It seems Austin Meyer has had a busy summer. As you may know, I’m big fan of his flight simulator, x-plane. About three months ago it was upgraded from 8.30 to 8.40. The 0.10 version increment represented a huge list of new and improved features and he managed to throw in some nice performance enhancements as well. The upcoming 8.50 release has a changelist that is even more impressive.
Check it out here: http://x-plane.com/beta.html. The long list includes major improvements to the scenery rendering, simulation accuracy of the plane on the runway, simulation accuracy of other planes in the air (down to simulating the turbulance they cause in the atmosfere) and many minor improvements. The major scenery improvements I’ve been reading about on the scenery blog are just a footnote in this list. Just reading it will take quite some time. Imagine implementing all of that in three months! Anyway, I’m looking forward to trying out the new stuff. Particularly the visual enhancements and formation flying look like they could be fun.