No FsWeekend, soon a new release will be available
This year, due to the Corona threat, there will be no FsWeekend in the Aviodrome. The NL2000 team understands this and hopes that next year the circumstances will be such that it can continue.
In the meantime, the NL2000 team has not been idle. Ever since the start of NL2000 in 1997 the NL2000 team members have been developing everything at home and despite the Corona this could continue. So we have good news, soon version v5.04 will be released which is based on aerial pictures from 2019.
Developing a scenery seems simple, but it takes a lot of time and also a lot of computer capacity. The photo sets are huge and processing them takes up a lot of disk space. The many donations we have received help us to keep the necessary hardware up to date. We are very grateful to everyone who helps us with this.
The photos from 2019 are not only more up to date, they are also much more beautiful in colour. Certainly in the east of the country, the photos from 2017 were somewhat less colourful. Version v5.04 contains, in addition to the 1 metre per pixel variant, another variant with 50cm per pixel for the high-end systems.
Lockheed Martin has now released version 5 of Prepar3D. DirectX 12 and the new render engine of Prepar3D have made the colours of the photo background much more beautiful. There are also new functions available like transparent runways. For the airports with grass runways, NL2000 has specially made separate packages of Prepar3Dv5 with photorealistic grass runways (EHAL, EHHV, EHMZ and EHTX). This makes landing on these fields much more realistic.
We are currently working hard to ensure that all NL2000 airports are neatly connected to the new subsurface. Wherever possible, updates will also be implemented immediately to make the airports more up to date.
It is possible that not all airports will be ready during the release, which will follow shortly after the release of version v5.04 in a separate release.
We get a lot of questions about the new Microsoft Flight Simulator. At this moment the SDK for this simulator is still under development at Microsoft and not all tools are available yet. As soon as they become available the NL2000 team will look into the possibilities to make the NL2000 scenery suitable for MSFS. At this moment we will have to wait and see.
Version v5.04 of NL2000 is now in beta testing phase. Here are some screenshots and some demo videos.
As soon as the release date is known we will announce it on our website.
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