X-Plane 10.04 Beta 2 - Ultra-realistic flight simulator.. (Updater)

X-Plane 10.04 Beta 2 - Ultra-realistic flight simulator.. (Updater): "

X-Plane is the world's most comprehensive, powerful flight simulator, and has the most realistic flight model available for personal computers.

Welcome to the world of props, jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well as gliders, helicopters and VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier.

X-Plane comes with subsonic and supersonic flight dynamics, sporting aircraft from the Bell 206 Jet-Ranger helicopter and Cessna 172 light plane to the supersonic SR-71 and Space Shuttle. X-Plane comes with 35 aircraft spanning the aviation industry (and history), and several thousand more are freely downloadable from the internet. (See www.X-Plane.org as a good place to start).

X-Plane scenery is world-wide, with scenery for the entire planet Earth between 74 degrees north to 60 degrees south latitude. We also have MARS scenery! (thanks to the Mars Orbiting Laser Altimeter, which mapped that planet's elevation). On Earth, you can land at any of over 33,000 airports, as well as test your mettle on aircraft carriers, helipads on building tops, frigates that pitch and roll in the waves, and oil rigs.

Weather is variable from clear skies and high visibility to thunderstorms with controllable wind, wind shear, turbulence, and microbursts! Rain, snow and clouds are available for an instrument flying challenge, and thermals are available for the gliders! Real weather conditions can be downloaded from the internet, allowing you to fly in the actual weather that currently exists at the location of flight!

X-Plane also has detailed failure-modeling, with multitudes of systems that can be failed manually or randomly, when you least expect it! You can fail instruments, engines, flight controls, landing gear, or dozens of other systems at any moment.

While X-Plane is the world's most COMPREHENSIVE flight sim, your purchase also comes with Plane-Maker (to create your own airplanes) Airfoil-Maker (allowing users to create airfoil performance profiles), and Weather Briefer (to get a weather briefing before the flight if you use real weather conditions downloaded from the internet).

X-Plane is also extremely customizable, allowing you to easily create textures, sounds, and instrument panels for your own airplanes that you design or the planes that come with the sim.

X-Plane's accuracy (in flight model), scope (in aircraft and terrain coverage), versatility (in aircraft type and weather conditions), add-on programs (in aircraft and scenery editors), customizability, downloadable aircraft, and downloadable scenery makes it the ULTIMATE flight simulation experience for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux platforms.

BE SURE TO TURN ON THE >BETA< option in the installer before you run it to get the beta!

The demo contains a limited scenery area to keep the download size reasonable. It will run for 10 minutes before it begins to ignore the user's input, at which point the simulator must be restarted to fly more.

Version 10.04 Beta 2:

• All buttons on the FMS's should work properly even if there are two different FMS's in the airplane.
• Wind-shear and turbulence model refined a little more to be more complex in it's randomness, and not always quite so strong in what are requested to be moderate conditions, and to change in a reasonable way with altitude. This should help improve wind and turbulence modeling, especially with Real-Weather turned on.
• X-15 drop and Space-Shuttle-carry missions should work properly now.
• Right-mouse drag to look around in 3-D cockpit command-look view, and mouse scroll wheel zooms. This is a pretty convenient way to look around the 3-D cockpits. (This works in "command" look mode, not mouse look mode! So when you are not right-mouse dragging, the view stays still and you can manipulate the 3-d panel.)
• Track-IR functions in ALL 3-d cockpit views now... It has WORKED for years, but is now easier to find since it engages in ALL 3-d cockpit views, not just one.
• Cool new feature for QuickTime movies: Movie quality! Set it high or low depending on how good you want it to look... and how much disk space you want to burn!
• External visuals should sync-up faster in the multi-machine setups, which should save some time in real flight-training scenarios.
• Landing lights, spotlights, and spotlight aiming-angles all go from master machine to external visuals now.
• Plane-Maker system screen: Option to auto-load with current values, or not, airspeed, vertical speed, and altitude when a new autopilot mode is engaged.
• Visibility tuned to change with altitude in a more accurate way to follow the reported weather more closely.
• AI planes should be better about holding desired altitude now, resulting in less annoyed air traffic controllers.
• Fixed: incorrect warnings about missing scenery
• Fixed (partly): the ocean shading should have fewer sharp lines on it. Far view shading of the ocean is still a work in progress...more color tuning in a future beta.
• Fixed: wing flex now works - X-Plane was incorrectly zeroing out wing-flex on some v10 planes.
• Fixed: sharp turns in taxiway lines now render correctly at KSEA and other airports.
• Fixed: right button on Linux is now the "right" button, not the scroll wheel itself.
• Fixed: plugins won't crash if they try to read the weather from XPluginStart

Facades:

• Roof behaviors now match v9 for legacy facades
• A bunch of new features to control the exact appearance of facade-attached objects - docs coming soon!
• New facade features: attached objects on facades appear and disappear with "objects" rendering setting for better performance.

• Mac OS X 10.5 or later
• a 2 GHz, dual-core CPU
• 2 GB of RAM
• a DirectX 9-capable video card with 128 MB of on-board, dedicated video RAM (VRAM). See here for compatibility and graphics cards.

Download Now

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(Via MacUpdate - Mac OS X.)