Recently, a new airport was opened to the public in my country (LRBV for those interested). The project was announced a few years ago and it was supposed to be finished in 2022, but was delayed. Honestly I wasn't expecting to have it in x-plane too quickly but then I found out that the other sim already has it for free, with realistic buildings and all, and realised there's not much interest from the community in developing scenery for x-plane anymore. The old object libraries weren't ported to XP12, many of the airports too, and the gateway is a mess of airports that are unclaimed and unfixed. On the other hand, I was shocked by how many high quality airports were already developed for the other sim.

I can only hope for a payware add-on at this point, since it's the only area that still seems active.

For a freeware, it looks really good.  

4 hours ago, bogdansrb said:

LRBV for those interested

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

If you want it in the next XP scenery update.

currently one XP airport or another is updated around every two hours.

Edited June 20, 20232 yr by mSparks

 

We may have a suspected trolling attempt here. This guy has form.

6 hours ago, Brian Mackie said:

 

We may have a suspected trolling attempt here. This guy has form.

Maybe, but it is true that it has "slowed down" compared to the past, mostly because the quality of the airports is so much higher than before and so many need upgrading with the new shiney

 

8 hours ago, Brian Mackie said:

We may have a suspected trolling attempt here. This guy has form.

What makes you think he is trolling? I don't think he is particularly wrong.

He's not wrong, a lot of developers (freeware and payware) moved to MFS, including some big names. 

In terms of scenery gateway airports, as mSparks said, a lot of them are already fairly decent, so there is less activity on them these days but it is still on-going. 

Quote

Maybe, but it is true that it has "slowed down" compared to the past, mostly because the quality of the airports is so much higher than before and so many need upgrading with the new shiney

I see many airports as "unclaimed", so I don't think there's many people working on them. Just a few that come to mind: ESGG, LJLJ, LBSF, LYBE, LRCL, ENCN, EGGD.

Purely from a development point of view, yes, higher quality airports need more time. But afaik x-plane has better development tools so apart from the actual design and research, everything else must be easier.

I'm glad that the object libray mess for custom sceneries is on its way out as it was simply horrible to build up and maintain.

8 hours ago, Bjoern said:

I'm glad that the object libray mess for custom sceneries is on its way out as it was simply horrible to build up and maintain.

Yep, sadly I agree with this. Whenever I went to download an airport and seeing it needed 6000 different libraries, I'd just give up, which is a pity. OpenSceneryX which forced the use of an installer, and broken links to other libraries :/

The major issue was that most of these libraries didn't allow airport designers to just take the object out they wanted and include it in the scenery, which would have made life so much easier for the end-users.

15 hours ago, tonywob said:

Yep, sadly I agree with this. Whenever I went to download an airport and seeing it needed 6000 different libraries, I'd just give up, which is a pity. OpenSceneryX which forced the use of an installer, and broken links to other libraries 😕

The major issue was that most of these libraries didn't allow airport designers to just take the object out they wanted and include it in the scenery, which would have made life so much easier for the end-users.

Absolutely. Same here. 2-3 standard-libraries like OSX etc. are ok but there is no way i will download 50 different libraries again.