Got these two recently, went to check them out.

A mixed bag.

Distinctly unimpressed with the KIAH. OK'ish as an external model, but nothing special

but with all sorts of cheap touches. The tower looks good from the outside

but it's all fake - there is no interior

Same with the transit station below. Yes, there's a moving train

but no interior to the station

so, not worth hanging around here for any length of time

a quick pass through downtown

which has much better quality PG than Calgary (see my other recent post)

and on to FSimStudios KHOU

which is also, IMO, a lot better than their CYYC

and away south

I have been buying a lot of addons for MSFS lately, and am definitely getting the feeling that the quality is, to put it politely, somewhat variable. Names I used to feel I could rely on feel like they're just churning stuff out a bit now, and consistency within a developer's catalog is not a given. I shall definitely need more convincing in future before I buy too many more airports. Some of this stuff feels overpriced and under-developed.

9 hours ago, andy1252 said:

Distinctly unimpressed with the KIAH. OK'ish as an external model, but nothing special

Your screenshots at KIAH are for the first version and don't reflect the current status of the scenery. I suggest updating it, the difference is quite noticeable, mostly in the apron textures.

And, it seems you noticed the Control Tower using Parallax mapping, but you have completely skipped the fully modeled Terminal C that not only is made from scratch for MSFS, but has it's a full interiors, if that's important for you.

At some point, we should try to remember this is still a FLIGHT simulator, not a first-person game, and it doesn't even have something like P3D "Avatar mode", and if you are doing a big airport (KIAH is not just "big", it's huge), modeling interiors everywhere would not just kill the fps, it will add months to development time, which will affect the product price and possibly making the whole thing not even sustainable anymore, because it would risk not recovering the dev cost.

You haven't said anything about performances either. Parallax shading it's a good way to make an airport this large and also keep a good fps, and it's also a good way to make a proper port from an existing version, and it also allowed an extremely competitive price, considering the importance and the size of the airport.

We used exactly the same, identical, strategy for our LSZH scenery: a port from a 2007 version, with one Terminal heavily reworked (not even made from scratch) and the rest mostly adding PBR textures, sold at a very attractive price, and it's currently our absolute N.1 seller for airports, even considering it has to compete with a fairly good default handcrafted airport, clearly showing users DO appreciate a properly made port from FSX/P3D, when it's not just a straight conversion, but a good work that adds lots of native MSFS features, yet keeps good performance, and is sold at a competitive price.

 

13 hours ago, virtuali said:

I suggest updating it, the difference is quite noticeable,

Hi Umberto,

I have done so now, wasn't aware of the need for an update. Not really sure how much difference there is in the overall buildings. You're probably right about apron textures but they're not a thing I particularly notice anyway.  I've taken a few more shots, shown below, and will happily admit that I'm feeling better about the airport now. It looks better for some AI around it (courtesy of AIG), and I did find the more fully modelled Terminal C in the end as well. I do have GSX installed (along with most of your products) and so I will have a play at that terminal and see how my little pixel people behave there. I made no comments about performance as I rarely have an issue these days with my current machine.

I'm more than happy to revise my original comment about KIAH. It is a perfectly fine airport at its price point, which is very reasonable. I've certainly paid more for airports that are much more poorly put together.

I would just say though that your comment about "this is still a FLIGHT simulator" is increasingly no longer the whole story. I for one have no interest in the whole pretend pilot thing, and I know many other folk who feel the same, to various degrees. The single most important aspect of MSFS, and the reason it prospers, is that it is much more than a flight simulator - it is a world simulator. For the first time ever, we have a global environment worth examining up close, The fact that aircraft are currently the major means of doing so means that airports are also a major part of this scenario, and so themselves are increasingly being produced to be worthy of close examination. You may or may not approve of this trend yourself, but the fact that you feel obliged to include such features at all must mean that you see the commercial improtance of doing so.

Personally, I look forward to a time when things like the road and rail networks are more actively in use in the sim, and the whole photogrammetry system has matured to a level of stability and reliability that makes it a consistently reliable as autogen (but several times more attractive). If the same simulator can keep all those procedural pilots happy at the same time, well, we all win.

This is the sort of interior I found initially

and here are some shots of the fully modelled Terminal C, for the benefit of anybody who hasn't seen it

So like I said, I will go and edit my initial comment after posting this.

Edited to add - unable to amend comment in original post, sorry.

Edited June 1, 20233 yr by andy1252
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45 minutes ago, andy1252 said:

Not really sure how much difference there is in the overall buildings. You're probably right about apron textures but they're not a thing I particularly notice anyway

It won't, since the most users never had a problem with the modeling, they understand the need to keep the performances high, fact this is a port (except TB), and always keep in mind the price. 

But most users, instead, even those that liked the scenery overall, wanted better ground textures, and the update was focused just on that. I think the modeling is just fine, considering what the scenery is trying to achieve, which is offering a large airport, a flyable airport, one you'll enjoy returning to, because it's accurate, updated, and fps friendly.

 

45 minutes ago, andy1252 said:

It looks better for some AI around it (courtesy of AIG), and I did find the more fully modelled Terminal C in the end as well. I do have GSX installed (along with most of your products) and so I will have a play at that terminal and see how my little pixel people behave there

If you haven't tried those things yet, you missed  a lot of its best features. Great attention to the airport layout, parking assignment, parking codes, parking sizes, which should result in very realistic AI flow, within the constraint of what the MSFS AI system allows, of course.

I don't know if you ever followed the GSX Creators channel on Discord, where you find one of the most experience GSX users, which are in fact more creators, so really power users, and the general consensus is that even some of the most highly ranked airports out there, have big flaws in the layout, like wrong parking sizes, bad taxi layout, detail placed everywhere to trick users assuming the scenery "is detailed", which result in tons of vehicles placed in the worse position (a developer placed a *static* car on a vehicle road, so we get the heat from user that "GSX clashes into stuff" ), so we tried to take great care about it.

Haven't you noticed the taxilight side lights and center lights at night ? They all have their individual dynamic light, which is so carefully LOD-optimized, that you still get a better fps compared to airports that don't have it, and cost more than twice as much. 

Also, the KIAH manual explains also some of the never seen before features that works together with GSX, which are currently working at Terminals B and C, like the Terminal doors in both terminals opening at the right Gate, when passenger are Boarding/Deboarding.  A scrolling text in the Info display over the gate will become active, showing the operation is taking place. So if you were looking for immersion and eye candy (and not just "screenshot eye-candy", but something that makes sense in the context of the ground operations), there are several places where you can find it.

 

38 minutes ago, andy1252 said:

I made no comments about performance as I rarely have an issue these days with my current machine.

Not having issues, doesn't mean you won't see a difference compared to other similarly sized airports, and that won't translate into an actual benefit when you need it most, for example when on final, possibly in bad weather, the autopilot might be struggling and lose precision, because the fps is lower because airport is too heavy on modeling.

 

Interesting.  I see it as a flight simulator where I can appreciate the sophisticated avionics.  For open world stuff I play PS5 games.

On 6/4/2023 at 8:19 AM, Jack_Sawyer said:

Interesting.  I see it as a flight simulator where I can appreciate the sophisticated avionics.  For open world stuff I play PS5 games.

Agreed.

I think the "I for one have no interest in the whole pretend pilot thing" is the most ridiculous comment I have found to date... This guy is is clearly in the wrong place...