Maybe someday. There are a number of pieces of tech floating around the company that could help solve the problem, but it would be several steps to getting it all working in the sim. To make things more complicated, at least part of the problem (airplanes that contain skeleton info, e.g. which parts are attached to other parts) would require annotation on the plane, so you’d need authors to modify their airplanes.

In the end, we may move toward that but I don’t think it’s the highest priority…we certainly don’t think destruction modeling is as important to the general purpose flight sim genre as it is to the combat sim genre, for example. (Those guys take blowing sh-t up seriously! And they put in some serious rendering tech to make it happen.)

Do you think there will be a stage where the collision model is good enough to take out pieces of the plane? So, say you fly (at speed) by a hard surface close enough that hits your left wing and the sim detects that and removes the bit of the wing that collided? Could that happen?

I don’t know…we may tweak the “hardness” of objects in a patch once we get 10.0 out the door. My guess is: perhaps major structures will be solid – we definitely prioritize correct operations (e.g. you can land a helicopter on the roof) over incorrect ones (I crashed my 747 into a baggage truck and it didn’t catch on fire).

We’ll have to look at performance, as well as the quality of collisions – X-Plane’s collision model for the airplane and solid things was not originally designed to deal with low-speed ground collisions.

Because there are a huge number of airports in the world and we don’t have a way to synthesize terminal positions for arbitrarily complex pavement layouts.

This is a major feature of version 10. But the data is going to get built up over the entire version run. The process will start in 10.0 and continue with each free patch.

FlightTime56: these airport lego bricks have nothing to do with apt.dat. The layouts are going to be in scenery packs that ship with the sim, and the art assets will be in the library.

If you install a custom scenery pack that uses OpenSceneryX, whether you made it for X-Plane 9 or 10, that custom scenery pack will take precedent over what ships with the sim. You don’t have to rebuild anything.

Yes, you can mix OBJs from many sources, including multiple libraries, and including libraries from LR and third party libraries like OS X.

We are not using that data. As I have said before, at this point we are only using road and water data from OSM; we are not using any of the many other types of OSM data yet.

It’s not quick to use OSM data – OSM data doesn’t come on a silver platter. We have to write code to analyze, interpret, reprocess, and transform that data, and because OSM data can be literally anything that a user drew and uploaded, that code has to be very defensive about errors, non-conformant, and bogus data. There are often no standards for how features are mapped, or multiple standards or usages; sometimes the data isn’t specific enough for X-Plane’s purposes without a lot of enhancement.

Ahh, ok, I will keep up to date. Why is it that most airports will likely be empty still? I thought this was a new feature for v-10, so it would compete with msfs in terms of visuals/ exceed x-plane standards.

Can we bang into things? Or does XP10 retain the XP9 intangibility? Not obviously that I want to, but it’s always a sharp reminder of bad aircraft handling if we knock into a building.