X-Plane - An Obsession For Realism

caseih writes "Popular Science is running an article on Austin Meyer, the creator of the popular X-Plane flight simulator. Although not an open source project, X-Plane has a devoted community of flight enthusiasts and developers who are striving to make it the most realistic flight simulator ever. In fact, flight characteristics are calculated in real time from aircraft design data, not static tables like MS Flight Simulator. PopSci has a neat picture showing X-Plane calculating the lift-drag vectors in real-time across an aircraft. Meyer's quest for realism in his simulations dominates the development and use of X-Plane."

Comments

Wrong Section: X-Plane is not a game

[RalphBNumbers]

Alot of other flight sims are games, X-Plane is not. This is a serious piece of software used by alot of professionals to model and simulate prospective aerospace designs. I can't count the times it has been emphasized to me that this is not a game. ...that said, it's damn fun sometimes.

Best Quote

[pnatural]

At the end of page one:

"I have a moral duty to make it fly as realistically as I can."

Now consider: if every programmer was able and willing to make a similar statement about their code, what would our software "ecosystem" (as MS likes to phrase it) look like?

Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article

[torpor]

The media hate videogames because both videogames and media are competing for your attention.

If you're playing videogames, you're not watching TV.

Re:First post with something meaningful to say!

[dougmc]

I would imagine that static tables are much less realistic

Perhaps, if you're doing something `wierd'. But 99% of the time, you're not likely to notice anything `wrong' with MSFS's flight model. And the other 1%, either the difference will be very small, or it's some 3D (stalled wing, but massive amounts of power that make it work anyways) maneuver.

Re:Too bad it's proprietary (aka: useless)

[danheskett]

Passion isn't enough. This type of programming is not "write a text editor" or write a replacement for Notepad.

Its scientific, requires loads of specific realm based knowledge, and eons of refinement and highly technical skills.

Its a simulation engine that is precise and accurate. It's not just a toy.

OSS is great. But not for everything. Somethings are too narrow for a sufficently wide pool of programmers to latch onto and program on thier own. The number of OSS-comitted programmers, with aero-engineering skills, with 3D programming knowlegdge, with sufficent free time and sufficent drive to replicate this level of work is very, very, very small.

Re:Terrorist Flight Simulators? Nope.

[afidel]

They won't use a plane next time. They have eliminated hijacking as a viable method of terrorism. In the past people on a hijacked plane would wait passivly because that's what was expected of them "no one move and no one gets hurt", which was generally true, the terrorists got to broadcast their message and then were arrested, people were rarely harmed, and if they were it was generally during an attempt to board the plane by anti-terror police/military units, not in the air. Now people must assume that not only will THEY die, but many others on the ground, potentially including their friends and families will die, so every person on the plane will do what they must to stop the terrorists, even fear of death from guns and knives won't stop them. In a crowded space a couple hundred people who have nothing to lose will beat out just about any realistic number of terrorists.