Digital-Flight Review
X Plane 7.0, RC-4
By Tony Gondola, Sandy Barbour and Jason Chandler
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Digital-Flight Review |
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X Plane 7.0, RC-4 By Tony Gondola, Sandy Barbour and Jason Chandler |
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A Little History, A Little Different....... In the early 90's Austin Meyer, the author of X Plane was a student at Carnegie Mellon university and an engineering intern at a major California aerospace company. As part of his internship he was asked to complete an existing simulation project. Mr. Meyer took on the challenge and that work formed the basis for the X Plane program we know today. Currently, X Plane inhabits a unique place in the flight simulation world as the only major simulation product available for both Apple and PC platforms. It is also unique in that it is largely the result of the effort of a single person, Austin Meyer. Progress in X Plane's unusual development cycle is mostly driven by user feedback and direct contribution via direct access to the developer, emulating more of an open-source approach that is constantly evolving rather then the closed dev. cycle of most commercial products. As we shall see, there are pros and cons to this approach but there's no question that it makes X Plane unique in the world of commercial flight simulation software. |
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Product and Installation..... The current version of X Plane is sold direct from Laminar Research at $79.99 US (8/12/03) for the program and world-wide scenery disks. 3 day domestic shipping is $10.00, carrier and service not optional. Overseas shipping is $20.00 and again, carrier and service is not optional. If you also want scenery for Mars you'll have to tack on another $10.00 US bringing the total for the full package to $99.99 US domestic, $109.99 US overseas, VAT not included. I would advise you to check the pricing as it's changed twice during the course of writing this review. The software is delivered in a soft shipping envelope enclosing a single CD containing the software along with several additional disks containing the scenery data. All of the disks are packed in paper sleeves with no additional protection. A sheet of installation instructions is provided however, a printed manual is not included. This is pretty bare bones and a little disappointing for such an expensive product, shipping damage would seem to be a real possibility so check your disks carefully. Installing the software is a simple operation, just uncompress the proper version to an appropriate place on your hard drive and you're done. 520 MB of free space will be needed for the basic install. The world-wide scenery will occupy and additional 5.2 gigabytes of hard drive space. However, you can install only the scenery areas you're interested in if you need to reduce the program's footprint on your system. The X Plane software package is actually made up of 5 separate programs.
The basic installation also includes a diverse suite of 37 ready to fly aircraft and an HTML based manual. We should also mention that the purchase of X Plane entitles you to free program updates for the life cycle of the release version you buy into. For instance, if you buy version 7.1 all of the updates through the end of the 7.xx will be fully functional. However, keep in mind that typically the series runs have been ending at x.70. If you happen to buy in late in a series you won't get much benefit from the free update system although you will benefit from the development that has taken place up to that point. You can buy into the next version at a discount but the best advice here is to buy in early if you can. The software is normally sold at a discount early in the series run anyway so that makes buying at that time an even more attractive option. It's also worth noting that the update downloads are currently running at about 140 MB each so that's something to consider if you're still on dialup. When you purchase X Plane the program disk you receive will probably be beta-1 for that series. In order to get an up-to-date, stable, bug free version you must download the update or buy a $15.00 update disk from 3rd party vendors. |
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Hardware Requirements..... Our experience has shown that you'll need a 500 MHz CPU as a minimum for reasonable performance, that goes for both PCs and Macs. Any Windows version from 95 on up will work however, if you're a MAC user you'll need to be running the latest version of OS-X. Minimum RAM required would be 256 MB for Windows and 384 MB for the MAC although the Apple side benefits from having more. For video, Laminar says that the program will run on a 16 MB 3D video card but a mid-level card 64 MB 3D card such as a GeForce 4 4200 would be a better choice. OpenGL support and a screen resolution of 1024x768 is required. All in all, X Plane is not a particularly demanding program in terms of hardware. With careful selection of rendering options it will run well on modest equipment. All of the testing for this review was done on an AMD 2200+ power PC with 256 megabytes of system RAM and a GeForce 4200 for video. |
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