level that FSX had reached.

After listening to a podcast where he was interviewed and was bragging about his simulator I thought it was finally time to check it out a little more than the 10 minutes of demo.

The thing I was most interested in was the flight model, and it is indeed not bad :) However, some of the things didn't seem realistic... for instance, I was unable to make the C172 enter a proper spin... that same 172 seemed a bit too responsive on all axes at low speeds...
The ground handling is great better than FSX, X-Wind landings are much more realistic.
One thing I love is that flight model view where one can see the flow of air around the airplane, this is really cool!

After flying with it for a bit, I can say that with some more effort on Infinite Runway, I could reach a level where Infinite Runway could be a serious contender to X-Plane.

I think the keyword to achieve this is: iterations!

I'm planning on releasing more iterations of the game by developing a streamlined process to create the releases.

I can't say too much about the content yet as the feature set of a 1st release haven't been fully laid out yet.

One thing is for sure, I'll be making of lot of efforts to make the flight model as realistic as possible. For instance, I'm working in a new airfoil model to remove my dependency on lift coefficient tables. Instead, I'll be using wing shape data to compute the lift and figure out other parameters such as pressure, velocities around the airplane.
The first sandbox tests are very promising, and I'm just about ready to plug that new model in.

It will be hard, but fun to code :)


So to summarize, Austin, I'm coming for you! (just give me some time!) ;-)