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Behind the Screen : July 2024

 

Someone noted in the forums that Laminar Research had cancelled X-Plane 10 or created an abandonware on the Simulator version? It's not true of course, X-Plane 10 can actually be purchased for a Digital Download of $29.99, in fact you can go back as far as X-Plane 8 if you have the disks or purchase them. Which is interesting, why would you?

 

There are several reasons, the guy above is obviously running old hardware (networked to 5 computers), an interesting concept, but he has also created his own age-fence, having to run old software on old hardware. Yes it costs a lot of money (I know) to keep up to date with hardware to run the latest version with the consistent "Vulkan Errors" hanging over your head if your Graphic Card is not powerful enough.

 

X-Plane has never had an vintage or obsolete list like Apple, if your old disks work, then you could fly any X-Plane version, obviously this does come with with limitations and hardware, I personally don't know if there are emulators out there to run vintage software on modern machines? myself it has been an interesting journey though computer hardware and software eras.

 

I have had Apple computers since the original Macintosh era of a 512 mb machine, and the various types through the 80' and 90's. But during my editing career created by the formation of the G3 Machintosh and Final Cut Pro (1999) or Digital Non-Linear Editing (NLE). To get a combo like that cost all of AUS$5000, as other systems were in the AUS$50,000 dollar range, it was however still highly restricted by 12 Gb hard drives, restricting you to only about 30 min of editing time, before taking another 10 hours to render, you didn't do mistakes, as a mistake cost you another 10 hours to re-render the footage...  the good ole days.

 

But my point is that during the time you built up a collection of tools (in this case related to film editing), and the actual FCP versions themselves. Personally I would still rather edit on the original timeline version of FCP than the iMovie based current FCP. So if I wanted to use all those excellent tools you had to keep the same hardware to match them, or run them. I moved up to the Power Macintosh G5, and fortunately all the G3 software ran on the G5 with upgrades to OSX 10. But after that you slipped down the order in losing precious software tools with every new Mac release, starting with "Tiger 10.4", but then all became totally obsolete with "Leopard 10.5". If I wanted my perfect hardware system with all my tools, then the G5 soldiered on, and and on for over a decade and a half. Luckily you could later add on (tons) extra storage space, but the performance (rendering) was stuck in a timewarp (but the G5 was far faster than the G3), but if you were only editing a 60min video, it was always acceptable. My 24" 2009 aluminum enclosure iMac ran both FCP and my first X-Plane (XP9), and was only reluctantly retired to go Windows.

X-Plane demands a lot of processing power was the reason, but updating Mac's is not done at all either. But one story was interesting. In the early release of SSD's (Solid State Drive) I put one in my 2009 iMac, transforming the machine to survive another four years with the expanded speed, but graphic cards were off the table unlike the fortunes and the wide open options of Windows. I'm looking at that 2009 iMac now, doing another job of storing music and being a broadcast hub, yes FCP still works (just), but all the support video equipment is now either broken or gone. 

 

We all have our computer stories. But the rule is you are trapped with a duel upgrade timeline. The hardware OS has to exactly match the software version you are running, if either are out of sync then you are struggling with a lopsided or even non-working system. That aspect can be expensive, or you are stuck like the guy above in a timewarp, with nowhere to go but to your wallet.

 

The X-Plane I am flying now is nothing like the version I built up in the early days, and I worked extremely hard on building up all those various elements to create a realistic on-line world, but in reality (even though a lot of the old (XP10) scenery does actually work). What I fly and use in this current simulator is world's away from the flying a decade ago, however I did get a taste of the old days twice recently.

 

Doing the excellent South Pacific Tahiti scenery, I found there was no ATR 72-500, the aircraft run by Air Tahiti to use in part of the review. The aircraft is the ATR72-500 v1.2 Riviere 1.2.0 updated by henkfix, and this was the replacement for the review.

 

The shock was how dated the ATR72 was. It is a standard PlaneMaker version, and it came with all the foibles and flaws of PlaneMaker. It was certainly a jump back in time. And the dawning realisation of the issues and problems I had encountered a decade ago, was not actually me or the way I flew...   I then realised, that the way that PlaneMaker interprets the X-Plane dynamics, honestly is actually not that good. I found very quickly the ATR was hard to start, even in this crude simplistic environment, then the old issue of the Autopilot not locking into the route in the FMC (FMS)... it all came back, and the horror of it all. Like I said, I thought it was (at the time) my own inexperience that was why I couldn't intergrate or fly the ATR well. But it's not, it's the original PlaneMaker design, notable to me was the fact that the underlying system has not actually changed at all.

 

Modern X-Plane 12 aircraft use Plugins (mostly SASL) to get around and hide these now very crude backend systems, but do you ever remember an update specifically relating to PlaneMaker, a little touch here and changes there obviously to accept the newer X-Plane version, but not much else is going on back here. 

 

The second aircraft was Peter's A380-800. Again an aircraft that originally was created back in the same X-Plane 10 era. Notably Peter Hagar had updated areas to meet the X-Plane 12 era...  but the core elements were still there, one was banks (rolls). When the A380 came to a waypoint, the aircraft would do a hard sharp 45º turn to the next heading, very PlaneMaker and not at all very realistic, so it dated the design. Plus all the sky holes in the modeling, this is again a limitation of PlaneMaker not the developer, yes even modern X-Plane aircraft can get sky holes, but here it was extremely noticeable as they were everywhere, and you even had the sky showing on (through) the OHP. The old style liveries with separate .png daytime and .lit night layers that were so hard to edit and created fusions of both files on the aircraft in the intermediate point as they clashed at dusk, editing them (fixing) sent me again back to a time now forgotten, but I had spent many an hour doing the same photoshop fixes back then, it was a very big memory trip back in time to that earlier era, thankfully the skills of the time past remained effective.

 

Ten years ago this was the X-Plane norm, so you just excepted it as part of the Simulator and flying in X-Plane. It was the surprise now on how all very crude it was, and is. The ATR was a pain to fly, I worked it and actually did complete the flight from Bora Bora to Papeete, a small bonus on the other side of the PlaneMaker coin is that a decade old aircraft would still fly in it's basic form, but you saw the yawning gap. Most would say, well what do you expect after a decade or so of Simulation advancement? and I accept that argument.   

 

So the combination of advancement ran though my flying over the last few months. The split between the old and to be discarded, and the new. Again the revolution of file processed in that in between time. I have hard drives full of past aircraft and scenery, now dated and basically unwanted. And actually my X-Plane aircraft fleet, even the scenery folder is far smaller than those earlier times.

 

The difference is the quality of the aircraft and scenery, in numbers it is far fewer than then, but they wholly deliver a far more intimate and quality experience...  you then in the past experimented everything, but are now far more discerning on what you use and fly in the Simulator.

 

Yes certainly the change between X-Plane versions can create a lot of obsolete (abandonware) aircraft, even scenery, and god bless Carenado, but you rebuild it all in a different way and in a different environment.

 

So there are a lot of things you like to hold on to that worked so well for you in the past, like my FCP system, but in time it did become that word "Vintage", as did the computers that ran the software, and now it is all just "Obsolete". And yet I don't like the Apple turnover of perfectly good tools being discarded just to add in more functions after only a few years, or to maybe only sell you a new iPhone for only profits. If the iPhone still works then why should you have to throw it away, even if Apple says no, or not usable anymore, it's all a bit of a tech waste, but 3G anybody.

 

But overall there is not much difference between the two platforms, X-Plane and Apple...  Windows users however can probably run Microsoft FlightSim ver 2.0, and quite happily...  See you all next month.

 

Stephen Dutton

5th August 2024

Copyright©2024 X-Plane Reviews

 

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