Laminar Research, the team behind X-Plane has released the final build for their latest, and largest ever update to X-Plane 12.1.0.
After many months of teasers and beta testing, the current build of X-Plane comes with many new features, updates, upgrades and bug fixes both in front and behind the scenes. Among the new features for X-Plane users are a new screenshot tool to capture X-Plane at its best, particle effects based upon different types of material that create sparks when tail striking the runway or sand and dirt blowing upwards to obscure your view when coming into land in a helicopter.
Many of the new changes enhance the world around you visually. Changes to lighting and how light interacts with the environment, from dark and gloomy cockpits, to blazing sunshine creating shadows on the ground, these changes represent light more naturally with improved bloom effects too. Water and water effects have had lots of changes to how water looks and acts. Water colours now represent the differences in water sediments within them such as muddy and opaque or crystal clear and turquoise and cloud shadows are now more prominent over water. Autogen in Europe has been revamped to better represent the urban houses typically found in the region. Spawned aircraft at parking spots at airports will now be populated by the largest possible aircraft size for that type of spot reducing the number of 172s at terminal gates by default. In the spirit of FSExpo, Las Vegas has also had a revamp with new buildings.
Avionics and systems have received some attention from the team to include improved functionality to the X-Plane G1000 with additional functions coming to the NAV, AUX, and WPT pages. Two new flap systems are implemented within X-Plane 12 which include the McDonnell Douglas ‘Dial-a-flap’ system that allows you to select any flap between up and fully down rather than the traditional preselected settings for takeoff as well as the implementation of the ‘Johnson bar flap’ system found on the Piper PA-28.
Finally, there were over 350 bug fixes to ensure X-Plane 12.1.0 is the most stable build of the simulator yet.
To update your version of X-Plane, simply start the X-Plane updater if you are not prompted upon starting the simulator and the system will do the rest. To find a full log of all the changes to version 12.1.0, head to the Laminar Research blog.
