The founder and head honcho at FlightBeam, Amir Salehi, has been sharing some delicious images on their upcoming New Zealand airport releases for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Following the publication of several images of Wellington for MSFS at the end of last month, Auckland Airport is next in the spotlight. The primary international gateway for New Zealand is being worked in parallel with Wellington, which follows on their promise for an NZAA for MSFS which was released for P3D.

For Wellington - the project has been pushed back from it's original slated release in August due to Sim Update 5, which brought significant disruptions to users and developers alike due to its foundational changes in the simulator. Regardless, the team remains committed to get it out the door which would serve to compliment Auckland Airport when released.

For Auckland Airport, development for MSFS has begun during the main development phase for P3D (it being branched out into a seperate version during development). The airport will represent the best of FlightBeam's visual skills, featuring the latest real airport expansion under construction, their fifth iteration of their jetway modelling, hand crafted PBR texturing, bespoke terrain recreation which includes coastal rocks and accurate runway slopes, and then some.

FlightBeam is high regarded for their sceneries, with Amir himself previously a video game developer. With roots in FSX and P3D, following a very brief stint in X-Plane 11, the team quickly moved on and settled in the world of Microsoft Flight Simulator upon the simulator's announcement and release.

The team's passion for scenery is most visibly demonstrated on their MSFS releases, with Amir noting that none of their products are "ports" to the simulator, as they are thoroughly redeveloped from the ground up, using native models catered specifically for MSFS done on 3DS Max, texturing was redeveloped with PBR in mind and assembled together with the MSFS SDK, all in all, the airports harness the power of the rendering engine in MSFS. Each airport takes up a significant chunk of time, with each asset reauthored to take advantage of the modern simulator.

In contrast, Amir noted "A port...is a product that has been converted from it's previous compiled format, to a different compiled format."

To check the original update posts, visit FlightBeam's blog on the following entries: Wellington Update, Auckland Update. We'll keep you updated on this front, so stay tuned!