Comments on: Feature Requests for X-Plane 10

By: Deane

Deane — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 01:11:06 +0000

With the new world sim engines in development (like Outerra), the bar is moving higher and higher. The key to advancement, in my opinion, is refining your level-of-detail model and adding mathematical detail refinements.

For example, use the multi-cores to be prepare auto-gen scenery and environmental/scenery details and perform fractal-based level-of-detail enhancements to the terrain.

We should never see those tiled texture patterns from 30K feet again, and we should be able to see mountains all the way to the horizon — and better shaded mountains up close with rock outcroppings and little details if we get up close. Waves crashing on beaches up close, semi transparent ocean areas with the beautiful variations in blue, birds that don’t automatically flock to your plane just to screw with you, but actual birds in various places.

Also, although it may be a moot point with the upcoming release likely to be very taxing on the video cards, it would be nice to set a maximum frame rate. That way, when flying at FL45 when the level-of-detail model has lightened the load of the video card because we are so far away from any GPU intensive detail, I don’t need to max my video card out rendering at 120 FPS. Let me set my max FPS at 45 or 60. Who needs 120 FPS and all that power and heat being generated by my computer? I have to have my fan on max all-the-time just to run X-Plane without some kind of throttle.

Also, please have available a realistic push-back system. the push back plugin moves the plane at a constant velocity and looks really unrealistic so I don’t bother, and using reverse engines is also pretty unrealistic too.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 11:08:35 +0000

Great to see updates on your blog – looking forward to version 10 of the series.

By: psionmark

psionmark — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 10:22:47 +0000

Any chance of the Android app being released? I know there are issues with the Marketplace, but you could make it available for purchase via other means, such as PayPal etc.

By: Darrick

Darrick — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:08:44 +0000

Your doing a great job Ben! Thank you for handling the constant deluge of requests and criticism (my own included,) with such poise. Can't wait to see XP-11 go gold, for our sakes, and for yours!

By: Jack Skieczius

Jack Skieczius — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 15:32:52 +0000

Everything well said here Ben, watching with attention at the release for X-plane 10. question tho, and i don't care if i get an answer, cause i know how these things work, but are you guys aiming this holiday season for a release?

By: andrew

andrew — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:49:12 +0000

Thought so.

I bet we'll start seeing game art from MS shortly. If they feel XP will pull attention away from their new sim (which is should) they'll undoubtedly start ramping up their hype like they did with the Courier.

Sure felt like they did that just to keep mind share from Apple.

By: Benjamin Supnik

Benjamin Supnik — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:38:34 +0000

The main factor with ACES is that if we are shipping X-Plane 10 into a market that doens't have a MS sequel coming out immediately, we expect a larger influx of new users to at least check it out, and thus we are going to push for more features now while the field is less cluttered.

By: andrew

andrew — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:28:03 +0000

"There have also been two complicating factors that have cropped up during the X-Plane 9 run:

1. Microsoft closed ACES, which definitely changes what we want our next major release to look like."

And MS has reopened... ah... -something- like ACES for "Flight". How does their closing of ACES affect what you feel your product should look like?

Chances are that Flight will look really, really, really good, albeit, as I'm anticipating, in more geographically limited environments. Then again, they could be updating everything.