What happened to the US airport scenery vendors?

[Manny 1,293]

What happened to Fly Tampa? Flight scenery?The two primary US Airport scenery vendors and they are in hiding. Now new add on vendors for airports either. Whats going on? Thought SP1 fixed many of the issues.This is getting boring.Manny

[Paul J 349]

Don't know, Manny: I've missed them, too. It may just be that MS has raised the bar with their pretty good renditions of many of the airports that FT had done in FS9. FSX's KSEA is an example of "almost as good as" FlyTampa's FS9 version, so FT would have to work their backsides off bettering it - and then - as the MS version IS so good (at least, good enough for me) I think it would have to be a huge degree better than the default to generate the same sales as the FS9 version. George and Martin can do it, I'm sure, but is the market there yet? I think as long as there are folks using single-core and one gig FSX won't have the same customer base as FS9 has for a long time. I also think that Flight Scenery is very much a one-man band, like FS Nav and FS Passengers. In his two works Vauchez produced the best sceneries available: nothing is like Portland; but for him to do it again. . . . . hmmmm..

[Manny 1,293]

Well..even though MS has bettered (is that a word?) their airports, there is something of value when its customized with a specific runway and airport surrounding textures and custom buildings. and custom textures on all the object around it so we know it is that specific signature airport. Or at least I wish there were addon vendors who would provide for airport aerial shot of high resolution texture and custom runway texture if not buildings for a bunch of airports. Manny

[jbroadwa 0]

I can answer some of your questions Manny.Vauchez of FlightScenery is working on another project right now called Airliner XP (www.airliner-xp.com). His attention is fully focused on that work for now (at least that's my impression from the FlightScenery forums). My other impression is that he has not given up on airport design. He's just on hiatus.FlyTampa just released their Fly St. Maarten a few months back; so, they are still in the game. George did say though on the FlyTampa forums,"I'm not currently working on FS Scenery. I'v tried, but I'm just bored of it for now & have a full-time job doing exactly the same type of work for a non flightsim product. Martin is still with you all at full speed :)" So, FlyTampa has cut back but it still going to produce sceneries via Martin according to the above quote.Imaginesim is producing airports every 3 months including some FSX airports. In my opinion, they are not as detailed as FlyTampa or FlightScenery, but they are still pretty good. So, I think airports are becoming available for FSX. I think we just got used to the breakneck pace they were being produced for FS9 (and still are being produced). Once designers (both payware and freeware like myself) get their hands around the new design constraints, you'll start seeing more show up on the market (or in the AVSIM library). As for adding ground imagery, you can do that as freeware developers pretty easily. There is a new freeware tool to design airports similar to the AFCAD tool of FS9, but with the ability to add taxiway signs as well as a few other cool things. There are also freeware tools coming out to download imagery and help place it via the SDK (or just use the SDK directly). I've started doing this for my home airport and it's not that bad. Anyway, sorry for the long post. If I'm incorrect on anything ,especially dealing with the payware developers, please correct me. I only got this information from posts on the payware forums by the developers directly. Developers are of course always free to change their minds and may have new information since they last posted on their forums.Take care,Joshua

[Manny 1,293]

Hey Joshua,Thats good to know. Yeah. I knew about Vauchez and the airbus project. But I also heard that he is AWOL from there too.. not sure. All the other information you gave is all news to be. So that was good. Thanks.About placing airport photo textures for the airport with custom runway and taxiway textures...an easy tool where us hobbiests can pull down from Foogle maps or any such things and do it ourselves...that would be awesome. BTW..what is the name of the freeware tool to download imagery that you say is coming out?ThanksManny

[LuisFelizTirado 33]

Hello Manny,Please see SBuilderX by Luis de S

[jbroadwa 0]

Luis,Thanks for the update. I was doing the imagery placement using the SDK tools directly. Manny, the AFCAD-like tool I was referring to is FSX Planner. This tool allows you to change the runways, taxiways, parking spots, gates, etc just like AFCAD but with more features. I believe it is in the library as well. Happy development,Joshua

[Manny 1,293]

Luis,Very nice tool. Thanks. I just tried it and got something working. need to tinker with it a little more. I got a phototexture for my home airport and it looks good. Except I need to figure out how to get those high resolution city textures. Thanks again. This is exactly what I was looking for.MannyThanks Joshua. Let me look at that flight planner. I have the F1's AFCAD tool. But I just using it for location duplicate AFCAD files for now. Not learnt to use the tool yet. Does either of this tool let you replace the default runway texture with a custom one?