I'm new to X-Plane 11 on Steam, and I'd appreciate your help.

In FSX, all I had to do to get local airports and scenery looking real was to install UTX or ORBX, as well as a few (mostly freeware) airport packages.

Having switched to X-Plane 11, I'm doing a lot of reading and Youtube watching, but I'm still confused.

Two concrete examples of local airports:

CYHU St-Hubert is there, but it's just a runway and apron - there's not even a tower.

CSB3 St-Mathieu de Beloeil is missing completely.

Both of these airports are well documented in Open StreetMaps.

I have installed HD Mesh V3, so the roads around my local area look OK, but the landclass has farmland where there should be towns.

But for now, I'd just like to get the airports looking better.

I know there are lots of X-Plane resources available. But what would be my best place to start in order to get my local airports looking real?

Thank you for any suggestions.

https://gateway.x-plane.com/

This is the web page for the X-Plane Scenery Gateway. It is here that you can check and see if a particular airport has been made in 3D or if it is still in the original 2D format. As people update the stock airports in X-Plane they are uploaded to the Gateway, then when X-Plane is updated by the developers these are sent out to us the users. A lot of the airports have been made, they are made with a Laminar Research program called World Editor or WED. There are many more airports that have not yet been updated. Making these airports for some people is an additional part of the  hobby in and of itself.

2 hours ago, jschall said:

I'm new to X-Plane 11 on Steam, and I'd appreciate your help.

Hi jschall,

the default airports in X-Plane are crowdsourced, that is people add 3d buildings to them and then periodically Laminar Research pushes them as updated airports when you update X-Plane. For this reason, not all default airports have 3d buildings. In this case, from the gateway website, I can see that CYHU still hasn't 3D buildings, while CSB3 seems to be completely missing, as you noticed.

Fortunately, there is freeware add-on scenery available for both of them at the .org:

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/10575-quebec-cyhu-st-hubert/

http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/22794-csb3-st-mathieu-de-beloeil/

Another thing that you can do is to install the "prefab airport" addon, it adds generic buildings to 25000 aiports around the world: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/27582-prefab-scenery-for-25000-airports-with-exclusions/

With regard to missing towns around your local area, you could try installing the W2XP scenery from Simheaven. It adds buildings and other objects from OSM. Be advised it requires the installation of some additional libraries (be sure to follow the installation instruction):

http://simheaven.com/?page_id=3260

The file of interest for you should be "W2xp_America".

Finally, be sure to put the addon sceneries in the right order in the "scenery_packs.ini" to have the correct priority. Custom addon airports should be at the top, then prefab airports (if you installed them), then W2xp sceneries.

 

Thank you, @wb5okj and @Murmur. With your help I have installed St-Mathieu, St-Hubert and Pierre Elliot Trudeau, as well as Montréal Landmarks. More to come as I make my way through the Montérégie collection of seven more local airports!