Hello there!
Without customers and fans like you, X-Plane wouldn’t exist, so this month we’re featuring a few of your own words from our User Stories collection. We also cover another upcoming 10.40 feature and a Russian airliner you can download.
In Your Own Words
Last time we talked about anonymous data collection–one of the new ways we’ll be hearing our customers’ voices. Every so often though, we get an email from someone who tells us more about their specific experiences. From retirees to pilots to teachers, we love hearing their stories.
- James (JJ) Brennan started in the Navy’s NAVCAD program and then flew for United Airlines for almost 30 years. He warned us, “Don’t tell United that anyone can now fly the 747 by using X-Plane!”
- Professor Tom Gielda uses X-Plane in an aerospace engineering capstone project. He believes “X-Plane is the perfect learning tool for the engineers of today and tomorrow.”
- Bruce Erwin never realized his dream of becoming a licensed pilot, but instead uses X-Plane almost every day because “when flying X-Plane our other world disappears.”
These are just a few of the stories we’ve collected. Check out all of them on our User Stories page, or drop us a line and tell us yours!
Read all user storiesTips and Tricks
We’re continuing our closer examination of new features of the upcoming X-Plane 10.40 release with the five new rendering preset buttons: minimum, low, medium, high, and extreme.
Each preset is hand-built to try to make good settings trade-offs; instead of having to repeatedly tweak individual settings, you can simply try 2 or 3 presets based on your hardware. Once 10.40 is released, open the Rendering Options screen, then, if you have a very new system, try “high” and “extreme.” If your system is really old, try “low” and then go on to “minimum” or “medium.” Thanks to our new data collection, we’ll measure the performance of specific presets on real machines so we can dial in good compromises in terms of speed and quality.
We hope these presets will provide a better user experience, less time spent tuning X-Plane, and be a good stepping stone toward a better UI. If you’d like to read more about this feature, check out the developer blog article “Rendering Setting Presets.”
Featured Freeware
Round out your collection of widebody airliners with this Ilyushin-Il-96–400 from Ramzess Aviation. This Russian-manufactured bird is a four-engine long-haul aircraft that competes with the Boeing 777 and Airbus A340. This version features an extremely detailed 3D cockpit, numerous animations, and high resolution textures. Check out all the specs and screenshots, then download it from X-Plane.org. 
Happy flying!
—The X-Plane Team
