Fsx Captain Sim Xload
Captain Sim Xload F/A 18D And F117A For FSX By Andrew Herd (19 May 2008) This package caught my eye mainly because it has the distinction of being a third party developer payware addon for an 'official' Microsoft addon - which means you need FSX and installed in order to run it. We see plenty of freeware addons for freeware addons, a few freeware addons for payware addons (the FS2004 Misty Fjords scene springs to mind), but very few addons like this Xload pack, the best description of which I can think of is 'small, but perfectly formed'. What you get is an F/A 18D, which is the tandem cockpit version of the F/A 18 that comes with Acceleration, and a completely new airplane in the form of the F117A - so the package is something of a departure for Captain Sim, who are best known for fully-featured addons like their amazing. The Xload addon is widely rumored to have come about because Captain Sim developed the F/A 18 which is included in Acceleration - but this isn't true.
The Xload F/A 18D is considerably enhanced by comparison to the default plane and is packed with animations, and the F117A, while not being the most exciting warbird around, is certainly a welcome addition to the hangar, but these are completely new planes. The package is a tiny download from the Pilot Shop; only ten megs, so broadband is hardly a necessity and it installs without any fuss at all, the only complication being the need to activate the addon on-line using a key code. Captain Sim quote the system requirements as being a 1.5 GHz equivalent or better processor, 256 MB of RAM, a 64 MB DirectX 9 compatible video card, 500 Mb of free disk space, Microsoft速 Windows速 XP SP2 / Vista, Microsoft速 Flight Simulator X Acceleration and, of course, Internet access, or you won't be able to activate it. I was kind of interested by this, because even Microsoft quote the requirements for Acceleration as including a 2.0 GHz processor or better, a gig of system RAM, and a video card with at least 128 Mb of RAM and I can't say I would be confident that the addon would run very well on that. I did the review on a 2.66 GHz Core2Duo with 4 Gb of RAM, a 768 Mb GeForce 8800GTX video card, Window Vista SP1 and FSX SP2. Vista SP1, for what it is worth, does seem to generally speed things up and makes running FSX considerably less of a gamble than it was prior to the service pack's appearance. When the installation was complete, a check of the Start Menu showed I had the usual new program group, which included links to the user's manual, a repaint kit and an uninstall icon.
I was so blown away by the F/A-18's flight model, especially in low speed manouvers where you are one inch from losing control, that I decided to get the extra models. F/a acceleration 18d xload f-117a sim captain addon animations fsx. Captain Sim is proud to introduce the new generation of the award-winning '757 Captain' series: the '757 CAPTAIN III' family of expansions for FSX and Prepar3D. The 737 2.1 The 737 Captain free update to version 2.1 for Prepar3D4 has been released.
These really are links, because apart from the uninstall, none of this stuff is actually loaded on your hard disk and getting it involves a trip to Captain Sim's website to download a ten page pdf - a quick flick through it was enough to tell me that I was not about to review a state of the art simulation of a modern warplane, given that most of the text is devoted to how to load the flights which are included in the package and telling you about how to work the animations. You get a total of ten flights, six for the F/A 18D and four for the F-117A, found in the 'saved missions' section, all of which have you somewhere in the circuit, or on the deck of the carrier. Getting the animations out of the way first, these are triggered using a similar animation control panel to the one included with the C-130. As far as the F/A 18D is concerned, this lets you open the radome, extend the radar and wiggle it about, extend the refuelling probe, show gun loading in progress, drop the ladder, open the canopy, chock the wheels and cover the intakes, fold the wings, extend the airbrake, deploy the launch bar and attach to the catapult, call for take-off assistance, and, if you ever get that far, drop the tail hook. The animations are smart and you can't put on the intake and nozzle covers if the engine is running and if the aircraft is moving, you can't chock the wheels - a nice touch, given the number of FS addons I have encountered over the years which let you put out cones when the plane is at FL330. There is also a load control panel for the F/A 18D, which lets you hang just about any combination of weapons on it you can think of.
The F117A has fewer animations, these being an opening canopy, extending fuel probe, dust excluders and wheel chocks, a drag chute (nice), all the usual carrier bits and you can also load a couple of missiles. Finding the aircraft isn't too hard, because the F/A 18s are tacked on after the Acceleration planes, the single F-117A appearing just before the Maules. Barring the fact that no-one would ever call the F-117A a beautiful airplane, the visual models are very nice indeed and the F/A 18D is much more detailed and a great deal more convincing than the Acceleration F/A 18 - so much so, it is hard to figure out why Microsoft didn't go the extra mile and give us something that wasn't quite so arcade-like, as the Aces design suffers by comparison.
The reason may lie in all the animations, which up the level of detail enough on the Xload plane that it imposes a little extra performance hit compared to the Acceleration plane, which makes it all the more mystifying that Captain Sim give a lower minimum system spec for this addon than Microsoft do for Acceleration. Anyway, you get four liveries for the F/A 18D: Canadian Air Force Tiger Meet; Swiss AF; Finnish AF; and a Kuwaiti plane; there is only one for the F-117A, any color you like, so long as it is black.
No USN schemes? Nope, not a one. However, if you go (assuming your internet connection doesn't wear out with all this to-ing and fro-ing) to the Captain Sim web site and create a login, you can get free liveries for the F/A 18D there. At the time of writing, there were ten, all by David Sweetman, including three for the RAAF, two for the RCAF, a Blue Angels scheme, three USN planes and a Malaysian AF paint.
The only snag with these free liveries is that there isn't an automatic installation routine and some of the ones I tried included instructions that weren't correct for my FSX setup, which is about as standard as I can make it. In the end, I unzipped the liveries to an empty folder and dragged all the stuff across to the correct FSX folder, but it would have been easier if Captain Sim had included an installer for the addon liveries, as they do with the C-130. As far as the cockpits go, Captain Sim have settled for making their F/A 18 panel look superficially more realistic than Microsoft's, without going to the lengths of coding any additional subsystems worth mentioning - which is why the manual makes no mention of this area. The Acceleration F/A 18 cockpit is, as I am sure you will agree if you have a copy, less than scintillating, although it is fine for blasting around the skies practicing carrier ops - the Xload F/A 18 cockpit is just as unsophisticated under its skin, but the little bit of extra attention that has been paid to it makes you feel better about sitting behind it, just as long as you don't expect any of the buttons to do anything.
I am talking about the virtual cockpit here, because the F/A 18D does not have a 2D panel as such, unless you count a screen full of the head-up display. So the path is still clear for any developer who is thinking of producing an all-singing, all-dancing F/A 18 sim - which it would be nice to have, a really good addon of this jet sure would be tremendously popular. The kicker in Xload, and it is a kicker, is that the F-117A uses the same panel as the F/A 18D, which will annoy many users to death, but that's the way it is. And the sound on both planes is aliased to the Acceleration F/A 18.
2D Panels
Yeah, I can hear you going 'Nooooooooo!' But there is worse, I won't bet the farm on it, but the time and date stamp on the F/A 18D.air file - this is the code that defines the flight model - is the same as the one for the Acceleration F/A 18 and to confuse matters even more, the F-117A file has the same size, time and date too, so I ain't even gonna comment on the flight models (-: One last point is that although Acceleration is given as a requirement for buying Xload, it is actually possible to install the package without owning Acceleration, though I am not sure why you would want to do so. If Xload is installed without Acceleration, you don't get any aircraft sounds or panels - presumably you do get the flight models, or you wouldn't be able to leave the deck. Bottom line: is the Xload pack worth it? At the time of writing, you can get Abacus, which includes three new carriers and three different planes (all of which own their own panels) for less than a dollar more than Xload costs.
I haven't actually seen the product, partly because Abacus haven't been terrific at responding to emails - hint, guys - but even if Carrier Strike Force is average quality, barring the wonderful animations in Xload, the Abacus pack has to offer better value for money. Autocad 64 bits. Unless, that is, you want an F/A 18D and an F-117A, in which case, Xload is the only game in town as far as FSX is concerned, hence the 'depends'. On the whole, I would have found it easier to live with the wholesale borrowing from Acceleration if it hadn't been for the shared cockpit, which makes the F-117A look like an afterthought, which perhaps it was - ultimately, what you are paying for is a somewhat more convincing F/A 18 than Microsoft has to offer and a nice F-117A visual model. However, it has to be said that the animations on the F/A 18D do look terrific and if Xload was ten dollars cheaper it would be hard to say it wasn't a contender.