About X-PlaneX-Plane is a flight simulator created in 1993 as a Microsoft Flight Simulator equivalent for the Macintosh OS, currently in v9.70. It's also fun as hell.
HistoryIt was originally created to simulate the Piper Archer (V1), and the V2 update (1996) added support for the then most-current Windows OS,
Windows 95 (Does anybody even use this anymore?). V3 (1997) added World-Maker and Weather-Briefer, and removed the 256-color mode requirement for Windows. V4 (1998) added textured graphics and hardware acceleration using the cross-platform OpenGL graphics library, World-Maker was updated so that users could make photorealistic terrain covers, and create buildings such as skyscrapers and airports. V5 (1999) added Airbus aircraft to the V5 disc, and the B747 was added. V6 (2001) replaced the bitmap textures for aircraft with paints, added support for Mac OSX, Mac OS9, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, and removed support for Mac OS 8.6 and under. V7 (2003) changed the aircraft texture format to .png (png forget yeah), changed the game engine, and gave the simulator an icon. V8 (2004) was the first DVD version, gave the sim the ability to read .dsf for scenery files, 8.2 added support for animated .obj files, 8.4 added support for Intel Macs, and the first Linux version was released. X-Plane V9 (2007-present) added memory management, shader support, and an auto-updater. V10 (December 2011) is expected to have global scenery generated from Open Street Map data allowing accurate placement of roads, rivers and auto-placement of buildings, a global weather engine with advanced cloud rendering, global illumination and shadowing, better use of multi-core processors for AI aircraft, improved aircraft and scenery, and improved ATC designed to work not only with you but with AI aircraft as well. V10 has been slated for a couple of release dates, but those were missed.
LinksX-Plane Forums and RepositoryWikipedia articleX-Plane Wiki 
