However, realistically, Laminar cannot compete with the kind of resources that MSFS needs to power their system anyways. It’s this autogen method that Laminar will be sticking with for the next generation although it looks like they intend to evolve it significantly.Īs a side note, Austin did spend some time lamenting about Flight Simulator’s “melted apocalypse.” While MSFS scenery is not perfect, I feel like the 20 minutes of time he admitted to having spent with the new sim is not sufficient to get a good sense of the power of that system. Meanwhile, the default scenery in the sim uses data to populate areas with some basic textures and objects. This unfortunately can take up hundreds of gigabytes.
X-Plane 11 is capable of supporting ortho imagery although traditionally people have “made it themselves” or downloaded scenery packages such as the TrueEarth series from Orbx.
This relies on Bing Maps plus BlackShark AI to populate the world.
For those who may not know, MSFS streams high resolution orthographic imagery to your PC via the internet much as you would your favourite show on Netflix or Disney+.
The issue of scenery and terrain also came up and of course everyone wants to know how Laminar intends to compete with Microsoft Flight Simulator in this area. He did make a note of it so hopefully we see this evolve before release. I don’t get those with default X-Plane right now and I’d like to very much. That leads to some interesting real world effects, particularly when flying in the mountains. Here, Microsoft Flight Simulator, appears way ahead doing detailed modeling of how wind interacts with terrain and buildings. The team has also worked to make weather transitions smoother than the current more jarring and rather sudden transitions in X-Plane 11.Īustin did seem more resistant to upgrades to things like the wind model. This is a must have feature to me and I hope that it will put X-Plane at least on par with the latest in cloud technology that we’ve seen from Microsoft Flight Simulator and DCS World. The issue of graphics including clouds and landscapes came up during the presentation and we learned some interesting things there too.įirst, volumetric clouds are coming to X-Plane by default (finally!) and Laminar will be showing those off sometime soon. Will they be charging their usual $60 price or some sort of subscription or both? The visuals Although Austin did say a few times that the next generation pricing model hadn’t been announced yet, it is clear that this is X-Plane 12 in all but name at this point.Īpparently, by the time of FSExpo in September, the team will be ready to talk about the name and price. It seems that Laminar is keeping their plans for the next generation close to their chest.
There’s no telling what features may break or need to be tweaked in order to make them work in the new sim but I have high hopes that dedicated developers like Thranda, Aerobask, and VSkyLabs just to name a few will be able to quickly update and port their aircraft to the new sim. Next up, another major key point was the news that X-Plane 11 content (all of those third party aircraft for example) should work just fine in the new sim.
Austin made a somewhat sarcastic remark about a roughly $60 price tag every five years suggests to me that X-Plane 11’s life is coming to an end. Right from the start, it’s become clear that what Laminar has been previewing has been all about the next generation of the sim. Getting an overview of the next generation The Airbus A330 is one of the confirmed aircraft in the “next generation” suite. It was an interesting presentation and while it doesn’t fully let the cat out of the bag I think we can read closely into what they have planned. He talked quite a bit about the next generation of X-Plane and what their team has been busy doing. Last week, Austin Meyer, the founder of X-Plane, did a webinar with the Flight Sim Association from the Oshkosh Air Show.