X-Plane 10: What Has Been Posted So Far

There have been a few posts about X-Plane 10 in a few random places; here is a summary of all of the version 10 material that’s been previewed so far, and some notes on what is actually being shown.

First we had Paul’s Oshkosh 2010 video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCoDPNvOMP0?fs=1
I think this has been made clear already, but:

• The base simulator shown here is not X-Plane 10, it is X-Plane 9.
• Many of the airplanes shown here will be released for X-Plane 10.
• This is not showing the new X-Plane weather system or global lighting.
• Some of the content shown here are third party add-ons, available today for X-Plane 9.

The main purpose of this video was to show X-Plane off at Oshkosh; at the time we didn’t have X-Plane 10 in a state where we could do an exclusive version 10 preview.

Then I accidentally leaked two test videos of global illumination. This was strictly accidental: I was looking for a cheap way to post a large video for Austin and Propsman late at night and didn’t think anyone would sift through 191 zip files to find two obscurely named videos. I was wrong, and someone found them on the org. I appreciate that participants in the ensuing discussion withheld judgment; these were early test videos and don’t represent the final feature in any useful way. They do, however show off some of what global lighting will mean.

• This is the Cirrus Jet with landing lights implemented via global illumination. We get two distinct landing lights that cast specular hilights on the fuselage. As the door animates, it opens “into the light”.
• This is the Avanti Piaggio with strobes and beacons implemented via global illumination. The strobes cast light both on the fuselage and on the runway below the plane.

This second movie is typical of the kinds of tests I do: the beacon lighting is just awful – a gross huge red light splatted on the plane for test purposes. When I get the rendering engine code working I usually hand the feature off to Propsman or Sergio to tune the textures and art constants. In this case, the videos are pre-tuning.

Austin has posted three screen-shots of X-Plane 10-related content:

• This is Javier’s new shuttle, which I believe will ship in version 10. I believe this shot may have been taken in X-Plane 9. So this is not the new weather system.

  Some of these screenshots and Paul’s video were shot in X-Plane 9. By the time the new airplanes are finished, they will not be usable in version 9 – they will be version 10 only.

• Propsman has done work on the lighting system. It can be subtle to see what’s going on here because the old runway lights looked pretty good too, but most of these billboard lights are actually rebuilt.

• This night shot shows global illumination in the scenery system. The glow on the highway pavement is not rendered; it comes from the 3-d lamps along the side of the road. Similarly, the car headlights spill light on the pavement and each other as they drive. (Note how the highway lines are visible in the headlight spill even when there is no streetlight.)

  One difficult problem with rendering a lit highway at night is that the lighting from street lamps on a highway tend to spill light on the surrounding terrain, an effect that is impossible to create with a LIT texture. If you look at the right side of the main highway at the bottom of the picture, you’ll see that the street light is casting light on the grass to the right of the highway too.

I think that that’s all we have posted. At least, it’s all I am aware of. I will go into some of the details of global illumination in another post.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

View all posts by Ben Supnik →