Version 7.50

Warning! The Mars scenery doesn't work in 7.50. The Mars ENVs were generated using an earlier ENV version, and Austin quietly dropped support for all ENV formats prior to the current one (version 650) in 7.50. Mars (and presumably other version 610 scenery) works again in X-Plane 7.61.
NEW STUFF FOR 7.50

3-D Weather and Turbulence Modelling:

Full 3-D Weather Matrix! We now have a 3-d weather pattern for the entire region, with thunderstorms, turbulence, icing conditions, rain, and radar returns all based on this total 3-d picture. This finally opens up the door for future implementations of weather fronts moving through, UNLIMITED cloud layers, and anything else you can think of. It is AWESOME! Set the weather to thunderstorms with BROKEN or SCATTERED clouds and you can fly through the storms that go up to 40,000 feet, with turbulence, rain, and even ICING if the temperature is right. This is miles above the old method of just having 2 cloud layers and some artificial radar returns. The full "holy grail" of a no-restraints 3-D matrix of any conceivable weather is finally here! You still ENTER only 2 cloud layers, but this is simply a user-interface limit... more variations are possible with this engine, and in fact if you enter stormy weather, clouds will tower up to form it with no regard for any pre-determined altitudes!

Now, while we are doing full 3-D matrices of air data for all the weather, we introduce: An incredible new turbulence model!

X-Plane now actually tracks the motion of the air all around the aircraft in turbulence, giving vertical, lateral, and longitudinal gusts (continuously-variable on a randomized 3-phase sin curve) to give turbelence-varying airflow ON EVERY ELMENENT OF THE AIRCRAFT, DEPENDING ON THAT PARTICULAR ELEMENT'S LOCATION IN THE TURBULENCE PATTERN. So part of the left wing might be in an UPDRAFTING bit of air, and part of the right wing might be in a DOWNDRAFTING bit pof air, with the center of the plane in the "eye" of the vertex... all resulting in a hard roll of course. As well, the wings might be in the updrafting part while the tail might be in a downdrafting part, resulting in a ptich up... Of course, in tiny fraction of a second, the tail will have moved to where the wings were a fraction of a second ago, reversing the pitch force! This means that a really BIG plane is typically LESS affected by turbulence, since it's wings will occupy some air going up, some air going down, and they will tend to cancel to some degree, giving a smoother ride. A smaller plane will be more impacted though, since if it is in a rotating swirl of air, it is likely the at the entire aircraft will be in the same swirling pattern, resulting in the greatest pitch, roll, and heading offsets.

It gets better! As you fly slowly, you enter new rotating masses of air SLOWLY, resulting in gradual onset of pitch, heading, and roll motions, but as you speed up, the turbulence turns into short, sharp, hard jolts because you entering changing patterns of airflow more quickly. All of this gives the real feel, and performance, of a real plane in turbulence.

The cool part is: NONE OF THIS IS FAKED... we actually take a randomized airflow pattern and then move the plane through it without any assumptions about what will happen next... the resulting accelerations on the airplane will be based on the plane's interaction with that air. And now it gets even coolor... turn on sime wind and turbulence and then hit the '/' key 3 times to bring in some visual flight-model... you will be able to SEE the wind vectors from outside the plane!


Other Flight Model Stuff:

New Visuals:

New Instruments:


General Features:

See the various fuse/misc body screens in PlaneMaker:

Tech Stuff:

Refinements:

Changes/Obsolete removals: FOR AIRCRAFT DESIGNERS ONLY:

Bug Fixes:


Version 7 Overview

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