Introducing my next freeware airport (ENOV)

[tonywob 4,768]

Following on from ENHA, I've stepped up to a larger Norwegian airport located in the north-west of Norway. Ørsta-Volda is a small regional airport located in a very scenic part of Norway.  The airport is served by Widerøe who have scheduled flights to Oslo, Sandane and Sogndal using their fleet of Dash 8s.
 
The airport is currently under development and I'm working on getting it as accurate as the real thing. Tom Knudsen (who you may know as the author of the XP library installer) lives nearby and has visited the airport and taken hundreds of photographs both night and day for me and all signs and layout should be very accurate as of August 2016. This is a fantastic small airport with a very scenic approach. The airport is big enough to accomodate a 737 for anyone wishing to take their IXEG Norwegian for a spin.  

Here are some very early preview shots of the airport:

 

The airport includes hand-painted high resolution ground and building textures, HDR and custom night-lighting. There is still a lot to do including the surrounding buildings, people and general airport clutter. The airport is designed to fit in with Norway Pro and UHD/HD mesh, but it can be used without if those sceneries are too heavy.

[jcjimmy 150]

Hi Tony,

 

Beautiful work! Thanks for the heads up. It is a keeper for sure. I am looking forward to the release.

[60North 120]

Nice!

[Jimmy RFR 406]

Tony, wow... that looks amazing.

 

My goal this weekend is to install your Norway Pro VFR, plus the other two great looking airports you've done, then I'll be all prepared for this release! :smile:

[tonywob 4,768]

Thanks Jim, I hope you enjoy Norway, it's a great region to fly in.

 

Also, if anyone is interested, I released Liverpool EGGP this morning http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/34230-eggp-liverpool-john-lennon-airport-and-city-custom-hd/

 

This one had been sat on my drive for sometime and I decided to release it as is so others can enjoy it. I have also reuploaded GB Pro as people have been requesting this.

[Jimmy RFR 406]

EGGP looks really good as well!  I have a copy of your GB Pro, but I haven't gotten around to installing it yet.

 

I really enjoy flying in Scotland - I used to have a very complete Scotland setup in FSX, with nearly complete Scotflight, FTX, Sim720 and UK2000 scenery installed, and flew it quite often, mostly with helicopters. I haven't looked yet to see what is available in Scotland in terms of XP airports, but I've been meaning to as I enjoyed the area quite a bit.

[Pugilist2 878]

Wow, amazing work Tony!  Hope to see some USA airports in the future.

[mmerelles 78]

Looking pretty dam amazing!

 

Preparing a flight plan for my saab340  :smile: in/out to enov

[airlinejets 709]

Exceptional Tony, wonderful use of textures.

[z06z33 763]

Wow!

[Jimmy RFR 406]

 

 

Thanks Jim, I hope you enjoy Norway, it's a great region to fly in.

 

As promised, I finished installing Norway Pro, as well as your ENSD and ENHA, plus a few others from the Org. And so tonight, I did a short flight from ENOV (a stand-in for yours) to ENSD. Wonderful scenery on my flight, will be flying around Norway awhile for sure.

 

ENSD definitely had an interesting approach, especially when I got close and realized that I had "runways follow contours" turned on - with HD Mesh, it was quite a hill to land on! :smile:

[saed45 38]

Tony I know you work really hard for this stuff and don't need more work. 

 

But i think it be very cool if you could stream your process from start to finish on picking an airport, modeling, texturing and stuff. 

 

Its pretty clear that people interest in xPlane has risen recently and if you can show them the  journey to making good freeware airports people will just come together and create better and better scenery. 

 

I hope you dont take this the wrong way, just my opinion.

[tonywob 4,768]

Thanks Saed, I've had similar requests via email since I released ENHA with people wanting a quick magic answer and I have thought about doing some streams since there is a large lack of decent and detailed tutorials on this for X-Plane, but I'm by no means an expert and I am continually modifying how I work and learning new things. I also look back at my earlier airports now and cringe at how bad they are now, especially my first UK ones which I was so proud of at the time, and I'm likely to do the same with what I'm doing now :-)

 

There is some material for FSX (where the process is quite similar) but it's very fragmented and for the most part I sadly get the impression that developers don't want to share their methods of how they do it (Especially if they have now moved on to payware). I've mostly learned the hard way, from making bad stuff and them improving, starting with modelling really ugly buildings for W2XP a few years ago. 

 

 

ENSD definitely had an interesting approach, especially when I got close and realized that I had "runways follow contours" turned on - with HD Mesh, it was quite a hill to land on!

 

Yep :-), I got quite frustrated when developing ENSD and I mostly gave up with it. You can probably tell it is lacking in detail or ground textures outside of the terminal area. The issue is because I couldn't get the terrain right or flattened correctly and it was either ugly flattening which gave cliffs of water, or a bumpy runway and floating buildings. I think this is one of the main reasons that developers from FSX are put off, it's frustrating and really limits creativity (I'm hoping for a local mesh patches for XP11)

[Jimmy RFR 406]

 

 

..from making bad stuff and them improving, starting with modelling really ugly buildings for...

 

Hey! That's the step I'm at! Modelling really ugly buildings, that is. :wink:

 

Seriously though, I think any effort, from anyone, is greatly appreciated when it comes to freeware scenery.  The role of freeware may be of lesser importance when it comes to FSX these days, but it sure makes a huge difference in XP. I spent a good part of the evening last night populating Norway with airports from the Org, and if it were not for those efforts by people such as yourself to make wonderful freeware, I wouldn't of been able to do so.

 

I took a flight last night around ENHA, really, really nice. Even with just HDMesh, your Norway Pro work really does a fine job making populated areas look really superb. One question in regards to ENHA: The PAPI lights on one end didn't seem to be functional, and on the other end, the glideslope angle seemed quite steep?

 

Now, I just need to find some resources for charts and flight planning for Norway, and I'm set!

[tonywob 4,768]

Well, actually the PAPI lights no longer function in real life when somebody hit them and they didn't fix them because the airport is no longer used at night, but that's just a coincidence and the virtual ones should actually be working. I'll check why, but I guess I messed something up in WED