Verticalsim has in the past few days released a new product in their VStates product-range, released a major update for their rendition of Sarasota Airport (KSRQ) and published results of the survey they organized back in January 2021.
VStates Montana
First of all, let’s begin with the VStates Montana release. While the project was discontinued back in November 2020 due to high server hosting costs, Verticalsim has found a cheaper server hosting and “revived” the project. For those unfamiliar with the VStates product range, it is a series of freeware color-corrected orthoimagery for different states in the United States for X-Plane 11.
VStates Montana is as well as other products in the range freeware and can be downloaded through the developer’s Google Drive.
Sarasota Airport (KSRQ)
Continuing through the news, Verticalsim has today released a major update for his rendition of Sarasota Airport (KSRQ) for X-Plane 11. The update features new taxiway lighting as well as new grass textures or edited tree colors, for example. Furthermore, new Southwest gates were added to the scenery together with new light poles.
Not to forget, users will now be able to see the terminal interior at night as the glass material was tweaked in the new version of the scenery.
In order to install the update, simply download the new files from the store of your purchase and replace the old files. If you want to purchase the scenery you can do so through the Verticalsim website for a decent price of $8.49 which is equal to about €7.
Changelog (v1.2)
- Added SWA to gates
- Added more light poles
- Updated groundroutes
- Switched export target to XP V11.50+
- Changed out ortho for a better source
- Edited tree colors
- Tweaked glass to be more realistic (You can now see the interior at night)
- New grass textures
- New taxi lighting
Survey results
As we mentioned in the article introduction, Verticalsim organized a small community survey back in January to get more knowledge on what the community wants.
Based on the results that were shared, 72% of the survey participants use X-Plane 11 as their primary simulator, about 38% are looking into switching to Microsoft Flight Simulator when more payware addons become available, and about 65% of the survey participants are still purchasing addons for X-Plane 11.
Furthermore, a majority of people prefer Google Drive for downloading VStates, and 78% want the developer to finish the project with all 51 states. All survey results that were made public can be seen below.
