X-Plane 12 has woven an interesting journey in the last year or so as the Laminar Research team have worked away on thematic updates for their last several changes to the core of their sim. Their next 12.2.0 update is considered a Major Release and it has the potential to make some more significant changes under the hood solving some long standing issues and improving the sim on the whole. Let’s see what they are saying.

Coming up next

Laminar Research is preparing the next update for X-Plane with 12.2.0 being considered a Major Release by the developer. The last two updates have been minor updates by comparison, however, they have been consequential and they have delivered some new core features including a revamp ATC update, a new flying lesson module, new scenery and landmarks around Salzburg, Austria, and a new physics-based camera.

Coming up next is a graphics focused update as shared by their Facebook page. They list on their roadmap lighting improvements, cloud improvements, something they call “exposure fusion” which is ultimately a fancy marketing term for HDR that should hopefully solve the sim’s dark cockpit issue, and they report that stability improvements are coming too.

This should be quite an interesting inflection point for the sim as Laminar have been talking about some of these features, solutions for overly dark cockpits for example, since at least last summer when they presented it during their FSExpo presentation.

It should be an interesting update. Stay tuned for more as they communicate their plans for X-Plane 12’s next major update.