4 ms·
As awesome as the new Flight Simulator is, as an avgeek the Flight model is very disappointing. X-Plane can, and has, been used to design real world aircraft be
by Stevvo 6y ago
As awesome as the new Flight Simulator is, as an avgeek the Flight model is very disappointing. X-Plane can, and has, been used to design real world aircraft because you input the aircraft geometry and it simulates how it should fly based on that. MSFS extrapolates a lookup table over the input geometry, making it useless for real-world aerodynamic predictions.
From the consumer perspective, both models are capable of outputting accurate results, but from the developer perspective, MSFS is no better than FS 98.
- nikitaga 6y agoWhich aircraft were actually designed with X-plane, and why? I've heard this several times but that never made sense to me. I wouldn't be surprised if their blade element theory approach is superior to whatever Microsoft is doing (not familiar), but still both of those are optimized for realtime simulation, not for correctness. When I wanted to analyze performance of a hypothetical rigid wing hang glider I went with XFLR5. That isn't a perfect tool by any means either but its algorithms should be miles ahead of X-Plane. Though of course you can't actually fly the plane in XFLR5, just do the math.
- Stevvo 6y agoBeta eVTOL. https://www.beta.team/ https://www.beta.team/
- 0xffff2 6y agoI don't know about production aircraft, but NASA uses X-Plane pretty extensively for all kinds of research, including modeling flight dynamics for small UAVs. It's used often enough that several years ago I developed (and released on NASA's GitHub) a tool to simplify programmatic interaction with the X-Plane simulation engine. It's not nearly popular enough to make maintaining it a full time job (thankfully), but I do get pretty regular comments from NASA researchers and members of the public. I have never heard of anyone using MS Flight Sim in the same way, although another fairly common use case for my library is to disable the X-Plane physics completely and just use if as a visualization tool. If someone developed a library that made that equally easy for MSFS, I can see it taking over that role. It certainly looks better the X-Plane IMO.