Hello there!
This month we’re focusing on all aspects of scenery! We have exciting news about the newest World Editor and a major Gateway milestone.
Upcoming Dates
- Aero Friedrichshafen – April 10-13 in Friedrichshafen, Germany
- FSExpo – June 7-9 in Orlando, FL, USA
We’ll be joining our European distributor, Aerosoft, in Germany. Visitors will be able to experience X-Plane 11 in virtual reality, as well as purchase X-Plane and X-Plane add-ons. We’ll be a major sponsor at FSExpo so keep your eyes on your inbox for more in-depth details to arrive soon!
World Editor 2.0 is here
World Editor has gotten so many major improvements that it was time to get an entirely new version number! WED 2.0’s major features include: now 64 bits on every platform (Mac/Win/Linux), automatic background maps, NAVAID overlay, adjustable text size, and various bug fixes.
The automatic background maps & NAVAID overlay layers are the highlights of the changes
because they make aligning an airport in WED easier than ever. You can enable OpenStreetmap or ESRI Orthoimagery to see exactly where the nearby roads in X-Plane will be, or trace the satellite imagery to make an exact match to the real world airport. Enabling the NAVAID overlay can quickly show if anything is out of alignment, and is also quite useful to precisely place pavement polygons underneath antenna installations.
WED 2.0 is currently posted as a beta version and you can snag a copy of it here.
Mobile News
As announced in our live Q&A in February, full world scenery for X-Plane Mobile is expected in Summer 2019! The team is hard at work making autogen scenery capabilities & huge scenery size efficient and mobile-friendly so that your flights will be able to take you anywhere around the globe.
Tips & Tricks
Learn more about World Editor and designing custom scenery with prolific scenery artist and pilot Jan Vogel! He has posted an in-depth, 21 part video tutorial series on YouTube that covers every aspect of scenery creation. It uses the previous version of WED but is still a great tool to get started or take your scenery development to the next level.
Featured Add Ons
Two scenery packs and three new aircraft were released last month. Check them out in our featured add ons round up!
Gateway News
On March 12, the X-Plane Scenery Gateway received its 10,000th “recommended” scenery submission! What an amazing milestone! Since going live in August 2014, our artist community has made nearly 24,000 submissions to the Gateway, and we would like to express our gratitude to each end every one of them for a fantastic achievement. We couldn’t have done it without you.
Collectively we have moved X-Plane forward to the point where it arguably features the most comprehensive and accurate global airports of any platform. We still have much work to do as over 20,000 airports are still up for grabs, but Gateway volumes continue to trend upwards, and we look forward to a place in the future where X-Plane features accurate models of every airport a flight simmer could conceivably want to fly to.
Stats as of March 25:
- 3D airports: 10,098
- Scenery packs submitted to date: 23,663
- Registered artists: 6,510
- Airports with Taxi-routes:
4,821 - Airports with Ground-routes: 1,594
- Airports with ATC Flow: 1,914
Happy flying!
— The X-Plane Team
