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Airliner XP: The Airbus you are waiting for!

January 28, 2007 - The Internationally-based development studio, Airliner XP, is announcing the most unique Airbus Simulation Experience for both FS9 and FSX.

"With today's announcement of our Airbus Simulation, we are officially ushering in a new era in true next-generation simulation and entertainment for everyone" said Jean-Luc Dupiot, co-founder of Airliner XP. "The innovative Airbus Simulation product features powerful technologies and capabilities that have never been brought together in one simulation title. The results are breathtaking new interactive simulation to explore, eye-popping multimedia functionality, and a fully integrated experience -- all in high- definition clarity. The value we are providing consumers with our Airbus Simulation is beyond compare."

Airliner XP’s A320 Airbus which has been under development for 3 years will be released for FS9 first and FSX later.
Airliner XP's management and staff includes producers, artists, designers, and developers with experience from leading publishers and titles in the industry including DreamFleet, FlightScenery and Reality XP.

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Technology & Features

The Airliner XP Airbus A320 is essentially a separate simulation within Flight Simulator. Unlike the majority of aircraft simulations that attempt to work within Flight Simulator's operating parameters and requirements, our Airbus makes Flight Simulator do what we want it to. This allows us a much greater degree of freedom and flexibility, overcomes any Flight Simulator issues, and allows us to achieve a much higher degree of operational realism.

Taking FS to new heights
The Airliner XP Airbus A320 is developed with the Reality XP Next-Gen SDK (Software Development Kit). While the FS SDK is an outdated pre-FS98 era C framework, stringent in data structures and performance, it is also poor by today’s graphics and multimedia standards. Reality XP Next-Gen SDK replaces the default FS SDK entirely and enables the management of gauge resources (bitmaps) in a more memory-efficient way, permitting full use of JPEG and PNG file formats (compressed, 32 bits). Not only it offers very high resolution/details bitmaps in our gauges to accommodate any screen resolution, but also fully enables 32 bits colors with alpha blending. Coupled with the additional sub-pixel bitmap rendering engine enabled with our technologies, we can deliver Photoshop like gauge bitmaps with shadows, highlights, glass effect in a real time rendering fashion! In short, our products will look sharper, better, life-like and will run faster than default SDK based products.

In addition to the Next-Gen 2D panel and gauges, the Airliner XP Airbus A320 features an enhanced 3D engine for FS9. With FS9, it features real-time/no-FPS-hit 3D shader for a mind-boggling visual experience beyond compare. You will be thrilled with real-time adjustable independent per-panel real integral lighting and real flood lighting which are available even in daytime and react correctly to sun’s illumination, correct 3D mirror-like reflections in the VC EFIS and cockpit windows, and a number of Hollywood-intense visual special effects.

The Airliner XP A320 is using the latest edition of the award winning Reality XP True Display XP EFIS vector drawing API. With rendering speed up to 100 times faster than the competition running with GDI+, the EFIS are fluid smooth and crisp. In addition, with the Reality XP Next-Gen SDK, they render in the 2D panel and the VC at the same speed as the Flight Simulator Frame Rate Counter! While traditional airliner add-ons drag the customer down with a lot of options to dumb down the rendering quality and speed of the EFIS to gain some FPS in the simulator, the Airliner XP Airbus A320 always runs the EFIS with no tradeoff whatsoever, and with no FPS hit either both in the 2D panel and the 3D Virtual Cockpit.

The sound experience goes beyond the traditional add-on and even beyond the FSX capabilities. The Airliner XP sound simulation is designed with real Level D simulation technical specification and features a unique 7.1 3D sound mixer, running faster than Direct Sound for faster frame rates and higher quality audio with professionally recorded sounds in 48Khz. The sound simulation is modeled with multiple layers and varieties for any single ambient and engine sound. In addition, every single switch and knob has been recorded in a real cockpit for a true-to-life audio user experience. With the additional HRTF technology that permits recreating surround sound with only 2 speakers, the sound experience delivered with the Airliner XP A320 is beyond reach from the competition.

Operational Realism on a new level
The Airliner XP A320 system simulation is the Flight Simulator port of a Reality XP professional simulation software designed with the Aircraft Training industry. It is designed with a sub-component organic approach. In short, every single element of the aircraft, a computer, an electrical bus, a switch, an hydraulic pipe, a pump, a valve etc.. is modeled and simulated at its fine low-level within the entire aircraft simulation. All these elementary blocks of simulation are then connected to each other exactly like the real aircraft and cross interactions between elements are naturally simulated. With this fine granularity in the simulation, any single element can be failed and proper interactions with the connected elements will take place automatically. For example, a bulb light, an electric relay could fail, a pipe could leak, a pump could slowly fail over time up to a complete failure threshold.

Unlike other simulations designed for Flight Simulator, the Airliner XP Airbus A320 simulation features an organic simulation approach. With this type of approach, all the hydraulic, electric, pneumatic and fuel simulation are not running in a finite state machine, where each state is predictable and coded for. Instead, every system is running with a life of its own, within the organic simulation, and behave over time like their real world counterpart. Hydraulic pressure builds-up, temperatures changes, computer-driven valves open and close to cope with the changing conditions. In short: the Airliner XP A320 makes the pilot feel the machine is living under his command, and not under the commands of a canned, pre-determined, state.

The Airbus unique computer based architecture is also fully recreated with dozens of individual computer simulations, like a dual CPC (Cabin Pressure Controller) with the correct Airbus pressure laws, triple DMC (Display Management Computer) with all the correct EFIS reversions simulated, the complete ELAC, FAC and SEC computer suite and all the other computers driving the functions and features of the Airbus. All these computers are internally simulated like their real world counterpart, connected with ARINC-like data buses. Even communication between the computers and the EFIS are driven through a data bus and permits separating the aircraft simulation from the EFIS.

In addition, the Airliner XP A320 simulation features a real EGPWS with terrain, Weather Radar with correct physics simulation of radar beam energy absorption/reflection and TCAS simulation passing the industry-standard 250 TSIM tests.