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X-Plane v6.XX: Someone Has Some X-Planing To Do

by Bob "Groucho" Marks

Article Type: Review
Article Date: May 16, 2002

Product Info

Product Name: X-Plane
Category: Civilian & Military Aircraft Simulation
Developer: Laminar Research
Publisher: Xicat Interactive, Inc.
Release Date: Released
System Spec: Click Here
Files and Links: Click Here

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Reviewed Version: 6.14

David vs Goliath



Visualizing X-Plane's flight model

It’s amazing how much a veteran flight simulation can improve with a new version. While the simulation community usually lets loose a collective yawn (at best) or sneering cynicism (at worst) on the announcement and subsequent hype that the newest iteration is “Better—Really!”, the proof is always in the figurative pudding. There is, however, that rare new release that actually does break new ground. Despite the shortcomings of previous versions, the newest build reaches for and actually strikes that near-perfect balance of realism of physics, technical accuracy, and immersion-building eye candy without adding too much system-stalling processor overhead. In short, that new release that finally gets it all right.

That simulation is Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2002 Professional (FS2002). As far as the serial simulator sweeps go, Laminar Research’s new version of X-Plane, v6.XX, is a bitter hard drive space-eating disappointment.

Is this comparison fair? After all, Microsoft is the huge corporate behemoth that has an R&D money bucket that can easily outspend most governments militaries, while Laminar Research is basically one guy (Austin Meyers) and a few talented net buddies. Does this classic David versus Goliath showdown warrant a fair contrast? Sorry, it has to. There are only two civilian flight simulations on the market (the born crippled and and left for dead Fly! II doesn’t count (don’t get me started there), both costing about the same and shooting for a very similar market. And while I salute the efforts and admire the pluck of the guys that make up Laminar Research, I’m afraid that this time Goliath has kicked David’s skinny ass all over the room.


The X-Ceptional and the X-Ceptible
This isn’t to say that X-Plane v6.XX is a bad sim, far from it. Unlike the Microsoft Flight Simulator series of sims, X-Plane uses something called “advancing blade theory”, essentially a low-level desktop form of computational fluid dynamics, that insists that a modeled airplane actually be able to fly. The airfoils that are selected, wetted area, power plant, and even prop type and disk diameter factor into how a selected airplane will perform. There are no pre-packaged “flight models” (FM) per se, just simulated physics. Fancy stuff, this, causing both real and wannabe aeronautical engineering types to squeal with geeky joy.

A V-22 Osprey in forward flight. The tricky part is transitioning to a landing without making the Secretary of Defense say "Oops!"

This is where X-Plane has always ruled. There are few challenges in all of flightsimdom that can match the pure difficulty of hand-flying a space shuttle through re-entry to touchdown or an X-15 launch from underneath a B-52. The atmospheric density and supersonic flight modeling is based on real-world calculations, and is therefore quite a bit more convincing than the lookup table-based FM of the Microsoft Flight Sim series. I have waxed poetic (or something like that) about these white-knuckle flights before, and they are still quite fun. Rotor-wing flight is very well implemented and has been improved over previous releases, as can be experienced in transitioning a V-22 Osprey from conventional forward flight to a rotor-borne hover. It soon becomes apparent why computers have to handle a large part of the workload in the real-life counterpart, and why more than a couple of test Ospreys have tragically re-kitted themselves. It’s a damned hard beast to fly. It’s fascinating and educational to select an outside view when flying a rotorcraft to watch the rotor disk distort and twist with various control inputs.

Even when flying less exotic fare, the advancing blade theory aero model imparts an unsurpassed, almost organic feeling of true flight. The ever-annoying pitch bobble oscillation that occurs when flying an out-of-trim airplane in FS2002 is absent in a similarly configured X-Plane aircraft. Once back in trim, the aircraft in X-Plane fly silky-smooth and convincingly real.

Lift and thrust vector lines protrude from a Raytheon King Air

Another gee-whiz view that is new to v6.XX is the “flight model” view. Vector lines protrude from the lifting, control, and propulsion to illustrate what aerodynamic forces are acting on various parts of the aircraft, thus making the aircraft of X-Plane a sort of virtual lab experiment for Aero 101. Very cool.

That isn’t to say that the advancing-blade aerodynamic modeling is all that and a bag of Doritos. With all this pointy-headed aerodynamic calculation going on, X-Plane still does not model departure from controlled flight. Conventional and accelerated stalls and spins have an artificial feeling compared with the silky realism that is evident when the wind flows merrily unimpeded and still attached over the airfoils. This makes flying aerobatic routines nowhere near challenging enough. The seeming ability to horse an airplane around to structural failure is quite lame, actually. No rumble, no buffet—the airplane just does what you tell it to do until something important snaps off.

The weather effects in X-Plane are quite well done

Part and parcel with this aerial number crunching are the weather effects. Thermals form and make things bumpy, while winds also form slope lift. These are things which are a bane to light plane pilots but are godsends for sailplane jockeys, who can catch a ride to the booming lift via a tow plane (as much a hand-eye coordination workout in this sim as it is in the real world). The clouds are fluffy and beautifully rendered, and when things get ugly, thunderstorms and their associated microbursts are modeled in sphincter-tightening realism. X-Plane can be set up to constantly monitor real-world conditions by downloading METAR information off of the web while you fly.


The In-X-Cusable
OK, so the FM rocks, with subtle improvements over even the previous version's excellence. These changes, however, are very incremental and are hardly worthy of the New and Improved label that changing from v5.XX to v6.XX would seem to bring. Most everything else remains essentially the same as the long-in-the-tooth previous versions. And while this added to the funky, near handmade charm of previous versions, the lack of any progress in these arenas is now just irritating.

Back before FS2002, X-Plane broke some serious ground by being the first civilian sim to integrate air traffic control into the simulation. Even with the grating robotic voices, this feature was very zoot and neato. Unfortunately, Microsoft basically lifted the entire ATC interaction scheme from X-Plane for FS2002. Whether the guys from Redmond stole it, borrowed it, or if this was a case of parallel evolution, who cares. They at least improved upon it by an order of magnitude. Meanwhile, X-Plane chugs along with the same old Atari-voiced controllers, much as if Stephen Hawking is giving you clearance to taxi to the active.

Check out the beautiful rendering of this X-15. Or not.

As always, X-Plane comes with PlaneMaker, a powerful aircraft design tool that allows those with sufficient time on their hands to design aircraft and spacecraft of any persuasion. Unfortunately, most of the downloadable aircraft and indeed the included aircraft have been severely pummeled with an ugly stick. The rendering of aircraft has not been improved one whit since v5.XX, placing the graphical quality of X-Plane back about three years. In an era where the movie-like realism of FS2002 and IL-2 Sturmovik has become the norm, the texture-on-a-wire frame aircraft that make up the majority of steeds in X-Plane look fuzzy, murky and distorted. Come on, Austin— hire some graphics guys, wilya?

A Boeing 777 panel in all of its unimpressive glory as rendered in X-Plane. Yes, This is the whole enchilada.

Unfortunately, this dated, retro look is carried into the cockpits that ship with X-Plane. Your entire front office is usually only available in the forward view, making for a crowded, unconvincing panel. Glancing off to any direction other than twelve o’clock most often reveals a whole lot of nothing, and immersion takes a bullet between the eyes. This lack of real estate would obviously negatively impact the simulation of complex systems. Fortunately, X-Plane doesn't model systems, so there you go.

A B-2 Spirit panel. My Dodge Intrepid has more systems.

Included also is a scenery editor, and boy, does this sim need one. World textures are improved somewhat over previous versions with the four CDs (!) of scenery upgrade disks and web-based Javascript-based local area scenery enhancement program, but X-Plane still rates as the most hideously ugly terrain currently available in a flight simulation. Cities and towns are reduced to patches of color, sometimes with scattered cookie-cutter buildings representing no landmarks in particular underscored by perfect grid pattern streets. Shorelines are indistinct and generic. I could go on, but I’m bored catatonic just thinking about the complete lack of anything navigationally useful or just plain interesting to look at. There are a (very) few third-party downloads with some nice local scenery, but you have to seriously search for it. True, like the panels and airplanes, you can "build your own" but most of us have other bothersome interests like jobs and families. If I wanted to build a planet I would've taken that God job when it came up on Monster.com.

You IFR purists can give me that “scenery means nothing” line all you want, but you know what? When I fly a real plane I look out of the bloody window, if the acrylic in my Wichita rent-a-wreck isn’t too hopelessly scoured. Otherwise, what’s the point? This might even be acceptable if it weren’t for the fact that with only a few local scenery enhancements downloaded, the X-Plane terrain folder on my hard drive is a Winfreyesque 4.2GB. Now what are you calling bloatware?

Stability, or lack of same, is also an issue. For such a mature simulation, X-Plane has more lockups than San Quentin. Not sure what the deal is here, but these frequent hiccups and outright seizures do little to keep me from dumping the whole time-killing enterprise and firing up FS2002.

Los Angeles, or Hamburg, or God Lost His Shoes, Nebraska? With X-Plane, this is all the terrain detail you get.

The X-Ecutioner’s Song
So what happened? When I last reviewed X-Plane (it was version five-point-something), I held that beautiful piece of code to the heavens and sang its praises. It was convincing. It was smooth. It wasn’t the processor-flogging FS2K. You see, with each successive new version, Microsoft simply piled on eye candy, still depending on the old legacy code for a base. Like many of the Redmond Giant’s products, the Flight Simulator series became synonymous with bloatware. Many hardcore civilian flight simmers, including yours truly, turned to X-Plane for realistic flight that would actually run. It seemed that X-Plane we had was turning from cult favorite to true competitor.

But then, an amazing thing happened—Microsoft actually listened to their customer base. With the release of FS2002, a substantially streamlined and enhanced version of its predecessors, they showed that realism and stunning good looks didn’t necessarily have to be mutually exclusive.

Laminar Research, however, had made a deal with retail game distributor Xicat Interactive. X-Plane had finally gone “big time”, with v5.XX being sold in CompUSA and Walmart instead of just being sold directly over the ‘net. As was their practice, Laminar regularly released enhancements on its web site supporting v5.XX, promising more throughout the lifespan of that iteration. The pace of enhancements, however, seemed to slow substantially after the box version hit the shelves.

Then, pretty much concurrent with the release of FS2002, Laminar Research released X-Plane v6.0. True to previously stated policy, support for v5.XX ceased on release of the newest version. Now, if you wanted new enhancements, you had to log into http://www.x-plane.com and pony up anywhere from $79 to $100 for this New and Improved version. All of this would seem to be just another beautiful story of capitalism if it weren’t for the nagging (and sometimes overpowering) sense that v6.XX is nothing more than another incremental patch on the boxed v5-vintage X-Plane. I salute Austin for what he's done with X-Plane. I truly do. But to ask his faithful followers to cough up this kind of money for something that's gone so horribly stagnant is just wrong. Is this a result of the inevitably slow pace of development with a program that is more labor of love than a product? Is this an attempt to ditch a deal gone bad with a distributor, or is it a blatant money grab?

I have no idea what the answer is, but one thing is certain: that is a lot of money to pay for three-year-old technology. If you’ve this kind of money burning a hole in your pocket for a convincing civilian flight sim, buy Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 Professional.

Forget about supporting your maverick, non-corporate sim developer. How about supporting progress?



Review System
  • CPU: 1.7GHz P4
  • RAM: 384MB RDRAM
  • Video: GeForce3 64MB w/ Detonator XP drivers
  • OS: WinMe
  • Controllers:
    • CH Products Flight Sim Yoke USB
    • Fighterstick USB
    • Pro Throttle USB
    • Pro Pedals USB HOTAS
    • GoFlight GF-AC cockpit controller


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