Although our company, NMG Simulations, is not that old, we have personally been in the Microsoft Flight Simulator business since 1984!
We started designing scenery with the release of the Airport and Scenery Design package for Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 in 1990. Unfortunately, the limitations of Microsoft Flight Simulator 4 only allowed for airports in the US to be enhanced because only certain parts of the US were available in the simulator.
True scenery designing on a global scale became a reality with the release of Flight Simulator 5 in 1993 as Microsoft Flight Simulator 5 for the first time included the whole world. It was now possible to design any airport anywhere in the world!
The first South African scenery package was born in 1995 and distributed as freeware. It contained only the large international airports. Over the following years, several versions of the South Africa scenery were released as freeware, all featuring more and more airports.
In 1998 with the release of Flight Simulator 98, the South Africa scenery package featured all 770 publicly accessible airports in South Africa, Lesotho, and Swaziland. It was a milestone project for us. Some of the airports in the package, including the road system was designed by Johan Van Wyk of Aeroworx fame.
In 1999 shortly after the release of Flight Simulator 2000 we decided to go the commercial route. Our reason to ask for money was simply to cover costs on our side. Designing scenery involves taking photos and buying flight charts and airport information, which all costs money. At this time, we parted ways with Johan Van Wyk and he went on to pursuit other things.
We released two versions of the South Africa scenery for Flight Simulator 2000: a standard version which was released as freeware and a commercial version which included a detailed road system and upgraded airports.
In 2002 with the release of Flight Simulator 2002, we released net next version of our South Africa scenery for the platform. It was our first fully commercial version of the scenery. No free-ware version was made available this time. We also released a Mauritius scenery package for Flight Simulator 2002 which unfortunately did not sell well…
In 2004 the demand for higher detailed scenery became a reality. Flight Simulator 2004 had just been released. We quickly realised that covering the whole country with the high detail as expected from our clients will mean that we will have to release the scenery by province. That is why we started with the Western Cape 2004 scenery. The idea was that we will release every province separately as we complete them. Unfortunately, this was never realised. The amount of work and the detail associated were just too much. It would literally take years to complete the whole country! We did however release several packages, including our first stand-alone airport package: Port Elizabeth 2004! We realised that the only way to design high quality scenery was to design the airports separately with as much detail as possible.
In 2006 with the release of Flight Simulator X we released our airport packages separately. Every airport was designed with utmost realism in mind.
In 2009 we were asked by the Simuflight group of flight schools to produce a South African scenery package for their simulators which ran on X-Plane and that is how we ended up in the X-Plane market.
In 2012, Microsoft decided to end the Microsoft Flight Simulator franchise. The decision to do so, shocked the world to a standstill, but it was not the end. Lockheed Martin bought some of the code of Flight Simulator X and then developed Prepar3D from it. Naturally we started developing airports for the package as the scenery engine was similar to that of Flight Simulator X. We also continued developing airports for Microsoft Flight Simulator X as many users continued to use it even if Microsoft was no longer on board.
Unfortunately, in 2023 and due to economic reasons beyond our control, sales on airport scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator X, Prepar3D and X-Plane declined to such a state that it no longer was viable for us to continue with their development, and we then abandoned it. The packages that we have developed for these flight simulators are now available as freeware on various freeware websites.
Since 2024, we are developing airports for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 only and we plan to continue doing so with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024.