X-Plane 12 Flight Model Update – Supersonic Transition, Delta Wings and Mass
developer.x-plane.com
developer.x-plane.com
For those who want to simply have fun flying (in something of a combat setting) there is also Far Cry 5 or 6 - two beautiful games I can’t recommend enough.
Yes, some extremely detailed aircraft have been released, but the underlying simulation is still lacking realism in some key areas. Many aircraft just "feel wrong" when flown. But it's a ton of fun, and the nice visuals really make it a joy to fly places. I find I spend a lot of time in MSFS these days, even though I still prefer X-Plane for the overall realism.
MSFS gets the most basic parts of the flight model and controls fundamentally wrong.
(source: I have made multiple payware aircraft for both X-Plane and MSFS)
Each "controller" be it your mouse, a joystick, flight yoke, game controller, etc, all have a different amount of available deflection on the physical device, and that has to be translated into deflection in-game.
Take a flight yoke for example - you might have say 120 degrees of rotation available physically on the device, but the actual aircraft has 180 degrees. This means the sim-pilot doesn't have a connection with what is happening in the real-world vs what is happening in-sim, making minute changes a lot more challenging.
It's even worse for things like joysticks that have a very low available deflection already. Moving the stick a few mm's could result in an uncontrolled roll in-sim.
To help mitigate this, most sims offer a scalable conversion factor for controller input, but it's never perfect.
> In real life, there'd be feedback on the flight stick or yoke due to all the air hitting the control surface
Also, not all aircraft are direct linkage anymore, and most (all) commercial airline aircraft (your Boeing 737, 787, 777, Airbus A320, etc) will either have simulated feedback or no feedback.
Not that one :)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_737_MAX#Structural_and_...
It's possible MSFS had to do it wrong to make it work on an Xbox controller; you have a lot less fine control than with a yoke or joystick.
100% agree, I enjoy the systems simulation in X-Plane, but I also want a DCS style native multiplayer so I can do formation
Now when we have some free overlapping time and the time zones are kind to us (He's in Europe), we hop into VTOL-VR together and it's just fantastic. Can actually wave at each other from our cockpits while we're on different continents and with the new helicopter DLC we can pilot/gunner in the same craft with each other.
The dynamic campaign was so cool, one time I was taxiing, preparing to take off for some routine mission when a bunch of Patriot SAM missiles nearby start firing off into the horizon. The game was simulating an actual, unplanned, attack 30 miles away and nearby air defense was responding. It was none of my concern though, it wasn't part of my mission, at least not until I got into the air.
I really like the idea of a flight simulator that tries to enable realistic things to happen, like stalling or being able to loft missiles, etc. I don't care as much about having the airplanes handle like real airplanes. I have a keyboard, mouse, and cheap joystick, I'm not going to get a realistic flight experience out of these, period, and spending 80% of the development effort on getting the airplanes to feel like their real counterparts isn't important to me.
That said, I totally agree with the others that this is an outstanding product and a bargain at its price. My griping comes from a place of love as someone who has been using xplane for over 10 years.
X-Plane prioritizes correctness and details above all else - whereas something like Microsoft Flight Simulator prioritizes eye candy and fun.
Want to fly to Area 51, attempt to land a 747 on an aircraft carrier, fly above the pyramids of Egypt, fly between buildings and perform aerobatics - choose MS Flight Simulator.
Want to practice patterns, procedures, participate in a live online ATC simulated community, familiarize yourself with new territory or airstrips, learn a new aircraft - choose X-Plane.
That's not to say you can't use X-Plane for fun, it just means doing things like aerobatics might not come easy due to the focus on realism.
Both are excellent simulators in their own right - just need to find the one you prefer. I personally fly X-Plane 11, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Prepar3D (based off older MS Flight Simulator codebase). Each has pros and cons.
Looks to me like MSFS is the way to go for someone who wants planes with the same "granturismo" approach.
When flying a plane in real life, you don’t do it with a keyboard. It seems odd to build a simulator prioritizing that unrealistic use-case.
A quality HOTAS setup can be had for under $400 which gets you much closer to the real-world experience that X-Plane is trying to create.
They sell a (much more expensive) version that is FAA-certified for training.
It's not even that much more expensive, the Pro edition is 750.
Though unless you also have real sim hardware it's a completely useless expense as aside from FAA cert validators the features are mostly for multi-projector systems (image warping, edge blending).
What does it matter? I play city simulation games, and want them to be realistic, because I find the realism fun. Not because I plan on building my own city.
Wanting a realistic flight simulator that gives the real sensation of flying does not mean you must then become a pilot.
That's not Laminar's goal, and that's not the market they're in. You can see that in the post, it's by the founder of Laminar. It's pages upon pages of gushing over flight modelling.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DUdKMKeXUAAjrFO?format=jpg&name=...
I want the leisure time my kids and I spend on X-Plane to count towards my/their overall ability to fly a small plane someday (a lifelong dream), but (a) I don't have room for flight gear -- there's barely space for my tiny home office desk, and (b) I can't even justify spending $100 right now for a flight yoke amid other financial obligations (it was a splurge to spend $60 for X-Plane 11).
Honestly, I probably would have bought Microsoft's 2020 FS instead if it ran on macOS.
So, very often I wind up flying with just my cheap Logitech joystick, but even an XBox controller would be a huge step up from mouse/keyboard only.
Having programmable buttons available at your fingertips without having to take your eyes off screen and look for a button really adds to the immersion in my opinion.
But something constructive: Consider enrolling them in the Young Eagles (https://www.eaa.org/eaa/youth/free-ye-flights) if you haven't already.
I can take off and land a small plane in a simulator without looking at the instruments at all (except maybe a couple glances at the air speed indicator as I set up for landing), and I've never flown in a real small plane.
I always thought visual flying was a crutch and instrument flying is the "real thing" that I know I can't do.
The kind of flying you're doing (basically) is called VFR, for visual flight rules. You keep an eye on your instruments of course but a lot of the flying is getting done just by looking out the window.
While a trained pilot certainty CAN fly on instruments alone (which is a separate certification on top of your regular license), no sane pilot would choose to ignore what is happening outside if visibility is decent. GOOD pilots like to have all the information they can, at all times.
These days it's common for PPL student pilots to undergo a little training under simulated IMC, but inadvertent VFR flight into IMC is an emergency condition and, if I understand correctly, is the top cause of fatal VFR aviation accidents.
There is also the classroom portion, which for an ultralight should be under CAD $1,000.
people using it for other purposes may be more in number, but focusing the product on their use case would dilute the intended product, and they don't actually pay the pro pricing
it's not optimizing for an aspirational use case, the product is for this very niche use case. letting other people use it for fun is just a bonus.
If you want a flight sim that maximizes fun, there are other options.
Based on my anecdotal observations of people I know IRL who use X-Plane? 100%.
Can you recommend anything?
The stick is $200 including a substantial shipping fee from China. The TWCS comes bundled with a (worse) stick at $145, and you can resell the bundled stick for $70 new bringing the throttle cost down to ~$75. Nyogel is ~$13 on Amazon.
Don't get anything less than a VKB Gladiator. You'll buy a Extreme 3D Pro and then find yourself wanting a VKB later.
How does one interact with the MCDU in an Airbus with the keyboard and joystick? How does one set the A/P altitude and airspeed? Set the radio frequency? What's the keystroke combo to manage the EFB? What keys are bound to "APU bleed on"? The sheer amount of functionality in a modern cockpit defies keyboard control - both because you very rapidly run out of available keybinds, and also that glass cockpits require input modalities that are fundamentally at odds with the keyboard.
I'd hazard to say the "3D cockpit + mouse interaction" mode is the only practical way of flying a modern complex aircraft, short of some type of VR/hard cockpit setup.
Imagine you press a keyboard chord to pull up a virtual search bar, then type "APU bleed on" and a virtual hand reaches out and does the action.
It would probably be a bad idea for a real world aircraft, but designing and testing it would be fun!
"Now playing 'Raise Your Glass' by Pink on Spotify."
> When flying a plane in real life, you don’t do it with a keyboard. It seems odd to build a simulator prioritizing that unrealistic use-case.
How much difference does that make to the sensation though? As long as it's a motion that's simple enough to become muscle memory (which having to look around with a mouse and click on the right thing onscreen isn't), I don't think the mechanics of how you're physically doing the input makes any difference.
Something that is quite hard to convey is how you actually _do_ get into an "OODA loop" in an aircraft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop) – observe, "orient", decide and act. For example, if flying VFR a lot of the time is spent looking out the window and actively checking that there is "nothing there". You look at the instruments, but you don't stare at them. A large part of flight training is pattern recognition, muscle memory, and fine motor skills.
I spent a lot of time gliding while writing up my doctoral thesis (mostly as it's hard to panic about not working when you're too busy not dying) and found it very helpful for other situations in everyday life. Part of that is knowing, exactly, without looking, where everything is. For that reason, aircraft have physically differently shaped handles for the important knobs so that they are unlikely to be confused. On the glider I have most hours in, the lever on the left that is blue, with a moulded grip is the speed brake. The tow / winch release lever is a yellow ball. In many prop aircraft, the throttle, mixture and prop pitch knobs are again given different shapes (round, star and "undulating" respectively). Knowing where to move your hands to is actually a really important skill and the keen-beans that X-plane sells to likely have set-ups where not only are these things in roughly the right place, but the distance between them and the chair is measured. Why? Well, if you're learning to fly an aircraft that burns ~$150 per hour (or more), and you can practice a ton of circuits in X-plane, it is a hell of a lot cheaper to try to get good at it outside of the aircraft first.
That and a few other replies made me wonder philosophically, maybe we should distinguish between a flight sim and pilot sim? An app could be both at once of course, but more a reflection on which bits get abstracted away.
eg fiddling with radios and realistic cockpit buttons and dealing with ATC might simulate being a pilot, but it's less about the sensation of actually flying and looking out at the world from above.
> maybe we should distinguish between a flight sim and pilot sim?
I wouldn't use pilot sim, it gives the impression of a 'career mode' beyond the scope of directly operating the aircraft. The terms I've encountered are flying game and flight simulator.
This is almost, but not quite, reflected in the Wikipedia article names. The X-Plane article is under X-Plane (simulator), whereas MSFS is under Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020 video game).
[1]: Some examples:
- you'll have to smash the throttle up key very quickly to throttle up for a late go-around,
- you won't have meaningful rudder controls so you'll have to rely on auto-rudder, and
- trim is a bit more difficult to get a sense for without sensing the deflection of your pitch control.
Though more out of curiosity I recently got a TrackIR, which tracks your head (usually using reflective surfaces that you can put on a baseball cap) and adjusts the viewing angle, and I must say that is an absolute game changer.
No longer having to either guess what's left, right, or even behind the screen, or awkwardly using camera controls is so much easier. And I was surprised how natural it feels: The head tracking has to heavily amplify your head motion, since you still want to keep your eyes on the screen after all, and to my own astonishment there was practically zero time for my brain to adjust. I even added some nonlinear curves and that works well, too.
It works in all the later versions of Windows, but my point is how OLD it is. Has nobody figured out a way to improve on it yet? All the gopro headband hacks, monitor bezels shrinking over the years, wireless tech including bluetooth LE... one would think that there would be room in this world for a TrackIR 6.
The VR craze is past the peak thankfully, but man that would've been the opportune moment to sell a product that doesn't have all the weaknesses of early Oculus and Sony VR headsets.
(Why would I practise crosswind landings with a PS4 controller? I don't really have room for a joystick, much less pedals. Not in my wallet and not in my apartment. I do have a PS4 around for other things, though!)
If you use a game pad, can’t you use one of the two analog sticks as rudder? That’s what I do. I even patched MSFS4 (the one from 1989!) for it for fun.
They don't really emphasize visuals. Even with X-Plane 12, the graphics will still be far behind those of Microsoft Flight Simulator. Thankfully they will be overhauling the graphics for trees, which currently look like something from the 90's. [0]
> it has gotten less and less enjoyable to fly xplane with that kind of a setup because of the emphasis on making it look cool over making it behave realistically
As others have said, you might be better served by Microsoft Flight Simulator. It prioritises approachability far more than X-Plane does, and isn't going for the professional/approved flight simulation market.
> (I don't consider having to click a graphic of a physical switch on the screen with my mouse more realistic than hitting a key on my keyboard). You can fix some of it with key mappings, but it's clear that this experience is not the priority.
I'd be very surprised if it weren't possible to map the button to a key, provided you have enough keys on your keyboard that aren't already bound.
Everything can be bound to a key or keys.
The reason we often click/flip switches with the mouse in a virtual cockpit is partly the fun, but also it familiarizes you with the location of things in different cockpits. It also increases work load, especially during critical phases of flight such as landing/take off, making a slightly more realistic feeling simulation.
Just pressing a button on the keyboard doesn't achieve that, even if it results in the same thing happening to the model.
This fidelity is what makes x-plane hard to fly (and a lot of fun) because a lot of interesting planes are fundamentally hard to fly in the real world as well; unless you know what you are doing and have good controls. However, a simple twisting joystick goes a long way. I have an ancient Microsoft one (like 15 years) and it has served me well over the years. You just have to calibrate it correctly. Most x-plane developers have pretty modest setups too. You just need to set things up right and then fly the numbers (correct v-speeds). And select the right planes. I always enjoy flying the simpler planes.
What's interesting is that most simple joysticks are actually already more expensive than the sim. You get some amazing value for not a lot of money.
Fs-elite has been running a series of interviews with x-plane developers about v12 the last few weeks. Well worth checking out if you are interested in x-plane: https://www.youtube.com/c/FSElite/videos
I'm particularly looking forward to the improved weather and clouds. Also, built in ATC looks like it should be more usable.
Yeah, not really. The models are tuned until it feels like the actual aircraft which is good, however it wasn't until just two years ago [0] that Austin Mayer re-discovered some of the most basic models used for aircraft performance (fixed- and rotary-wing).
He's got a good instinctive way of thinking about it that's for sure, but he seems to have skipped some introductory material during his degree.
Given the F-4 is obsolete, and it looks like it's been retired by everyone except Iran and South Korea, I wonder how practical it would have been to get an actually flight simulator for one, and reverse engineer the flight model from its software.
It probably would be super-difficult computer history project, but probably pretty interesting. Might not even be worth it either, since given the technology of the time it wouldn't surprise me if the simulation actually wasn't as accurate as desired here.
Interesting links found while writing this comment:
https://www.digitalcheck.com/f-4-phantom-flight-simulator/ (The F-4 Phantom: Building a Flight Simulator That Ran on Film)
https://www.flightmuseum.com/explore/link-f-4-simulator/ (Link F-4D "Phantom II" Simulator)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMc1qqxWCeM ("a partial teardown of a CPK91/A24G Flight Data Computer from AireSearch - an analog electromechanical computer from the late 1960s, use to control the inner workings of the F4.")
X-Plane is different from all other simulators in that it doesn't have a "flight model" programmed in for each aircraft. Instead it simulates the actual airflow around the body of the aircraft, based on the 3D model being rendered.
So any existing simulator would likely have been fairly unhelpful: it would have an inaccurate physical model and no hints whatsoever as to how air actually flows around the plane, only shortcuts giving off hints as to what effects it has on flight dynamics.
What old simulators could have been used for, I suppose, is for automating discrepancy detection: throw random scenarios with random control inputs into both the old simulator and X-Plane, then see if the aircraft response diverges. Based on that, investigate.
That said, it sounds like this was exactly the instructor's job (except maybe they simulated in their head) which was probably the cheaper way to go about it in the end anyway.
However, something to keep in mind for someone newerish to siming in general - not just flight sims:
Whatever payware you purchase now (aircraft models, plugins, scenery, airports, etc) will almost certainly (with a few exceptions) not port over to the new sim version... meaning you'll have to buy them again unfortunately.
This is part of the reason you still see people flying older sims - they put a lot of money into it, and/or their favorite model isn't available yet or something.
So anything you bought today for X-Plane 11 might not port to X-Plane 12 when it comes out, depending on what engine changes have happened under the hood to X-Plane.
It's not a hard rule, but something to keep in mind.
Although I wouldn't necessarily classify having to purchase the same model again as a scam - depending what's changed in the engine, it may require a lot of work to update the model to fully take advantage of everything X-Plane 12 (for instance) offers. If there's a substantial update for the model, I would personally feel fine buying a new version.
However, really nice to see Austin and Laminar have thought of this - some of us have waaaay too much invested into models and plugins!
So if you wait for Early Access you will get both 12 and 11 for the price of one.
After that, all minor 12.x updates will be free (they always have been) which means free updates for years to come (XP 11 was out for about 5 years for example)
One simple thing they can do is to ensure the keyboard and joystick etc can have an option of fs2020 mode. This will ease the transition. Given those model are coming to fs2020, there could be cross selling band upgrading. And whether one can do AIRSIM etc (air traffic) and map etc cross selling and compatibility and price option etc.
There could be more thinking. Live in a world of giant require hard thinking. Otherwise it would be like wordstar, word perfect and multimate etc that go in history. Office and word …
Or do anti-trust etc but that game is just getting the money but not the customers.
I think the fs2020 is easier to get in, tutor is fine and even have lane you can fly in and around to teach you.
But once you exceed that and say want a fight (just peace is not mankind and not prepare for it give us Ukraine invasion - imagine they have … others will just take advantage of you; having said that if you just rely upon other mercy of neutrality … hence luckily they are prepared a bit and uk trained them a bit) to keep the fighting spirit. If you have no war in fs2020, you can have it in others.
I am not sure how xplane can survive in its current form or would it move away from “consumer” but for flight training niche.
Dcs should be fine as a compliment as I do not see anytime soon dogfight or missile hacking onto fs2020.
Please think harder. We need more not less.
¹ Austin Meyer, creator of X-Plane
I used to fly a 48" delta winged glider that had a catapult launch. The catapult would launch it at about 120mph. I could fly to about 300 feet in a nice vertical arc, but as soon as I yanked back on the elevons, the rather light plane would turn sharply and slow down significantly, due to the very effect discussed. A non delta wing would have been unable to maintain airflow over the wing because the high AoA (20-25 degrees) would have been far more than the 12-15 degrees that straight or swept wing can take.
In other words, the Delta wing kind of acts as a giant vortex generator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_generator
That's not quite right either. A wing doesn't stop flying when it stalls, i.e. when the angle of attack exceeds the critical angle of attack. What does happen is that the coefficient of lift starts to decrease instead of increase what increasing angle of attack, and with sufficient angle of attack the coefficient of lift can become too low indeed.
A wing in stall can be flown, but it's tricky. Controls are inverted, natural stability of the plane doesn't really work anymore. It's not a situation you normally want to be in, but the plane does not suddenly fall from the sky.
The article referenced also talks about control inversion, interestingly. So yes, a stalled wing can be "flown" but not in the same way that the original question was referencing.
That's not the case for a delta wing in the regime that the article talks about. Increasing the angle of attack still increases the coefficient of lift.
More to the point, though, I get the impression that they run a pretty lean team and do a decent amount of volume. They definitely got my $60, and if going from 11 to 12 is a paid upgrade, they'll get my $60 again!