Imaginesim has confirmed to FSElite that they are looking to bring more of their commercial development products to Prepar3D. Their recent release of Barbados was actually a commercial product developed by the team for a large aerospace company for search and rescue simulation. The developers said that this is just one of four airports made for the company and that they are working to bring those airports to life on the Prepar3D platform.

Imaginesim’s statement is as follows:

“Between 2018 and 2019 we created four airports for one of the world’s largest aerospace companies, Barbados was one of them. They were required for search and rescue simulation, but the models can also be used for other applications if necessary. We were granted permission to re-purpose Barbados for Prepar3Dv4 after a casual conversation at last year’s Flightsim Show in Cosford, UK with one of the company managers. Permission was granted last December but the official paperwork to release Barbados for Prepar3D was not received until March. We are currently in discussion with the aerospace company to release further airports for Prepar3Dv4 and we hope to announce news of this shortly.”

Once we are aware of those airports and any additional news, we will, of course, let you know. In the meantime, you can check out their Barbados scenery here.

We will be shortly published our review on Imaginesim’s TBPB Barbados later today.

Laminar Research has released to the public their X-Plane 11.50 Beta Update. This major update features the native support of Vulkan and Metal API. Vulkan and Metal API target at replacing OpenGL in rendering engines in order to take a better advantage of the hardware technology currently available. This leads to a better rendition as well as better performance on the end-user computer.

Vulkan is an API primarily targeted at PC users, while Metal is an API developed by Apple. Respective X-Plane users will be able to see benefits of these APIs depending on the hardware they are running.

X-Plane 11 and Vulkan/Metal : what is it ?

What does Vulkan bring to X-Plane ? The developers have explained what they were aiming at achieving with the addition of the Vulkan API to the game.

• Better handling of plugin drawing. This means for example that weather addons have a better compability and possibilites, as explained here.
• Better handling of texture paging. This means that the use of Video RAM (or VRAM, the size of the memory of your graphic card) is much more optimized. Unused textures will be cleared from the memory with more efficiency. The display of the texture has also been revamped. In the end, the user will see better performance and better stability, with less risks of exceeding their GPU VRAM capacity. More detailed explanations can be found here.

As X-Plane developer Ben Supnik said “a flight simulator is more than its rendering engine”. The update also pushes new features for the desktop and mobile version of X-Plane, but the developers have said they would update us later on this subject.

While your X-Plane is updating, you can listen or read the script of the interview of Ben Supnik with FSElite in January 2020.

As the world continues to pull through as a global community against the pandemic known as Coronavirus, we are supporting simmers across the world with our newly released Stay at Home Community Hub. As part of that, we are challenging simmers around the globe to a series of challenges and share their best screenshots of those daily challenges. Each day, we will pick the best and showcase them! You can follow the Community Hub here.

The engines are what power the aircraft so let’s see your close up shots of them in action (or failing).

Be sure to check out our specific Daily Challenge page here.

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