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Announcing The Gate to the Great Lakes


Cameron
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Promotional video is below!

Captains,

It is with a lot of excitement that I get to announce a new developer and product today!

Attitude Simulations has come aboard with X-Aviation to produce a new series of regions in the X-Plane scenery world. The first series/regions of sceneries will fall under the title of 'The Gate to the Great Lakes' and will feature numerous regions (both cities and airports) within the State of Michigan that when purchased together will give you an entire region of unparalleled detail never before seen in X-Plane! The amount of work that has gone into producing this series is immense, and we are absolutely certain you will be in awe of what you see when you get a chance to see it in sim for yourself!

The Gate to the Great Lakes series will feature Custer Airfield (KTTF), Ann Arbor Municipal Airport (KARB), Erie International Airport (KERI), Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport (KDTW), and Mackinac Island Airport (KMCD). More may be added depending on how the community reacts to this type of scenery, so if you like what you see here (and we really hope you do), please consider supporting this type of development with your purchase. This is a very dedicated, hard working team of people, and there are other regions outside of Michigan already in the works!

The first airport and region to be released will be Custer Airfield (KTTF). We are pleased to announce it will be available for purchase this weekend! Subsequent regions as listed above will be released after Custer and are already very far into development.

So, with the above said, let's talk about the Custer Airfield region!

Custer Airfield and the nearby town of Monroe, MI. Custer Airfield is small public airstrip located just 20 miles south of KDTW Detroit. The airfield was created in 1946 and originally used as a bombing practice area. There are still signs to this day warning of digging and metal detecting as there have been recent discoveries of unexploded ordinance. Monroe, known for the partial meltdown of its Fermi II nuclear facility back in 1966 (included as POI), is located on Lake Erie’s western coast. KTTF Custer is in perfect range to some exciting destinations, such as New York City, Chicago, Cincinnati, Boston, Washington D.C. & Toronto.

Why start with Custer and not the massive, greater known Detroit International Airport? Attitude Simulations wanted to develop an airfield close to home that would offer the real world pilot and avid simmer the ability to simulate realistic VFR training as well as a tough workload in instrument conditions. Working in the pattern you will notice an incredible amount of detail below that helps to bring in a great feeling of immersion as well as flying so close to DTW and having to be aware of the Class Bravo shelf and altitude restrictions in the area. When DTW is landing to the North the traffic comes in directly overhead of KTTF. This presents many challenges and for online pilots it will be a fun place to fly their GA aircraft on busy nights. 

Helicopter pilots will find themselves getting lost in the details. With several helipads and fun landing zones off field, you air beaters will love simulating medical emergencies and police operations in Monroe, MI. I implore all of those police pilots to search for some illegal operations hiding in the bushes. Utility & charter helicopter pilots should depart from KTTF and give the raised platform at The DTE Fermi II Nuclear plant a shot. Gusty winds off of Lake Erie can make the final approach a bit rough but tons of fun! 

Here are the features for this first region:

⦁    Hand painted airport ground textures with highly detailed specular maps

⦁    64 square miles / 164 square kilometers of high quality USGS orthoimagery

⦁    Thousands of hand-placed custom “autogen” buildings

⦁    Realistic foliage for this region of the US

⦁    Commercial areas include actual businesses and industrial warehouses

⦁    DTE Fermi II Nuclear Plant completely modeled with custom raised Helipad

⦁    Accurate night lighting for the airport and surrounding area

⦁    PBR materials for the airport’s structures and static objects

⦁    Many hard to find Easter Eggs

⦁    Animated custom windsocks and airport beacon

⦁    Custom accurate static aircraft

⦁    Created from on site photography and videos

⦁    Plausible LIT textures for most structures

⦁    Edited road system and powerlines

 

Video:

A promotional video has been put together to show off this amazing scenery. We hope you enjoy and and support the cause of what promises to be some amazing scenery packages and states/regions throughout the country developed by some very talented individuals at Attitude Simulations!

 

Again, we really hope you like what you see and find the announcement of a developer like this around for X-Plane as exciting as we do. There are many developers which exist for MSFS and P3D who are skilled (ORBX comes to mind as one), but nothing of this caliber has ever been produced for X-Plane. We are proud of what's been produced, and with your support for this kind of scenery creation we are excited at the prospect of bringing many, many more!

We'll see you at the release this weekend! :)

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14 minutes ago, Cameron said:

Heavily optimized. I am not noticing any crazy impacts on my machine vs default.

Very specific. How much is a "crazy" impact? The machine gives up and self-destructs? 

I understand it is difficult to predict how it will affect different machines, but perhaps a little more specificity on the differences you are seeing in on your own setup would be of interest to prospective supporters. 

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14 minutes ago, nrarend said:

Very specific. How much is a "crazy" impact? The machine gives up and self-destructs? 

I understand it is difficult to predict how it will affect different machines, but perhaps a little more specificity on the differences you are seeing in on your own setup would be of interest to prospective supporters. 

I'm not going to turn this topic into such a discussion of semantics. Plenty of people will be able to prove my point this weekend. You can wait till those verdicts are in. :)

The video in and of itself does a good enough job in showing fluidity even with capture software running.

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I've been looking forward to this ever since I Steaven's announcement a few years ago. It will definitely be one of the nicest sceneries X-Plane has seen. 

12 minutes ago, Cameron said:

Requests never hurt and are always welcome! Your show of support for the product is the first step to ensuring things like that happen. :)

In that case I'd love to see something like this for the Southwest. Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, etc have a ton of small to medium sized airports located in the middle of stunning scenery. ;)

Edited by x-plane 123
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This needs to be done at major airports so that X plane has high quality add-ons for the first time. Not just great freeware but like ORBX level scenery as you stated. Also this needs to be excited expanded across the Midwest region so that pilot Edge can work it's way across the country.

Great work!

Sent from my Pixel 2 XL using Tapatalk

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3 minutes ago, signmanbob said:

This scenery looks like Orbx for X-Plane.  I am very impressed.

Stuff like this kills my retirement savings,:P I hope you realize that.

Will these sceneries have people moving around like Orbx?

Who needs retirement funds when you have places to fly  ;) jk!

We will have 3d people in all of our future releases. Thanks for the wonderful comment!

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Wow, it looks absolutely stunning, as signmanbob says; like ORBX for X-Plane! I have a ton of ORBX stuff for FSX/P3D and only recently "converted" to X-Plane after the release of XP11. The reason I have so many ORBX sceneries (besides their beauty), is because I got most of them when they were still priced at AU$19 (US$15) and they have frequent sales as well, up to 40% off. I find, however, that X-Plane add-ons are more expensive on average and I have purchased very few so far. Please make this affordable and I think it will do well.

Edited by tjitah
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Well...seems like what I wanted to say has been said already! So without any further ado, your scenery looks Smashing! And I love ❤️ the Easter Egg statement that there are many :)!  Since I fly mainly the tubes, your scenery will be perfect to practice in a little Cessna or Mooney once again while enjoying your beautiful work! Thank you for that too!

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Impressive and I am willing to buy, but to be honest if the prices are above ORBx (and they are way too expensive with +$30 for airports and +$50 for regions) then it will be too expensive too me to support this project. 

Edited by wim1976
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