A new 23-minute video from Laminar Research shows us our best look at X-Plane 12 yet as Austin Meyers takes us on a walkthrough his own personal experimental aircraft that has been recreated in the sim.

Lancair Evolution

X-Plane creator Austin Meyers owns his own experimental airplane – a Lancair Evolution. It’s a kit built aircraft that features a carbon fibre body, custom cockpit, and 850 horsepower to pull it along. Austin spends part of the video extolling the virtues of the aircraft but in the background we get a good look at how X-Plane 12 is evolving.

The parts that impressed me are the lighting and sky effects as well as the clouds. We’ve seen them before but the more we see and the more we can see what efforts have been put in to make it look good. There are some compositing issues (jagged edges between objects in the foreground and the clouds in the background) that we’ve seen with other sims and in X-Plane 11 as well that I hope can be solved.

Austin did talk about the scenery some and mentioned that there’s two areas that the team are currently working on and that’s the coastlines (which are currently just as polygonal as the X-Plane 11 coastlines) and the roads which have the same problem. I’m not sure how well the surrounding scenery and the airport match up just yet either, however, its clear that this is still deep into development so no judgement here until we see them release and of course how the sim evolves after that too.

We’ve also learned that there are currently about 200 private testers working on testing the sim. Reportedly, the stability of the sim is very good and at recording time they had apparently been running for several hours.

When asked if an open beta was coming up, Austin Meyers said “hopefully soon” but deferred the decision to other members of the team.

Check out the video below and see for yourself.