Aerosoft took to their Instagram page to announce the release date for their rendition of Frankfurt Airport (EDDF) for Microsoft Flight Simulator. This will be the latest entry into their Mega Airport series for the platform. Furthermore, a lot of information and behind-the-scenes previews and snippets were shared by the team on their YouTube channel.
Frankfurt Airport Previews – Part 1
Through an extensive developer interview hosted by Rafi (Raphael Maicher) on the official Aerosoft YouTube channel, the team, specifically Lukas and Jo (Jo Erland), shared lots of behind-the-scenes information about their upcoming project. The first part starts off with a brief introduction of the team in question and shifts to the massive size of the airport and how intimidating it was at first. The development first started with the northern cargo area of Frankfurt Airport also incorporating the Lufthansa Technik hangar. This area of the scenery was done before the team visited the real-world location.
The team spent a whole day at the real-world location capturing reference pictures and videos to create an authentic rendition in the sim. One of the challenging aspects of this endeavor was the terminal recreation and modeling in the sim. Frankfurt Airport is quite large and old and has lots of terminals with distinct characteristics, variety, and architecture that the team wanted to capture in the best way possible.
Speaking of the terminal, Rafi asked that another primary concern would be the performance impact on simmers’ PCs owing to the massive size of the scenery. A huge scenery would naturally have lots of objects, more buildings, more textures, and so on, and a big impact on performance. The team’s objective was to maximize detail while not sacrificing performance. They achieve this by reducing polygon count as much as possible without yielding performance. The performance is further increased by optimizing the LOD and finding more opportunities for improvement once modeling is complete.
Rafi then asked about the terraforming of the area the airport occupies and its surroundings and if it was challenging. The team says that although it wasn’t the most challenging, it was a little time-consuming owing to the size of the airport. They possess basic data that helps model the incline and decline of taxiways but a lot of it has to be manually smoothed out to prevent jagged rectangles. The team also received final renders of how the under-construction terminal 3 will look like and will be modeled that way upon release. It will however not be operational and the interior will not be modeled. That will be released as part of an update later down the line when the real-world location opens.
Part 2
The second part of the “interview” series primarily focuses on the terminal interiors of the airport, the southern side, and the dynamic night lighting. The primary motive behind recreating an interior for an airport rendition is of course immersion. Jo Erland discusses how it is something for the flight crew to look at when parked at a gate.
He then further states that not all of the interior is intricately modeled and lists two primary reasons for doing so. The first is the massive size of the airport and the terminals which would lead to massive implications for the performance of the simulator. Furthermore, modeling and texturing intricate interiors would eat up development time that could instead be utilized on other, more essential aspects of the scenery and refining them.
The interview then shifts to discussing the dynamic night lighting of Frankfurt Airport. Lukas was the primary developer working on the lighting and talked about just how much lighting there is around the scenery. The airport has a lot of variation in terms of floodlights with more than 40 different types modeled in the scenery and how a lot more exist in real life. Even service roads around the airport have been lit up with floodlights.
Back in the earlier days of development, the fire station was some of the first few sneak peeks shared regarding the Frankfurt Airport project. The new general aviation airport has been modeled and is located next to the fire station. The team discusses how a lot of the terminal buildings were a focus during development and its modeling was essential to recreate Frankfurt Airport authentically.
Part 3
This last interview video touches upon the real-world footage captured by the team at Frankfurt Airport and Rafi also thanked the many people who helped make this possible. The team has added lots of minor but cool “easter eggs” sprinkled throughout the airport for the people who work at the real-world airport to find.
The team also responds to a query from the community regarding the development time of the product. The airport remained in development for around a year and roughly ten people contributed to the project. One cool detail that the team added and was made possible by the footage captured was the one-directional taxiway lighting on the center line of the taxiways. This information wasn’t available on any data that the team previously had and was only made possible by talking to the workforce at the airport.
Another doubt expressed by the community was compatibility with the upcoming Microsoft Flight Simulator which will release on November 19 of this year. The team as of now does not know what the simulator looks like and how easy it will be to transition to the new sim. However, the product will be updated at some point to be fully compatible with MSFS2024.
Release date and more
The team does not fully disclose what their next project will be once Frankfurt Airport is released next week. That’s right, Frankfurt Airport will be releasing next week, on the 5th of September 2024 as announced on the official Aerosoft Instagram page. The team does plan to have a release party on an eventful day with a few other guests who will join and talk about the scenery. The interview series then concludes with Rafi thanking Jo and Lukas for joining and for sharing their insights surrounding the development of the airport.
Closing Notes
After sharing the release date with us, Rafi also announced that both VATSIM and IVAO online flying networks will be hosting an event in Frankfurt on release night. Safe to say things will be busy on Thursday evening. Nevertheless, a very exciting and insightful behind-the-scenes discussion hosted by Rafi at Aerosoft and we are excited for release day. For more flight sim-related news, announcements, releases, and more, do read our other articles on FSNews.
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