X-Plane 10: Regional Edition - North America

The Good
X-Plane was designed by a pilot for fellow aviation enthusiasts, and it shows. The physics engine that simulates flight is arguably the most advanced available for personal computers. X-Plane's flight engine employs a technology known as "blade element theory" which boasts the ability to accurately simulate anything that flies. It's not just for armchair pilots. It's also a tool for engineers who design aircraft. The manual boasts that X-Plane is used by defense contractors, air forces, aircraft manufacturers and even space agencies for concept design and flight testing as well as for flight training.

X-Plane is available as a retail version or as a commercial version. The FAA (U.S. Federal Aviation Administration) has certified the commercial version for use in logging hours towards flight experience and ratings. There is almost no difference between the retail and commercial versions of the software; the only differences are the hardware on which the two versions run and the commercial version comes with custom aircraft versions with larger instrument panels that work with hardware radios like those found in physical cockpits. Also, the commercial version lacks some of the "entertainment" features such as space flight. All this means that X-Plane is much more than just a game. It's a serious flight simulator. This review will, of course, focus on the retail version of X-Plane 10.

There are two retail versions of X-Plane available; the Regional: North America version ships on a single DVD and includes scenery covering most of the continental United States. The Global version includes scenery covering the entire world, spanning from 74 degrees North to 60 degrees South latitude and it ships on ... hold on to your hard disks ... eight (count 'em!) 8 DVD-ROM discs! If you purchased the Regional: North America version and later decide that you'd like the scenery for the rest of the world, you can purchase a Global Upgrade, which is what I did. However, there is a caveat here that I will get to later.

The scenery features exquisite attention to fine details. Airport runways and taxiways feature 3D modeled approach, runway and taxiway lights. Roads and expressways are fully modelled with 3D traffic, on and off ramps and overpasses and underpasses and even 3D streetlights along both sides. Flying over a busy cloverleaf at low altitude is an absolutely stunning experience.

Land classes in general are nicely modeled and rendered. Rivers meander across the terrain, water ripples and reflects the sky, shorelines have a nicely organic, non-geometrical appearance and mountains and valleys feature detailed rocky or forested textures and cast pleasing shadows and highlights. Trees are also individually rendered although, at very low altitude, it becomes apparent that they are two-dimensional.

Shadows can be realistically rendered, both on the world scenery and on the surfaces of the aircraft itself. Light sources dynamically light up their surroundings. Aircraft spotlights throw bright halos on the ground in front of the aircraft. Fly just below the clouds during a thunderstorm and every lightning bolt dynamically lights up your aircraft and the clouds around it. At night, the effect is stunning!

Speaking of thunderstorms, all types of weather are realistically modeled. You can set the weather to your liking or the sim can approximate real world weather at your current location.

Aircraft are lovingly rendered. X-Plane ships with a nice variety of aircraft, including small civilian aircraft such as the venerable Cessna 172SP, or Cirrus theJet (a personal single-engine jet aircraft), airliners such as the Boeing 747, large military transports such as the C-130 Hercules, fighters such as the F-4 Phantom or the F-22 Raptor, large bombers such as the Boeing B-52 Flying Fortress or the Rockwell B-1B and also helicopters and a glider, to name but a few. All aircraft are rendered in great detail and most feature both 2D and 3D cockpits and instrument panels. Each also features its own unique engine sounds (except for the glider - ha-ha). Military aircraft can even fire guns and launch other weapons.

X-Plane's performance is much more consistent and stable than I've seen in other home flight simulators. With all the graphical details cranked up, X-Plane can bring all but the most high-end GPU's to a crawl. However, once you've arrived at settings that give you a decent frame rate, the rendered flow stays fairly consistent. Of course, flying in more densely populated regions will bring down the frame rate, just as flying in sparsely populated areas will increase it, but the transitions seem much more gradual and less choppy than in other flight simulators.

To achieve that ideal balance between eye candy and performance, you're given control over a wide variety of settings such as texture resolution, screen resolution, the number of trees, buildings and roads to draw, the number of cars to render on the roads, the distance at which to render details, the complexity of water reflections, the complexity of shadow rendering, the number of "puffs" to draw on clouds and a host of others.

For the serious student, the PC can be networked with a "master machine" controlled by an instructor who can remotely send instructions, monitor the pilot's flight set weather conditions and even cause aircraft system failures for the student pilot to deal with.

For the aviation engineer, a host of technical data can be displayed including speeds, thrust vectors, drag, lift, ground effects, and much more.

X-Plane 10 comes with an aircraft editor and an airfoil editor which, combined, can be used to create any aircraft you wish for the simulation. A scenery editor is not included, but one can be download for free.

The Bad
What with 8 DVD-ROMs worth of scenery, you'd think that X-Plane's virtual world would be packed with cities, buildings and famous landmarks, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong! X-Plane's world scenery is oddly sparsely populated, at least out of the box. The first thing that jumps out at you is that major land-marks such as well-known buildings, are almost completely absent. No Sears Tower or John Hancock Center are to be found in Chicago. No Empire State Building or Chrysler building in Manhattan. No CN Tower in Toronto or Tour d'Eiffel in Paris. Seattle sports its famous Space Needle. As far as I've been able to determine, that's the only well-known building to be found in the default scenery.

In X-Plane's defence, its philosophy for modeling scenery is very different from that of its competition. Rather than attempting to accurately model real-world cities by placing real-world landmarks in them, X-Plane instead attempts to generate what its developers refer to as "plausible" scenery. This means that, if you're over a city, X-Plane will generate buildings and roads that look believable, in a general sense, given the size of the city. However none of it is based on what's in the real world. While I can appreciate the thinking behind this approach, it's still disconcerting to fly over San Francisco and not see any Coit Tower or Transamerica Pyramid. Also, while X-Plane does generate roads and houses within city limits, the spaces between them remains largely green. The effect is that even populous metropolises, such as Manhattan for example, look like farm or forest land with an unusually large numbers of houses and roads running through it rather than the concrete jungles that they are. In this reviewer's opinion, X-Plane's "plausible" scenery approach doesn't quite work; at least not in urban areas.

The airports are worse. Oh, they're correctly located and the runway and taxiway layouts seem reasonably accurate (to my layman's eye, at least) but, with only one or two exceptions, there are no building structures of any kind. No terminals, no hangars, no control towers. Airports are basically runways interlinked with taxiways but no sheltering structures of any kind. When I first noticed this, I seriously thought that something had gone wrong with the installation of the sim. I had to do some Googling before I discovered that, apparently, airports aren't "supposed" to include any structures. For a sim that pays such meticulous attention to detail in other areas, this just blew my mind!

The sparse scenery can be corrected as there are plentiful add-ons, both freeware and payware, that add buildings to airports and familiar landmarks and structures to cities, but you have to find them and install them yourself.

One other note; you cannot collide with scenery objects such as buildings, elevated roadways or even trees. Hit one of these and you'll fly or taxi right through them. You can crash into the ground (including hills and mountains) but you can't crash into objects on the ground.

There are also no seasonal textures. It snows in the wintertime, but apparently that snow never accumulates on the ground. Roads remain bare and forests and farmland remain as green as if it were mid July all year round. Neither do trees ever change color.

ATC is simulated, but the voices and variety of radio chatter are as sparse as are the scenery landmarks. There are only two voices; a male voice for the tower (all towers) and a female voice for the pilot (all pilots) including yourself (the person flying the sim). This makes it sometimes hard to distinguish who it is you're hearing. Further, nomenclature is very basic. Airports identify themselves only by their ICAO designations, not by name. It's "Kilo Oscar Romeo Delta", not "O'Hare'. The controller who's speaking (or whom you're calling) is equally generic. It's either 'Tower' or 'Center', never 'Ground', 'Approach' or even just 'Traffic'. Finally, the purpose of the communication is often left unstated. Contact the tower for taxi clearance, for example, and all you'll hear is, "Tower, November One Seven Two Sierra Papa". As opposed to "Tower, November One Seven Two Sierra Papa with Foxtrot, ready to taxi". Whenever the pilot voice stops after identifying itself in this manner, I half expect the tower to reply with something like "Yes, what can I do for you?"

I mentioned earlier that there is a caveat if you want to upgrade from the Regional: North America version to the Global Edition, as I did. While the upgrade did, technically, add the entire world scenery to my simulation, if I switch my location from the North American continent to Europe or Asia, or back the other way, I suddenly get an error message telling me there is no scenery for the region that I've switched to. The only way to get the scenery back is to exit the sim and re-install the scenery upgrade. This is not as intrusive as it may sound, because I don't have to re-insert all 8 DVD's. I only have to re-insert the first DVD after which the Installer scans my scenery and suddenly "remembers" that it's already all there. After that, I'm fine until I change continents again. Still, the process takes several minutes and it's extremely irritating to have to pull out my upgrade DVD's and re-install the scenery every time I change continents. I can only assume that this is a bug. I've reported it to Laminar Research (X-Plane's developers) but I've received no feedback at all. Demerit points for support!

Although there is other computer-controlled (A.I.) air traffic, it seems much sparser than in other sims. Further, like the buildings and trees that populate the scenery, you can fly or taxi right through A.I. controlled aircraft and no collision is ever detected.

The Bottom Line
The design philosophy behind X-Plane appears to have been to focus on aircraft and flight. Scenery is a secondary consideration; almost an afterthought. The inability to collide with objects and A.I. traffic also betrays a design philosophy that admonishes "You're here to fly, not to look at a lot of pretty buildings or crash into them!"

Like many others, I was weaned on Microsoft's Flight Simulator series and I've been a long time fan of that franchise. I only decided to try X-Plane after Microsoft decided to stop developing Flight Simulator. Because I wanted to evaluate X-Plane on its own merits, I've purposely avoided comparing it with the latest version of Microsoft's simulator (Flight Simulator X). That having been said, I'm sure there are other long-time MS Flight Simulator aficionados like myself who may be wondering whether or not to try X-Plane now that the Microsoft franchise has reached its end.

Having now tried X-Plane for several months, I have to admit that there are things about FSX that I sometimes miss, especially the real-world scenery and the varied and robust ATC chatter. FSX remains installed on my PC and I still fire it up on occasion; yet not as much as I used to, and not as often as X-Plane.

For all of its shortcomings, X-Plane is a robust flight simulation. The ability to add on custom scenery helps to make up for the shortcomings of the default scenery. X-Plane still has a lot of unrealized potential. What it does well, it does exceedingly well. Unfortunately, this makes its weaknesses that much more glaring. For me, it's sort of a love/hate relationship.

It's fitting that X-Plane was originally designed for Linux, because its design reflects some of the same bare-bones, do-it-yourself philosophy that seem to underpin the Linux operating system itself. You're given the basics, and what's there works well. You can add on, embellish and customize to your heart's content, but that's up to you.

If you're a reasonably hard-core aviation enthusiast who's more interested in simulating the experience of flying than in entertainment, and if you don't mind spending some time (and possibly money) tweaking and installing add-ons, then you'll like X-Plane. Otherwise, you'd better stick with Microsoft's FSX. Mind you, X-Plane has the advantage that development and support continue and it will continue to evolve.