May 2016 – City scenery will be better than ever

Hello there!

There are a lot of exciting things going on at X-Plane and in the community, and we’ve got your monthly bulletin about the news and products that make X-Plane great. Check out new scenery buildings, at-home pilot training, and a modern airliner for your collection.

Cities Get a Facelift

X-Plane 10’s automatically generated scenery (“autogen”) is unique among simulators. It uses the road grid and builds up scenery around it instead of randomly arranging static scenery tiles. The 10.50 update will add a lot of new buildings, including tall sky scrapers, to this system. FAA height data encoded in the underlying scenery will be used to make the buildings roughly match real-world heights. Many of the buildings will also include night lighting textures, so large U.S. cities will look better than ever before at any time, day or night.

Check out more screenshots on the X-Plane site.

Tips and Tricks

Finding the balance between having a lot of scenery detail while keeping your frame rate up is a source of confusion for many X-Plane simmers. Here are some tips on how to get a lot of buildings while maintaining a decent frame rate.

1. Don’t overload VRAM. Turn texture resolution way down, then continue with the other steps.
2. Start with the graphics card underloaded – small window, no clouds, low FSAA. You can turn those up afterwards. (If the graphics card is bogged down you can’t even see what you are doing.)
3. Turn off AI aircraft and turn the cars way, way down as these settings chew up CPU. If you use a payware aircraft that eats CPU (and many of them do), keep it so you can see what your “real” performance will be; saving 10 fps by throwing out the aircraft isn’t great if you actually want to fly it.
4. Turn down settings that amplify the cost of autogen, such as shadows and water reflection. This might be the most important step; when those settings go up, every building is drawn for shadows and reflections, not just those in the scene, making the scenery many times more expensive. Try shadows on the aircraft in 3-d and the second lowest reflection setting.
5. Finally, increase texture resolution until frame rate suffers, then turn it down one notch. Remember to restart each time to get accurate texture use.

Featured Add Ons

Payware

An airplane is an inefficient classroom– it’s noisy, complicated, overwhelming, and expensive. Save time and money by training at home to be a private pilot with X-Plane & the Gleim X-Plane Flight Training Course.

The course includes 27 lessons, several hours of detailed training videos, and a flight profiler that monitors everything you do in X-Plane and gives you feedback as you go. Harness the power of technology to start your pilot training with X-Plane and Gleim!

Freeware

Happy flying!

— The X-Plane Team