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X-Plane, produced by Laminar Research, is a flight simulator for personal computers, notable for its high degree of sophistication and customizability.
Unlike other simulators, which use precalculated tables of data, which they refer to and tweak according to atmospheric conditions etc., X-Plane incorporates blade element theory, a technique developed to analyse propellor behaviour. It involves breaking an airfoil down into several pieces, and then by reference to its velocity, calculating the forces exerted on it. X-Plane applies this to the entire aircraft, treating the fuselage, wings, tail and control surfaces as slowly-rotating propellors. The advantage of this over 'traditional' flight simulators is that, in theory, no performance data need ever be gathered from the real aircraft - all you have to do is enter the craft's geometry, mass, engine position and power, and X-Plane models the performance all by itself.
X-Plane has even been used as an aid in designing concept aircraft, such as the Carter Copter, and a look around the Registry at X-Plane.org will reveal hundreds of completely imaginary aircraft made by people ranging from aerospace engineers, to school children.
One of the greatest accolades that X-Plane has is that it is fully certified by the American FAA for flight training. But don't think you'll get your pilot's licence on your desktop; hours are only valid when taken in a full motion simulator, run by four copies of X-Plane tied together. Nonethless, as the X-Plane website gleefully points out, Microsoft Flight Simulator is under the games section of Microsoft.com - X-Plane is good enough to be used as the real thing.
X-Plane was largely developed using the Apple Macintosh computer with Mac OS X, but is cross-compiled to the Windows operating system as well and should, although it is not recommended, run on Mac OS 9. Also in the pipeline is a Linux version (Weather-Briefer. Airfoil-Maker, and Plane-Maker v8.00 Beta 8 added Linux compatibility) - to further this aim, a Linux version of X-Plane's sister program, Space Combat, has been made available, as a 'dry run'. The 3D graphics are fully based on the cross-platform OpenGLOpenGL Open G raphics L ibrary) is a specification defining a cross-language cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 3D computer graphics (and 2D computer graphics as well). The interface consists of about 250 different function calls whi libraries.
X-Plane 8, the newest version of the simulator, has significant improvements in aircraft design and scenery graphics.