Since I'm tired of seeing nothing here for the past day (yes some of us for some reason check for new blogs over and over....its a compulsion), I figured I'd share some of the not-so-spammy-spam that has been cluttering my mailbox from Laminar Research!
X-Plane 10 is here!!! Full information here
http://wiki.x-plane.com/What%27s_New_in_X-Plane_10
and here
http://www.x-plane.com/purchase-x-plane-10/
Some new features:
Obvious graphical improvements
"Plausable" scenery, never again look at the annoying looking flight sim ground! (sweet!)
Better handling of multithreading on multicore/multicpu systems
New weather system, clouds now look real from all angles, and not weird/2d when you're at the same altitude as them.
more...check first link for full list
Now is this fully compatible with APM? I don't know yet, the demo is available but i haven't tried it, i'll give it a shot tomorrow, i expect it should be no problem, however i have not read full release notes to see if there have been any changes with network controllers and data throughput. Either way, X-Plane is by far my fav flight sim, and its nice to see its gotten even better :)
Comments
> Now is this fully compatible with APM?
Just tried it myself, and it seems it is not... but simple to "fix" if you're able to build the Mission Planner yourself.
The Mission Planner is expectng to get back the necessary data packets {3,4,17,18,19,20} from X-plane (see http://code.google.com/p/ardupilot-mega/wiki/Xplane). However in X-plane 10 these are now on {3,4,16,17,18,20} respectively.
If you're able to compile the Mission Planner yourself, it is easy to work around this with a few quick changes to the affected DATA[X] references in Simulation.cs. Otherwise, probably out of luck until X-plane 10 gets added as an additional option to the Mission Planner.
@Anish yeah i have a friend who's like you, owns every sim and entirely too many accessories for it, heh :P
@Chris It will be interesting to see how good the updated weather modeling will affect flight, i'm hoping for some more realism in the sim when it comes to turbulence and wind. Besides i'll be buying it anyway, I like prettier things and $80 isn't so much for me ;)
I don't see anything that's particularly useful for our purposes. I'm going to stick with 9