We have just released East London airport for Microsoft Flight Simulator so what now?
One of our clients have pointed out that there was a problem with Cape Town in that the AI traffic will taxi via the military area to Runway 19 and not past the Cargo area as in real life. The reason we found was because the route to Runway 19 via the cargo area was too complex for the AI router to understand. We have simply added too many nodes to get those green runway centreline lights to follow the centre line. Back when we designed the airport, that was the only way to do it. We must add that the AI traffic system also did not work correctly back then, but all that is now fixed, and we now have to update all our airports to take advantage of these. We are now working on fixing Johannesburg in the same way as we did Cape Town by making the routes for the AI traffic simpler and easier to interpret. This will without a doubt make the flow of AI traffic smoother.
Microsoft has also now added the ability for us to add walls and fences by simply drawing them on the ground. Previously we had to add the parts of the fences one by one which was a long and most tedious task. That is why we did not add all the fences to our airports as we would have liked to, but only the most visible ones. The new way of adding fences and walls is also much more frame rate friendly than the old way. We are now also removing all the old fences and replacing them with more frame rate friendly versions. We can now also add the airport perimeter fencing as always wanted to do! Cape Town is already fixed in this way.
We have also found that our small airport series is way too dependent on the objects included in the World Updates that Microsoft has released up to now. We have received numerous questions about objects not appearing as in our screen shots of the product. The reason for that was that you need to have all the World Updates installed for the scenery to work. We use numerous objects from those World Updates in the small airports and that is how we can get the price that cheap for you. It seems that this was a mistake so we will also be fixing those airports and remove those recycled objects. After the update, you will be able to run our small airports on any system even if you do not have any of the World Updates installed. This means that there will be no more objects that does not appear because you do not have the right World Update package installed.
Our next airport on the list to be done is Lanseria International Airport and that will be followed by King Shaka International in Durban. We may also do the old Durban Airport as well, depending on public demand. If you would like to see the old Durban Airport in Microsoft Flight Simulator, then please let us know!
There are three airports that are crucial to be updated and they are Cape Town (completed), Johannesburg, and Port Elizabeth. After we have updated these airports, we will start with Lanseria and then do the rest of the updates in between the release of these airports.
As always, please let us know if you have any questions or suggestions! We appreciate your feedback more than you know!