This package covers close to 85% of the Earth's surface. Additionally, Laminar Research has released a 7 DVD "Global Scenery Package" containing imagery of a much higher quality than the default information. Map imagery and aircraft paint can be created and modified with any paint program capable of manipulating PNG images. Users can also subscribe to a mailing list, receiving regular updates of the airport and navaid database. In fact, much of the world's detail, including detail in airports, such as ramps, buildings, and taxiways, is provided by the end-users. Once built, editing landscape elevation and 3D object placement is easily accomplished with the scenery editor. While no tool is provided to edit the 3D mesh objects, there are tutorials for using the third party 3D modeler AC3D. The maps and scenery are also fully editable. Companies like Scaled Composites have used this tool in order to use X-Plane as a rendering engine for their in-house simulators.
Through a relatively simple interface, third party developers can control the simulator and extract data regarding the simulation state. X-Plane is also capable of communicating with other applications via UDP. Scaled Composites, for example, used the X-Plane rendering engine on top of their own simulator while designing and testing SpaceShipOne. Other work has been done in the area of improving X-Plane's flight model and even replacing entire facets of X-Plane's operation. One such feature is the Xsquawkbox plugin, which allows X-Plane users to fly on a worldwide shared air traffic control simulation network. Through the plugin interface, users can create external modules that extend the X-Plane interface, flight model, or create new features. X-Plane also contributed to the design of the Atlantica blended wing body aircraft. The CarterCopter uses X-Plane for flight training and research. Since designing an aircraft is relatively simple and the flight model can help predict performance of real-world aircraft, several aircraft companies use X-Plane in their design process. This has created an active community of users who use the simulator for a variety of purposes.
Users are encouraged to design their own aircraft, and design software is included with the program. However, as the flight model is refined, the simulator can better resemble real-world performance (as well as the aircraft's quirks and design flaws.) Famous real world aircraft modeled in X-Plane include the V-22 Osprey, the Harrier Jump Jet, the NASA Space Shuttle, and Scaled Composites SpaceShipOne.īlade element theory does have its shortcomings, as it can sometimes be difficult to design an aircraft that performs precisely like the real-world aircraft. X-Plane is capable of modeling fairly complex aircraft designs, including helicopters, rockets, rotor craft and tilt-rotor craft. This approach allows users to design aircraft on their computer quickly and easily, as the simulator engine will show immediately how an aircraft with a particular design might perform in the real world. When this process is applied to each component, the simulated aircraft will fly virtually like its real counterpart does. With Blade-element theory, a wing, for example, may be made up of many sections (1 to 4 is typical), and each section is further divided into as many as 10 separate sections, then the lift and drag of each section is calculated, and the resulting effect is applied to the whole aircraft. Blade-element theory and other computational aerodynamic models can be used to compute aerodynamic forces in real time or to pre-compute aerodynamic forces of a new design for later use in a traditional lookup table type of simulator. It is a way of modeling the forces and moments on an aircraft by individually evaluating the parts that constitute it. These simulators do a good job of simulating the flight characteristics of the aircraft they were designed to simulate (those with previously-known aerodynamic data), but are not useful in design work, and do not predict the performance of aircraft when the actual figures are not available.īlade-element theory is one method of improving on this. Traditionally, flight simulators try to emulate the real-world performance of an aircraft by using lookup tables to find previously-known aerodynamic forces such as lift or drag, which vary with flight condition. X-Plane differentiates itself by implementing an aerodynamic model known as blade element theory.