So @chipwich discussing World Traffic 3 for X-Plane got me wondering about the status of X-Life, which I bought a couple years ago. It works with XP11 and apparently the most recent beta goes and fetches the route data from somewhere on the internet (I assume the JAR site) and injects that into the sim. As well, if you download some “Bluebell” object packs, you also get a huge library of AI traffic objects that are supposed to pretty much match up to the real world routes and airports.
In doing some testing, I was loading airports around the world, watching them populate, and just observing how X-Life is working. And it is working really well. Yes, it has a few problems - the biggest one being that it tends to populate aircraft ONTO other aircraft that have been parked at ramp spots by the airport scenery designers. That isn’t a huge deal.
Anyway - so I’m sitting there watching London-Heathrow populate (it can take up to ten minutes to get full flow going) and all the sudden I spot one of my aircraft tail numbers on the X-Life “radar”. What the heck - N207CM is one of the aircraft in our fleet…! And the type of aircraft is correct (a B200 King Air)…
So I go into the free camera mode…and slew on up to the radar depicted location. And my jaw about hit the floor. It is even in our company paint scheme…!
That is just a tad bit weird. You must have an admirer out in x-plane/flight-sim land. Anyway…you’ve mentioned x-life a couple of times so I thought I would give the free version a try since I am having a bit of an X-Plane VR lovefest but growing bored with the lack of anything to do other than soak it all in. You have the NYC scenery. I am too cheap but I find the default KLGA and autogen NYC to be good enough…great even. The X-Life plugin settings are a little sketchy in VR. I found that I had to do some funny maneuvering with the headset off to get the two mouse-pointers in alignment. So long as you don’t need to change anything and only wish to turn traffic on and off, there is no reason to do the gymnastics. At first I didn’t think it was working. There was a long stutter when I turned the traffic on but nothing else. So I took off in the Bell to mess around the city, came back and found LGA to be a beehive. RyanAir was tucked right in to a Pilatus taxiing for departure apparently trying to make them to get to the rwy faster. I associate such behavior with Southwest but antics like that made hovering around the airport an amusing little show. The funny thing (not X-Life related) was that I had requested ground service just out of curiosity before taking off to tour the city. When I was back at LGA watching the show, my hand would get tired from holding in left twist (European rudder pedals still enroute). So I would land to rest and sure enough that faithful Texaco fuel truck would come over and tuck in right “under” the rotor. I never did figure out how to get him to leave me alone. He was like the butler in the original Tomb Raider if anyone remembers that. Well anyway sorry for the narcolepsy but I wanted to point out that in addition to being just a little bit creepy (if you are @BeachAV8R), X-Life is free and worth a peek.
The $20 upgrade gets you ATC and things like being able to file from the FMS route etc. It’s been a while since I used it, but it was pretty neat at the time. I wonder if the plug-in windows would appear in VR. I think I’m going to have to try it again tonight.
I couldn’t get it to work with XP11.20vr6. Not sure it’s supporting these previews, although it still does look under active development. Anyone else got it to work?
EDIT: I just think the windows don’t appear in VR, it all seems ok outside of that:
Pretty much, although there are some extra steps that enhance it a bit:
HOW TO INSTALL:
1. Be sure what you use OSX 10.9-10.12 or Windows 7-8-10 and X-Plane 64 bit 10.42+ or X-Plane 11 64 bit.
2. Be sure what you have at least one of static library installed -
OpenSceneryX. If not, you can install it for free opensceneryx.com
3. Copy X-Life folder to your ../X-PLANE 11/Resources/plugins/ folder
4. If you prefer use Bluebell XL traffic AI library, please download 3 files from
http://jardesign.org/downloads/BBXL/BBXL-1.zip
http://jardesign.org/downloads/BBXL/BBXL-2.zip
http://jardesign.org/downloads/BBXL/BBXL-3.zip
Next unZIP and put Bluebell XL folder to ../X-PLANE 11/Custom Data/ folder
and install folders PackA, PackB, PackG, PackJ, PackP to
../X-PLANE 11/Custom Data/Bluebell XL/ folder
5. UPDATE YOU NAV DATA WITH FRESH CYCLE (if needed)
X-Life use NavData cycle by Aerosoft from own /navdata/ subfolder
or (preferable) from ../X-PLANE/Custom Data/GNS430/navdata/ folder if exist
If you need update your cycle, please use Aerosoft/Navigraph
JARDesign a320/330 Native format
and put new cycle to ../X-PLANE/Custom Data/GNS430/navdata/ folder
create ../X-PLANE/Custom Data/GNS430/ folder before (if not exist)
Get more info from official product page http://x-life.jardesign.org/
To update it to very latest you can let the X-Life updater do it’s thing on first run within XP or just copy the .xpl file from here on the newest additions:
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