This is a game changer.

 

Hello everyone. After many months of hard work, I am thrilled to unveil Southwest Florida Intl for X-Plane 10. In the screenshots below, catch a glimpse of one of the most detailed and beautiful sceneries ever created for X-Plane. Handling about eight million passengers a year, Southwest Florida Intl is the second busiest single-runway airport in the United States, and the 45th busiest in the United States overall.

 

Key Features:

 

• 10 cm/pixel aerial orthoimagery covering the entire airport (approx. 8.41 sq. km)
• 1 cm/pixel custom ground detail/markings
• True-to-life pavement, not repetitive textures
• Never-before-done, hand-placed pavement seams covering the entire airport apron, runway and taxiways
• Baked-in, ray-traced ambient occlusion on all major buildings
• Baked-in, ray-traced night illumination on the airport terminal building
• Specular reflections and all-HDR lighting (no hand-painted lighting)
• Accurate building heights, measured using LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) elevation data
• Designed using efficient modelling techniques and X-Plane 10-native methods for maximum performance without compromising on quality
• Animated jet bridges and marshallers at all gates (using the freely available AutoGate plugin by Jonathan Harris)
• Static aircraft as an option
• Animated and static ground vehicles
• Volumetric grass
• Road traffic
• Compatible with HD Mesh Scenery v3 by Andras Fabian

 

Release Date: This scenery is not really a 'work in progress' any more, it has been completed and submitted to Aerosoft. That being said, a release date is not currently available.

 

-- Click on each screenshot below to view the full detail of the scenery in gorgeous 1920 x 1080 pixels --

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow.  Very nice.

 

Some of these screenshots could pass for real life images.  It's outside of where I usually fly, but I will definitely be taking a serious look at this on release.

WOW indeed!

Excellent !

 

There is a lot of work here, great attention to details and everything perfectly fitting together. Congrats !

Just one very little regret : as far as I can tell from the pictures, the buildings are a little too clean, and lack the nicely worn out look we see on the ground.

Looks like some talented people start to actually use deep X-Plane graphic potential.

 

Can't wait to buy it !

 

Pascal

Although: Game changer?

At least from what I saw till now I would say it doesn't reach Manchester, IMHO.

It looks fantastic! Great work!

First off. Longranger?? Whatever??/ You probably don't like pictures of puppies either.  

 

anways, i'm 40 minutes from this airport and can say it looks great. I have latinVFR's version but i think this one may be topping that one out. Especially since it's X-Plane.  

First off. Longranger?? Whatever??/ You probably don't like pictures of puppies either.  

 

Well, I wrote a rather detailed review about Manchester and at least what I see at the pictures I don't really think that we have quite as detailed textures as in Manchester and the night lighting can't really compete with the effects that Icarus presented to us in Manchester.

 

 

Manchester really plays in a different league than Heathrow or its direct successor Mykonos (where the Airport was rather weak, but they modeled the comnplete island. And I don't really see a location on the whole KRSW island where they could even start to play the complex games between direct lighting and light textures, where Manchester surpassed anything that we saw in X-Plane before.

But do you like pictures of puppies? That's the real question.

I have Manchester and it's very well modelled, even down to the letters and signs on buildings being 3D models. It's incredibly nice and detailed, but I do get a nasty FPS hit, and would have preferred something lighter, so everyone has a different opinion.

 

Baked-in ambient occlusion is surprisingly something not used much by XP developers although I see it a lot in FSX (Especially ORBX). I used it for the autogen libraries I did for Czech, but I'm also using it for EGGP Liverpool which I hope to release next month. The reason is probably that a large majority of developers seem to use Sketchup which doesn't seem to have the baking, whereas Blender, 3DS max etc do

As founding developer of Icarus Team, i would like to underline a few critical points, in scenery development. Those points have nothing to do as a critique to KRSW.

 

• I concur with tonywob that a good tool is essential for high quality professional airports. We are using blender, because of the abilities it offers. For example, for some of the 3D buildings we have used blender cycles render, that allows for ultra-realistic materials. No only for AO baking, but also things like reflections baking etc.

• Do not afraid of geometry! Today's PCs can handle millions of triangle per frame with ease. During tests with Manchester, I've seen more than 6 million polygons handled without braking a sweat on my i5(4440)/Nvidia 760 PC. Simple things like insetting windows or doors does not add a lot of polygons, yet the extra geometry gives more definition and allows for better results when baking AO.

• There is a ton of info on x-plane developers blog. Specially file format specifications are a bible to us. Not everything is 100% documented there, but mostly there are. And if something is missing, Ben Supnik is always available via email for any clarification/help.

• Experimentation. We spend a lot of time testing things to find the best way to accomplish a task. For example I took us a couple of weeks to finalize the orthophotos for Manchester. Even then, there were a few "last minute" changes.

• Think out the box. There are ways to accomplish tasks, that there are not written anywhere. Tools can be used differently to accomplish things that looks undoable. 

• Texture space. Creating hi-res textures has the drawback, that since VRAM is finite, you can run easily in troubles. If it is possible, textures should be recycled to more than one object. Also, it is way faster to have 1 texture 4096x4096 than 4 textures 2048x2048. If you have 4 objects that each needs 1 2048x2048 texture, combine all the textures to 1 4096x4096 and assign it the relative objects. This will need only one command to load the texture, than four the other way.

• GLOBAL attributes. One of the coolest things that X-Plane offers is the ability to repeat common objects a lot of times (hundreds at least) without any penalty on performance. But you have to use GLOBAL attributes, no animations etc. There is info on developers blog on that.

At the end, we need more great developers to show how X-Plane can really shine! Specially developments for X-Plane from ground up, that can take advantage of X-Plane's fine tricks! And I haven't even mentioned... decals!  :wink:

 

(Off topic: Manchester Airport never meant to be a "lightweight" airport, since we targeted to best possible quality, but performance-wise to be at the same level with airports like Heathrow.)

Any news on this scenery?   Sounded like it was about to be released, but that was a while ago.

 

Rob

Looking really good and I'm looking forward to day of release.

Looking very good ineed!

STATUS UPDATE

Hello all, and thanks for all the support! I am pleased to announce that Aerosoft hopes to release the scenery within a week (on Thursday, to be specific).

I have fixed some bugs and made some improvements to the scenery since my first post. These changes include more than doubling the texture resolution of some airport structures and ground vehicles, and adding weathering to the terminal and surrounding airport buildings.

Some of these changes are slightly visible in the updated screenshots below (click on each screenshot for full quality):