REVIEW: iniScene Heathrow

[Victoroos 205]

4 hours ago, GSalden said:

A big thing for me too. I was waiting for this release but terminal lighting has to be there…

Wait. Airside isn't light? Well.. Time to blind the ground worker with my taxi light (obviously I condem that action!) 

[Donka 645]

Great review Filbert - much appreciated.

Airport definitely looks rushed and unfinished. Hopefully they will revisit soon and make a few improvements but not one I would be looking to fork out for at this time. The inconsistency is frustrating though as parts off it look well done so the developer is clearly capable.

 

[liamp51 541]

Garbage. The iniBuilds people need to stick to making old Airbuses. 

[iFlySimX 751]

Rushed and unfinished....Thank you, next!

PS: And the price tag...LOL

[superspud 450]

How does one end up with a 10.3 gigabyte bit of scenery?

For that file size I'd want to be able to walk up to any airport walker and be invited back to their house for a barbecue in real time. And each worker lives somewhere different and same goes for what they grill up for me. 

[andym001 37]

49 minutes ago, superspud said:

How does one end up with a 10.3 gigabyte bit of scenery?

For that file size I'd want to be able to walk up to any airport walker and be invited back to their house for a barbecue in real time. And each worker lives somewhere different and same goes for what they grill up for me. 

From their site .....

10,000+ custom iniScene car models scattered throughout parking lots outside of the airport boundary.

Hand-placed bespoke ground service equipment at each gate featuring over 2,000+ containers, 2,000+ cargo dollies and a plethora of various static equipment.

[superspud 450]

1 hour ago, andym001 said:

From their site .....

A low poly model of a car or bit of GSE will be a few hundred kilobytes. A texture for it might be a megabyte but that's a bit extravagant. There might be 50-100 different models in total so that won't be more than 1-200 mb. 

Maybe the entire ground is all vast custom textures which really do add up. That might be where the vram comes in. 

[andy1252 3,892]

I'm an addon junkie (couple of thousand folders handled by the addons linker on my system) but I won't bother with this.

The price for starters, I really don't expect to see much for sale at these prices these days, and then a quick look at the images and seeing some pretty bland textures and no interior shots was enough to turn me off. And then to see comments about no night lighting. This really is a waste of pixels to my way of thinking.

There does seem to be a thing lately of airports with not much more over the defaults than a few extra tarmac markings, loads of trolleys and trucks, and bad cars in the car parks. And as others have said there is the worry that these will put off proper versions being produced.

Oh well, the default EGLL is actually pretty good, and I can usually find something to buy to scratch the itch when it arises.

[pmb 5,137]

Given I have the Asobo enhanced EGLL, I finally decided to give it a pass as well. I think Gary Summons/UK2000 will do it at a point, if no one else. He usually doesn't care too much if there are others available.

Some people don't like him but while his airports may not be FB or FT, most of them are quite good. Plus, he has experience with and assets of the airport after having done it 2 (or more?) times.

Kind regards, Michael

Edited February 24, 2022 by pmb

[liamp51 541]

7 minutes ago, pmb said:

Given I have the Asobo enhanced EGLL, I finally decided to give it a pass as well. I think Gary Summons/UK2000 will do it at a point, if no one else. He usually doesn't care too much if there are others available.

Some people don't like him but while his airports may not be FB or FT, most of them are quite good. Plus, he has experience with and assets of the airport after having done it 2 (or more?) times.

Kind regards.

That and his most recent airports have improved dramatically over his first efforts for MSFS. 

[iniBuilds 73]

Hello,

I think the feelings for Heathrow are rather mixed, but also some statements are being taken out of context and assumptions being made.

Firstly, to address the size "issue". Heathrow has been heavily optimized from the ground up - each and every building, GSE model, car, and you name it, has had a set of level of detail models created for them or also known as "LOD". This helps with performance greatly when you're further away from a model by not taking up so much system resources by decreasing the level of detail as you're further away with lower-detailed models which also in addition to that feature a few levels of decreased texture size and so on and so forth. This results in over 2x the size of what you're suggesting @superspud.

https://docs.flightsimulator.com/html/index.htm#t=Asset_Creation%2F3D_Models%2FLoDs.htm&rhsearch=LOD&rhhlterm=LOD

There are in addition to this, 7GB of compiled textures, all full PBR. But don't think we've skimped on this, many textures and materials are re-used throughout the airport, but if we wanted a diverse and whole, non-repetitive looking airport. The textures are also all optimized as per SDK standards and aren't loaded the further you are away from a specific object due to the lowest-res LOD only loading colours and not textures, again for performance reasons as prescribed in the SDK.

And finally, there's the satellite imagery, which spans outside of the airport boundary itself. This as a source file is over 10GB in size and when compiled by the sim it is 1.84GB with multiple LOD levels inside also to allow the sim to load lower-res versions of the imagery further away. The 10GB size for this airport is inevitable, and we can only see it getting bigger with future updates as there aren't many further optimizations that can be carried out on this scenery.

We are constantly monitoring the community for feedback and take onboard what's actively being fed to us. We hear you, and we're implementing what we can to make this the best and most-preferred Heathrow add-on for MSFS. In addition, we've paused development on all other scenery projects to resolve Heathrow feedback ASAP. 

Currently we're acting on the following;

- Night lighting improvements throughout
- Terminal lighting improvements at T5
- VGDS solution (longer term implementation)
- Increasing dirt at stands
- Adding airport side roads
- Increasing cars on landsides for added immersion
- And fixing numerous bugs reported to us on our own forum and support tickets as well as what's been picked up throughout the wider community.

In response to some other comments:
 

Please do elaborate, this seems rather vague of a statement based on other individuals' disgruntlements. 
 

We'd love to hear your thoughts on the "garbage" aspects of the scenery, so we can strive to improve for future updates. We will be continuing our entry into the scenery market with many more releases planned to come throughout the year through iniScene.
 

I can wholeheartedly assure you a lot of love, sweat and maybe even tears went into the development process of EGLL. We're completely open to feedback and implementing it as mentioned further above as this is a passion project for many on the team, and we want to see it do its best out there. But with an airport of this calibre, there has to be a limit on the level of detail we go down to solely for the purpose of guaranteed performance and it being as best as it can. As mentioned earlier in this thread, we've optimized this scenery very well in-line with the MSFS SDK guidelines in hope to have it running smoothly on the minimum specced MSFS PC. The comparisons raised in the community are rather unjust, and we understand expectations may have been higher, but for an airport so large, we sadly couldn't go to the level others have without having a different side of issues.

Thank you.

[DaWu 779]

2 hours ago, iniBuilds said:

Hello,

I think the feelings for Heathrow are rather mixed, but also some statements are being taken out of context and assumptions being made.

Firstly, to address the size "issue". Heathrow has been heavily optimized from the ground up - each and every building, GSE model, car, and you name it, has had a set of level of detail models created for them or also known as "LOD". This helps with performance greatly when you're further away from a model by not taking up so much system resources by decreasing the level of detail as you're further away with lower-detailed models which also in addition to that feature a few levels of decreased texture size and so on and so forth. This results in over 2x the size of what you're suggesting @superspud.

https://docs.flightsimulator.com/html/index.htm#t=Asset_Creation%2F3D_Models%2FLoDs.htm&rhsearch=LOD&rhhlterm=LOD

There are in addition to this, 7GB of compiled textures, all full PBR. But don't think we've skimped on this, many textures and materials are re-used throughout the airport, but if we wanted a diverse and whole, non-repetitive looking airport. The textures are also all optimized as per SDK standards and aren't loaded the further you are away from a specific object due to the lowest-res LOD only loading colours and not textures, again for performance reasons as prescribed in the SDK.

And finally, there's the satellite imagery, which spans outside of the airport boundary itself. This as a source file is over 10GB in size and when compiled by the sim it is 1.84GB with multiple LOD levels inside also to allow the sim to load lower-res versions of the imagery further away. The 10GB size for this airport is inevitable, and we can only see it getting bigger with future updates as there aren't many further optimizations that can be carried out on this scenery.

We are constantly monitoring the community for feedback and take onboard what's actively being fed to us. We hear you, and we're implementing what we can to make this the best and most-preferred Heathrow add-on for MSFS. In addition, we've paused development on all other scenery projects to resolve Heathrow feedback ASAP. 

Currently we're acting on the following;

- Night lighting improvements throughout
- Terminal lighting improvements at T5
- VGDS solution (longer term implementation)
- Increasing dirt at stands
- Adding airport side roads
- Increasing cars on landsides for added immersion
- And fixing numerous bugs reported to us on our own forum and support tickets as well as what's been picked up throughout the wider community.

In response to some other comments:
 

Please do elaborate, this seems rather vague of a statement based on other individuals' disgruntlements. 
 

We'd love to hear your thoughts on the "garbage" aspects of the scenery, so we can strive to improve for future updates. We will be continuing our entry into the scenery market with many more releases planned to come throughout the year through iniScene.
 

I can wholeheartedly assure you a lot of love, sweat and maybe even tears went into the development process of EGLL. We're completely open to feedback and implementing it as mentioned further above as this is a passion project for many on the team, and we want to see it do its best out there. But with an airport of this calibre, there has to be a limit on the level of detail we go down to solely for the purpose of guaranteed performance and it being as best as it can. As mentioned earlier in this thread, we've optimized this scenery very well in-line with the MSFS SDK guidelines in hope to have it running smoothly on the minimum specced MSFS PC. The comparisons raised in the community are rather unjust, and we understand expectations may have been higher, but for an airport so large, we sadly couldn't go to the level others have without having a different side of issues.

Thank you.

And who asked for sattelite images? This is msfs not P3D. There is already very good sattelite images

[iniBuilds 73]

HI @DaWu,

Thanks for your question.

Simply to put, we have no control over their satellite imagery, so we're forced to use our own if we want to make changes or a higher-resolution image than what's available.

Custom satellite imagery is still part of the process for any high quality scenery in MSFS, the quality and tangibility of it won't suffice to our needs, since we don't have control over removing lines, windsocks, aircraft on aprons and lines and so on and so forth with the in-sim bing data.

From a developer's perspective and for an end result of a major payware development, it just isn't good enough by default. This also factors in the fact that there are users who don't use the Bing Imagery streaming, and the airport will look strange for them when not paired with a satellite image it was designed for.

Thank you.

[Christopher Low 5,354]

I appreciate the performance considerations that need to be taken into account for such a large airport in such a high density scenery area as London, but......can you imagine how awesome a fully modelled and lit Terminal 5 interior would look based on that photo posted by Blueshark747?

[GSalden 4,665]

The developer shows his will to make the scenery better and he explained their view in a very polite way.

I will follow the improvements and might eventually buy the airport.

Edited February 25, 2022 by GSalden