Xsimreviews

It’s too soon to talk about the latest beta 5, but there were a few interesting new files out Monday and we’ll get around to those in a minute, but time to get out your calendar and mark down 5 August, because  a few items of interest to Mars- and sky-watchers everywhere will be unfolding that night:

How about a brief clip posted by Tom Kyler of a proposed “flashlight” feature to aid in making “cold and dark” starts in XP10; just click the link below to play.

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Here’s an interesting clip of carrier trials on the USS Wasp of the F35, with nice & fast final approaches!

Time for some files? First up, a new OSM package covering Alaska, and a fun livery for the STMA Otters to go with it.

Tom Knudsen has been posting some worthwhile OSM files for Scandinavia, the UK, and South Africa, so he’s no stranger to the genre and there are sure to be plenty of folks interested in his latest file – for 3D Alaska.

The above images are at Juneau, AK, and the airport is from Tom Curtis’s Inside Passde/Final Frontier package, and the OSM blows right on into the airport and some buildings place over the terminal building. Not good.

The package does indeed fill in a lot of otherwise stark territory with a few well placed objects, and perhaps due to the lack of urban density in most of Alaska there’s just not much of an issue with framerates. Perhaps these airport intrusions will be less obtuse with default scenery files, but I just can’t let go of my payware files!

Snow released another very interesting set of liveries for the STMA Otter(s), and C-GITL can be placed in any or all three of the ACF engine variants – and for float, ski or wheeled models too – and the real aircraft is based in BC if that helps any! Recommended too, though some of the textures could be a bit more sharp.

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Ntr09′s 8A3 can be found just outside of Livingston, Tennessee, and is hard by several other recent new airport releases in the area as well, and so ought to increase your options for GA OPS in the Southern US. Take a look!

Fact of the matter is, you could start here in the morning, drop in on 2NC0 Mountain Air, then chuff on down to KILM in time for some shrimp and grits and a pear cider. What’s not to like?

The Alabeo S2S Pitts is imaged here with res at “extreme”, and with a few objects dialed back a little in order to do so, including trees. The airport file looks decent enough for a simple place, and the surrounding terrain makes final approaches here a little more interesting than the norm.

Also, these images were made in the latest v10.10b5, and both performance and rendering seemed quite good here.

One other observation concerning HDR; at a small airport like this there’s almost no FPS penalty, even at “extreme res”, but as you can see in the images below there’s a huge difference in the way buildings and ramps look.

In fact, the entire airport simply looks better with HDR active.

Some complaints concerning the Pitts popped up this weekend, a few concerning the flight model (which is indeed twitchy as hell), a potential electrical issue (charge rates aren’t showing up, so will you have a half hour of flight on batteries before everything stops working), and Carenado’s typical level of documentation showing up in this file, which if I read these comments correctly means that their’s tends to be long on flash but a little short on substance.

Another funny gripe? Well, you’ve got COMMs 1 & 2, and a transponder, but absolutely zero in the way of NAV equipment besides needle ball and airspeed. Still, I like those freq readouts!

Flight models are notoriously difficult to model and to interpret here on this end – as a reviewer, anyway. I have very little aerobatic time under the belt, probably less than a hundred hours all told, and I’d guess most of that was in practicing or demonstrating routine maneuvers. My dad had a Citabria Decathlon near the end of his flying career and being a dive bomber pilot (by definition a totally insane way of flying) he loved to scare the crap out of anyone stupid enough to get in that aircraft with him (and I tended to get volunteered a lot by my mother for that duty…to keep him from doing impossibly idiotic things…like yeah, fat chance, Mom…), and anyway, he taught me a few things that aren’t in the Alabeo manual. Well, I’m no expert and have never even touched a Pitts so judging the flight model is a little like quasi-educated guesswork on my part (remember WAG vs SWAG? Wild Assed Guesses vs Scientific Wild Assed Guesses…). Anyway… The guys at Carenado advise that real Pitts drivers were consulted and the results woven into the Alabeo ACF, and I’m not going to argue with them. I will say that the flight model is, once again, twitchy. Or lively. And I feel absolutely no regrets at all for a lack of NAV equipment in this thing because about 15-20 minutes in it is about all I can take!

But hot-damn, that’s a fun 15-20 minutes! Like wrestling a greased up rattlesnake…

So anyway, that’s about all she wrote this time out. We’ll seeya again next time, and thanks for coming along. Hasta later – C