A note to my faithful readers:
I caught a little flak from some X-Plane fans because I slipped up and called the sim a game.  It’s NOT!  It’s a great sim, an application, a technical marvel, loads of fun, but not a game.  It’s the most fun I’ve had with an application since I found Spy Hunter buried in Excel 2000!  So if you see the word game, replace it with the word sim, incase I missed any on my editing.

This is no Flight Sim 2000…

…and that is a good thing.  X-Plane is not so much a game, but a true aircraft simulator.  While other games are hyped for new scenery and a couple of additional planes, X-Plane features a complex flight model, over 40 planes, a full aircraft design suite, and the most realistic air traffic control AI released in an off the shelf simulator.  It is probably the best sim on the market that you haven’t heard about, but need to buy.

Here’s a quick review of the system requirements, from the official site: (PC/Mac compatible)

-Pentium 300+ / Power Mac 200+
-96MB RAM
-80MB Hard Drive space
-3D Accelerator that supports OpenGL
-800×600 resolution or better
-Yoke or Joystick (optional)

Our test system was an AMD Duron clocked at 850Mhz, Voodoo5 5500 AGP, 128MB PC133 SDRAM, and an Aureal SQ2500 PCI sound card.  For controllers, I used the excellent Saitek X-36 stick and throttle.  Performance on this system was absolutely fantastic, even with the details cranked to maximum and 32-bit color.  I chose to run X-Plane at 800×600, in order to take advantage of the Voodoo5’s 4X FSAA capabilities.

What is X-Plane?

X-Plane is unlike any other sim on the market.  While the interface lacks the polish of a big-budget sim, the menu system is easy to navigate, and the list of options far exceeds the average off-the-shelf sim.  The complete package is a software suite that includes not only an excellent flight sim, but a complete plane maker, terrain editor, and a part maker.

I asked X-Plane creator, Austin Meyer, how he came to create the sim, considering he is responsible for everything in the game, and didn’t have a big name producer like Microsoft behind him.  He told me that X-Plane was originally designed solely as an instrument trainer for the Piper-Archer-II.  Austin eventually earned a Bachelors Degree in Aerospace Engineering, and he designed the Plane Maker software so he could flight test any airplane he wanted.  As 3D accelerators made their way into the market, OpenGL support was added to the sim, and X-Plane has evolved into a detailed sim that offers more than any of the mass-market sims.

The computations performed by X-Plane are very complex, and allow the sim to model flight characteristics of pretty much anything that you can dream up.  Since I lack a degree in Aerospace Engineering, here’s a quote from the X-Plane manual on how the system works:

X-Plane was designed to simulate aircraft by using an engineering process called “Blade Element Analysis”, a procedure frequently used by engineering companies to predict the performance of aircraft propellers and helicopter rotors.  The process is actually quite simple:  The propeller or rotor is broken down into a number of pieces (usually 5 to 20), and the exact speed of each “piece” is found by considering the movement of the airplane and the rotation of the propeller.  Once the speed and angle of attack of each piece of the propeller are known, the forces on the propeller can be found.  X-Plane uses this theory not just to the propeller, but on the entire aircraft.  The props, rotors, wings, horizontal stabilizers, and vertical stabilizers are broken down into several pieces and the forces are found on each piece.  These forces are added up to give the total force on the aircraft.  Once the total forces on the aircraft are known, X-Plane can easily determine what the aircraft will do next.

This system works because a propeller or a rotor are actually wings.  A helicopter flies because the rotor acts as a small wing moving through the air, but instead of using a motor to push the aircraft through the air and across the wing, the rotor spins, generating its own lift.  

An F-22 waits to take-off, while snow blows across the runway.