The world's busiest airport for international travel finally gets the love it deserves.

Hello everyone! I've stayed very under the radar the past two years because I've been busy with school as well as some scenery conversion projects for Aerosoft. However, throughout this time, I've also been working on a project that I've kept totally secret from the community. Some community members had asked me if I've been developing anything, and I'm pleased to reveal it today.

Dubai Next-Gen will be released for X-Plane 11 and next-gen simulators. Dubai Intl is the world's busiest airport by international passenger traffic, and the world's third busiest by total passenger traffic. It is also the world's fourth busiest airport by international air freight traffic, and the world's sixth busiest by total air cargo traffic.^[1]

So far, I've spent most of the development time optimizing my workflow, writing my own tools, and making the jump to physically based rendering. I've already overhauled the project twice, and what you see now is version 3. Now that I've finalized my workflow and tools, I can get on the fast track to finishing the scenery. Here's a preliminary feature list for the X-Plane 11 version:

• PBR materials.
• 30 cm/pixel orthoimagery.
• Animated passenger boarding bridges with aircraft door assignments.^[2]
• Animated Safedock T1 A-VDGS displays with RIDS.^[2]
• Animated ground service vehicles.
• Static aircraft displayed using X-Plane's 'Draw parked aircraft' checkbox.^[3]
• Compatibility with all major AI traffic plugins.
• Compatibility with Ortho4XP.

^[1] "Preliminary world airport traffic rankings released". ACI World. 13 March 2019.
^[2] Using the free Scenery Animation Plugin.
^[3] Using the free MixterX static aircraft extension.

Release Date: Hopefully late 2020, but expect delays.

In the meanwhile, check out these preview screenshots of the finished Concourse A with its twenty A380 gates. They've been captured in X-Plane 11 using stock shaders—only the shadows quality has been increased. I'll post more previews here as development moves forward.

Click on each screenshot below to view it in full 4K resolution.

WOW

Excellent work!

Some crazy details there, looks very nice. 

Very Nice.

 

Hi guys, sorry for taking so long to post an update on the scenery. It took so long because I decided to do one final overhaul before continuing with development at the normal pace. This is now the fourth overhaul of the scenery and focuses on the texturing workflow.

After completing Concourse B, I realized I'd been doing PBR texturing incorrectly all along. I decided to experiment with my texturing workflow and was so surprised by the drastic difference after trying it on a single texture, that I decided to redo all the textures in the scenery with the new workflow.

This development update focuses on the overhauled ground textures. You should watch the video in 4K 60 FPS to really see the difference without the ugly YouTube compression.

As you can see, I haven't just redone the textures, but also completely replaced most of them with better ones. I've also corrected the colors of the painted markings to correspond to standardized aerodrome signage colors.

There are still a couple of ground textures in the shots that I missed, but these will also be redone by the next development update.

Below are some screenshots comparing the old and new textures. Although they don't show the difference as well as the video does, they include some additional comparisons not present in the video. They've been captured in X-Plane 11.41 using stock shaders—only the shadow quality has been increased.

Click on each screenshot below to view it in full 4K resolution: