Any experience of X-plane

[wollo]

Any of you have any experience of X-plane from a home cockpit point of view? Is it easy to interface with hardware etc?
I believe running panels across a network is now possible. I don't know how sophisticated that feature is though.

[s4sha]

Hi Wollo - X-Plane is certainly an option for a cockpit-- I am building a C-172 using X-Plane. It is super-easy to network for multiple views, accepts tons of inputs, so you could cannibalize some joysticks for the potentiometers, buttons and use them for your controls, and use a keyboard encoder for switches if you want (look at the key map file in your X-Plane folder).

SimKits (www.simkits.com) makes servo-driven instruments that are currently driven by Microsoft Flight Sim, but I would expect a, X-Plane interface very soon. Or you can just have a monitor for your instrument view. The views are totally customizable for instrument repositioning, resizing, etc.

Best of Luck!

S4sha

[wollo]

thanks S4sha, I'm starting to play around a little now. I'll let you know how it goes.

Bill

[Paul G]

A friend and I bought X-Plane recently. My friend has a PhD in Computer Science and it took him over a whole weekend to install it and get it running. Although it looks good in places (night flying is spectacular, and the landing light effect is unbelievable), the Air Traffic Control is absolutely abysmal. Adding a joystick is, also, hardly plug and play. More like plug and scratch your head for 10 hours figuring it out. X-Plane is a good example of software designed by developers. It could really benefit from the skills of a usability expert, but then I don't think it's aimed at the mass market, and the developers have kept it personal.

[drinniol]

A friend and I bought X-Plane recently. My friend has a PhD in Computer Science and it took him over a whole weekend to install it and get it running. Although it looks good in places (night flying is spectacular, and the landing light effect is unbelievable), the Air Traffic Control is absolutely abysmal. Adding a joystick is, also, hardly plug and play. More like plug and scratch your head for 10 hours figuring it out. X-Plane is a good example of software designed by developers. It could really benefit from the skills of a usability expert, but then I don't think it's aimed at the mass market, and the developers have kept it personal.

That's the long and short of it, really. The bulk of the program is written by one fellow. What it lacks in user-friendliness it makes up for in depth; any aircraft imaginable can be created and flown in a far more realistic simulation than what MSFS has to offer. It ships with half a dozen DVDs of world terrain, however as most of the aircraft are community-built, it can be pretty hit-and-miss. X-Plane has the capability to achieve detail very close to MSFS, however. Just take a look at these babies.

Running it on a Mac, I've not encountered joystick nor installation problems. Just a matter of plugging it in and defining which button does what, installation just putting the disk in the drive. As with all software, mileage may vary