NEW SCENERY FEATURES: Night vision goggles! Check them out in the view menu and joystick buttons. It is so cool! Hit the 'i' key to turn them on! TONS of new instruments, with most every instrument overhauled to Sergio Santagada's new standards. We now have up to FOUR LAYERS OF SHADOWS, FONTS, AND NEEDLES FOR EACH AND EVERY INSTRUMENT! (about 600 so far) These new instruments are incredible, and represent 3 months of work for Austin, and easily a year for Sergio... check them out! The new instruments can be PNG files, not just BMP, for Sergio (or you, if you are a panel-designer!) to get the alpha-blending options just right. Here is a small sampling for your pleasure... remember, these are the DEFAULT instruments... you can drag them into your cockpit in your airplane in 5 seconds flat! These new instruments are too numerous to mention here, but include: ->new DG's, VOR's, ADF's RMI's ->new EGT's, ITT's, N1's, and N2's of all sorts (EFIS, round, digital, etc) ->New EFIS elements and horizon ->new master CAUTION and master WARNING annunciators... you get a warning for the sort-of-critical errors, and a caution for the big ones, as in the real plane. ->a full globe that rotates as needed to show your PLANETWIDE location! Cool! See it in the Standard-Six/Artificial Horizons folder. ->cool "all-attitude" instrument in the supplements folder, that shos pitch, roll, and heading in 3-D! ->standalone barometric pressure guage. ->new gear lites: UP ONLY and DOWN only. They only lite up when the gear is up or down, respectively. These are used in all Beechcraft planes. ->BUILD YOUR OWN HUD. Just drag the pieces in just like instruments in Plane-Maker! (from the HUD folder) ->BUILD YOUR OWN ECAM. Just drag the pieces in just like instruments in Plane-Maker! (from the ECAM folder) Now there can be 300 instruments on any panel, not 200 like the old limit was! And we are doing this WITHOUT changing the aircraft format! 200-instrument planes are still supported! YOU CAN NOW HAVE ANY OBJECT YOU CAN IMAGINE (USING THE OBJ FORMAT) IN THE AIRPLANE WITH NO FLIGHT MODEL EFFECTS, SO NOW YOU CAN DO THE COCKPIT INTERIORS COMPLEETE WITH LITTLE PILOTS THE ==>RIGHT<== WAY. See the sample kingair for a cockpit object, which is a little concrete building on the roof of the plane for now, but you get the idea. Balloons can be seen tooling around on nice days, moving exactly with the wind... do a close flyby to see people in them waving to you as you pass... ...or are they desperately signaling for help??? Runway markings are right for the type of approach to that runway, be it VFR approach only, non-precision approach, or ILS approach. New light and heavy cirrus clouds... with all new cloud and liting conditions if the visiblity is around 7 miles and heavy cirrus clouds are selected, simulating the "misty" conditions right at the edge of a front. New water shows waves for all sorts of water conditions, based on the wave height and wind set in the weather screen... cool! User interface fonts cleaned up.. the data output looks really nice! New skycolor setup by Sergio: Really cool! No more stars below the horizon. Sky colors are not the same all the way around in all headings.. instead they glow around the sun near sunset and sunrise. Now we have real star locations... We start with a good number of stars visible at sea level, and then increase the number visible as you climb through more and more atmosphere, until thousands are visible from bery high altitude! Get in the Jap Anime and climb vertically to space, at night... Watch MANY THOUSANDS MORE STARS APPEAR as you climb into thinner air and you go from the Earth-bound fogginess to the hubble space telescope view! Runway lites are on for IFR day operations. Better 3d clouds and shadows... all clouds move with the wind, the shadows move with them, and the shadows effect the trees as well... It's really cool as Cirrus clouds blow over the mountainous terrain at 50 knots, the shadows moving with them! All the sub-applications (Plane-Maker, World-Maker, etc) now run at whatever screen res you set in X-Plane... and use that space to best effect. Running World-Maker and Plane-Maker in hi-res now gives bigger editing views! Make the side-views of the cockpit any size you like up to 1024 tall... the w/s keys will scroll them up and down. New smoke-modelling for weapons, engine smoke, tire-skidding, forest fires, etc. Smoke is now modelled with volumetric tracking of opacity based on the volume of the smoke for more realism. New object instruction type: polyon offset. This determines how much polygons (like ramps) are offset to avoid fighting with the ground. See the KSBD example in the custom scenery folder for an example. Revised ground-effect model Semi-transparent aircraft textures possible (like for cockpit windows)... just use PNG format for the paint. More ram savings NEW FLIGHT MODEL FEATURES: More realistic rotor model physics... the flapping of rotors on those helos and gyros is now improved. New engine physics across the board... check out the various new options in Plane-Maker engine window. Engine-start fuel introduction rates and inertias and torque response times are all variable. New N1, N1, EGT, ITT, torque-rate, and egnine response physics. Watch an airplane with a recip engine, like the 172, from an external view while you shut down the engine to appreciate the detail and accuracy of the new engine model... the prop actually oscilates as it stops due to the compression in each individual cylinder! Refinement of speedbrakes and parachutes to be more realistic, even including falling BACKWARDS, hanging on the brake or chute. Improved seaplane dynamics, complete with an ANCHOR! Hit the BRAKES in a seaplane when in the water to drop your ANCHOR! The first time a beta-tester saw this, he refused to belive that the anchor was intentional! Why would the plane stop in the water with the brakes key??? Two sets of spoilers now avail, with cutout speeds for all ailerons and spoilers. And, a new level of refinement for the roll spoilers: In the controls screen, you enter HOW MUCH ROLL INPUT MUST COME IN BEFORE THE SPOILERS ACTIVATE. This allows the roll spoilers to augment the ailerons without the controls being too sensitive at small aileron deflections, as is done on real Airliners Helos are more realistic about what system keep working after tail-strikes... pumps and stuff are hooked up to the right systems for proper damage-tolerance. Flight model refinement: aircraft angles perfectly tracked through the ENV shifts. Flight model refinement: airfoil coefficients perfectly interpolated between data-points based on angle of attack. More detailed engine model.. enter both the torque onset rate and engine inertia in Plane-Maker this let syou get engines that have compressors that spin up FAST for RAPID torque, but with N2's that spin up SLOW due to large weight and high speed, thus giving rapid TORQUE response, but slow SPEED response. this is typical of free turbines, where the torque can come up quickly, but the N2 is slwoer to follow! More realistic indicated airspeed. It has been perfect at low altitudes and Mach numbers, but with some compressibility errors at high altitudes and Mach numbers. The high altitude and Mach number flight regimes are now covered with compressibility effects taken into account. Sloped terrain correctly impacts ground dynamics... now you can slide (and tumble!) down hills! ....On your roof if things go badly enough! And put a plane like the Lancair (free-castoring nosewheel) on the deck of the carrier in 20-foot waves with a wildly-pitching and rolling deck... then turn off the brakes so the plane plane can slide and pivot freely on the continuously-chaning surface... hilarity ensues! As well, the inertias of the wheels are modelled, so they spin up and spin down realistically... tap the brakes after takeoff to stop them from spinning! Mopre realistic brake modelling as well... ABS is modelled to prevent locking the tires and blowing them, as would happen in the sim if you simply applied max braking torque. Excerpt from email from Austin: "I am importing the ABS (anti-lock braking system) from X-Auto to X-Plane now... it is wild... with X-Auto's wheel inertia and barking system applied to X-Plane (as it now is) going to full braking effort would lock the wheels every time (as would happen in reality) and a lot of screeching, smoke, and tire blowout ensue. To prevent this in the sim, I have to do the same ting we do in real life.. an ABS system... be it the automated system of an airliner, or the pilot just easing off the brakes in a light plane when he hears tire squeal during braking. Do you want to still want to hear the screech, burn the rubber, and blow the tires? No problem. Just touch down with the brakes already on.. the result will be the same as in a real plane, which is listed above" Gravity adjusted slightly to always go to the center of the Earth, which is not always exactly "down" in the coordinate system, since the curvature of the Earth changes the local "down" as you move across the face of the Earth! Manually specify the radii of gyration for your planes, if you like, over-riding X-Plane's defaults. Signifigant improvement in ground-effect model... the aspect ratio of the craft is now considered. New data output: cl and cd of the whole craft, based on the wing area of all basically-horizontal wings (thus, including the horizontal but not vertical stabs). Improved vacuum-system failure modelling. The aerodynamic drag and bearing friction on the gyro are modelled to get spin-down times tuned, and gyroscopic forces on the the instrument from the spinning gyro are more accurately modelled. The X-Auto driving engine has been imported into X-Plane to handle the gear dynamics with the realism of a driving sim. Set your autopilot constants! See the art stab screen in Plane-Maker Elec system overhaul.. gen load, bat load, and bat amp instruments all avail now in engines/supplement folder NEW AUDIO FEATURES: New sound: afterburner New sounds: 4 different levels of landing roughness New sounds: Starter for each engine type, and each engine, just like with the engine and prop sounds. Check them out in resources/sounds/engine... And of course you can make them custom for your plane as well! LOOK AT THE C119 IN THE VINTAGE FOLDER AND THE CL-415 IN THE SEAPLANES FOLDER FOR A SAMPLE ON CUSTOM STARTER SOUNDS. NOW MORE POWERFUL THAN EVER! A DIFFERENT START SOUND FOR EACH ENGINE IS ALLOWED! If you ever wanted both the radial and jet engine STARTER AS WELL AS ENGINE sounds to sound just right on a B-36, with the left engines begin left-biased in stereo, and the right engines being right-biased in stereo, with the near engines having loud starter sounds, and the farther engines having quiter start sounds, well then, your day has come! Better sound with wheel skid and touchdown, with all skidding noises and effects being more thoroughly modelled... Skidding will no longer be the predictable "blirp" on tocuh-down, but will instead be a continuous skidding sounds that is modified in pitch and volume to fit the current skidding of the tire, based on its inertia, touchdown speed, friction coefficient, and the weight on it. This way, a hard landing in a heavy plane on dry pavement will give a sudden "GR!" sound and that is it, because the tire will spin up very fast. On the other hand, a smooth landing in a light plane on a slippery (wet) runway will result in a long "BBBBBBBBbbbbbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr..................." as the tire slowly spins up. NEW GENERAL UTILITY FEATURES: Now you can have X-Plane automatically download Real-Weather at any interval you specify! It is all handled in the Set Weather window. Just tell it how often you want to grab real-weather from the net! Easy! New joystick button to scroll the panel up and down, and the joy butttons are re-organized. Heck, there are a WHOLE HANDFUL of new joystick buttons for you, such as the new joy button option to set to takeoff trim. Enter this value in the controls screen in Plane-Maker, so now you can set the takeoff trim settin for each plane! And, now you can move the helicopter landing lite with joy hat switch! See the joystcik buttons options for this. We also now have joy buttons and axis to adjust the blimp/dirrigible displacement up or down. We also now have lots more data output options, and re-organization of the selections. When in a map or plate view, hit the space bar to center on the aircraft. Kind of convenient, and requested. We now have DG drift! The vacuum DG's drift over time now... you have to spin the little adjuster to calibrate them from time to time! Choose what gear steers and what gear doesn't in Plane-Maker landing gear screen now. Easy! Up to 9 multiplayers with you for 10 total aircraft in the air... Time for a lan party while you contest to see who can land the shortest, race around buildigs the fastest, fly formation, etc. We had an incredibly good time doing this in our secret meeting in the Black Forest of Germany... and in 740 you can do it with TEN planes! (And, if all 9 guys are on the same IP address except the last 3 digits (all on the same LAN at a LAN party, for example) then just hit the "auto-detect" button to have X-Plane constantly search out all the other players on the LAN so you dont have to enter too many IP addresses. This keeps everyone flying together, without you having to enter each person's IP address! Cool Plane-Maker feature I invented while entering my Cirrus: Double-click a body node you are editing to "lock" it... do this and then the smoothing algorythm will NOT move that node! New propeller type: Auto-RPM. This automatically setys the prop RPM based on the throttle percentage, interpolating RPM setting with throttle position across the green arc and then up to redline as entered in Plane-Maker. This is what the Cirrus uses. New rotor type... manual-disc tilt in Plane-Maker VTOL screen. This uses brute force to mechanically tilt the disk, rather than the helos way of adjusting cyclic pitch to finesse it. No craft in the history of aviation has successully used this method, since the advancing blade retains a high angle of attack, thus a high lift, thus pitching the craft up-and-over as soon as it picks up any speed. In other words, the craft works like, and flies like, a boomerang. Nevertheless, if you want to see WHY cyclic control is such a good idea, try this method to see how NOT to do it! (some of the early helo and gyro attmepts used this method, and were never put into production for the reasons mentioned above) Airliner autopilot heading now has roll mode to select max bank angle. Ask ATC for the barometric pressure, right under the wind-check, whenever you like. Mouse cursor changes whenever you get near something you can grab or push... kind of convenient. PANEL EDITING FEATURES IN PM Multiple select/toggle in selection via the shift key, or drag outside an instrument to lasso select. Hold down the option key to see the number of an instrument in the set. The number in parenthesis is the number of the instrument within its type, e.g. (1) means you're the first N1, (2) means the second N2. This is how X-Plane decides what instrument works with what engine. Option drag to copy. Shift drag to constrain the drag to horizontal or vertical boundaries. The panel can now zoom. Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out up to 8x around the mouse pointer. New keystrokes: - Arrows - nudge the current selection 1 pixel. Shift arrows nudge 10 pixels. - Delete key deletes the selected instruments. - A and D select all and deselect all. - Z is undo, Y is redo - now 40 levels. - minus and equals zoom in and out around the mouse. - Brackets [ and ] shuffle an instrument up or down relative to its peers. Use this to get instruments on top of the glass cockpit panels or to adjust which instruments work with which engines. - Q,W,E,S also scroll the panel. The UI is revised. The new toolbar has four icons: the up arrow goes up a level. The gear toggles "advanced" mode (with import and reset buttons), the panel toggles the panel, and the up/down arrow minimizes the UI. FUSELAGE EDITING FEATURES IN PM The fuselage/bodies editor also has undo!! Use Z and Y to undo and redo in that screen too. Copying a station now preserves the relative longitudinal offsets of a station. There are copy and paste buttons for each station, allowing any station to be copied to any other station. A WARNING ABOUT UNDO: When you change editing screens in PM, or change tabs in the fuselage editor, your undos go away! So once you close the panel editor (for example) you can no longer go back and undo panel changes. REFINEMENTS Big panels are better-situated in the follow-view. Check out the viewpoint screen in Plane-Maker: You now can enter the vertical viewpoint center location (in pixels) for each of the 8 views to get the correct left and right view geometry. Airplanes should not start up at helipads unless you specifically ask them to in the set apt window. More robust net-connections, to handle all the out-of-sync type cases better. Up to 300 airports per region now, not 200, to get in every field in even the areas most crowded with airports and helipads. Weapons mount rotated about their attach point, not cg, if you enter a weapon rotation when mounted in Plane-Maker. Automatic computer crash-proofing. If the simulator detects incredible accelerations from a high-speed ground impact or squirrely behaviour from a computational flutter, it automatically dampens the flight model for a few moments to avoid crashing the simulator. This is to stop the flight model from crashing in extreme situations. Autopilots on the airliners fly with trim only in pitch now, not applying both trim and elevator Landing gear and much, much, much more saved in the situation files. Better starting speeds for the carrier approaches. Standard rectangular fuel gages now respond to custom fuel limits, and TOTAL fuel custom limits, which were never used, are now applied to DROP TANK custom limits. (TOTAL fuel custom limits never used since there are no fuel gages in the sim that show TOTAL fuel... only fuel PER TANK) Set the max ITT and EGT for your plane in Plane-Maker, engine screen, tab-3. Thrust vectoring now has some new options: Enter the amount the vector can change direction, and how much the nacelle can change direction seperately. This lets you get discs that tilt a different amount than the nacelle rotates, as is needed in various applications Reversible props now go from flat to max reverse pitch linearly with the the handle position as you drag it into reverse, as the props typically do in actual turboprops. Are you at an airport with no tower and no rotating beacon? OK, then hitting the tower view just places you at a starting point or on the runway. Fuel flow can now be controlled by the UDP data I/O. You can do map placement at negative altitude... good for Death valley, or many places on Mars. Glideslope flag indicator only comes up when you have a nav indication on an ILS A different wheel fairing is now available for each wheel. Weight and Balance screen: Enter the vertical location of the center of bouyancy for those blimps and stuff. More joystick buttons listened to on Windows machines. Manifold pressure for recip engines tuned a bit. ATC text location scaled to fit all resolutions nicely. Lots more joystick buttons and better organization in the joystick screen! New joystick buttons: View Zoom and Speedbrakes Ground plane is a new data output option... set the ground local elevation point and slope in each direction if you like so the simulator lines up with your own custom scenery. New option in the Special Controls screen in Plane-Maker: Auto-Sweep with thrust vector. This can keep workload down in fast VTOLs. Liquid-fuel rocket engines do not smoke so much. Helicopter hydraulic systems are hooked to the transmission of the helicopters, not the engines. This is how real helos are set up. MUCH MORE THOROUGH flight replays, complete with engine handle locations, NAVAID indications, etc... and all of this is done WITHOUT any increase in the situation movie size or RAM increase. Mouse is automatically disconnected from flight control if you scroll the panel I am now working with a compnay that supplies simulators to the military for total battlefield awareness and simulation... An offshot of this project is that you will be able to send x-plane a UDP message to draw any object in any location... the military will use this to draw tanks, missiles, etc, but you can use it for unlimited additions to X-Plane. See the udp reference docs when the beta comes out for a description of the UDP message format New attribute for the objects: backface culling on or off. For smoothing of the wheel fairings, misc bodies, and engine nacelles in Plane-Maker, only the body on screen in an editing window is smoothed, not the others. If you you hit the smooth buttons with NO editing window on-screen, though, then ALL the bodies are smoothed. FADECs can handle tip-rockets now as well. Check out the UDP reference in the instructions folder... the "VEHA" (control ALL PLANES by UDP) now lets you set the CAMERA position as well, so you can set the location of all planes and the camera in the same frame. (All locations for these UDP messages are now handled as double-precision lat and lon, by the way, so there is no question on the axis system any more... this makes it much easier to control X-Plane when using it for visualization only) The nav.dat file now has the RANGE of every navaid on Earth! 4 throttles, props, and mixtures individually assignable in the joystick screen... New stuff from GoFlight and CH Products has 4-handled throttle-quadrants, so we support it here As well, I am now working with a company that does flight recreation using "black box" data, so 740 has a new system that lets you very easily import (real) black-box data for replay in X-Plane FORMAT CHANGES: Note: stab trim, stab deflections, and wing tilts are all about the 50% chord now, not the 25% chord! Note: The data output format is different now! Be sure to read the UDP docs in the instructions folder to get the new format! Note: More sounds. Check out the rseources/sounds folder. Important change for panel-designers! The size of all the compass-style markings for all the new instruments in X-Plane is now exactly the same size as the bitmap itself (times the instrument size). Make them larger or smaller as you like to have them fit various instruments in your plane. New key commands, including HUD brightness, transponder mode, and nav/com flip-flopping... check out the key file. "SMO" is now the file type suffix for situation movies, not "MOV"... they were getting confused with quicktime movies. SPEED INCREASES: Very large custom objects are read in much faster... this reduces load time. Very extensive frame-rate optimizations. So much so that even with all these new features, the frame-rate is usually almost identical to version 730. Autogen objects are slower, but we are working on that now.

X-Plane v7.41 Demo & Patch (140.94MB)