FSElite Exclusive: Behind the Scenes with Pilot Plus’ Bristol Airport (EGGD) Definitive

We delivered a few Behind the Scene type articles with a few Orbx products over the past few weeks. The community reception was excellent and so it’s going to become a nice trend going forward as we…

FSElite Exclusive: Behind the Scenes with Pilot Plus’ Bristol Airport (EGGD) Definitive

We delivered a few Behind the Scene type articles with a few Orbx products over the past few weeks. The community reception was excellent and so it’s going to become a nice trend going forward as we see new releases. This time, we’re with Joe from Pilot Plus, who gave us some insight into their soon-to-be-released Bristol Airport (EGGD) Definitive Edition.

This project has a personal attachment to me considering it’s my home airport, so was extremely excited to see it brought to the simulator in an updated manner. I won’t go on too much and instead, leave you with Joe from Pilot Plus who will talk about some of the development that went on behind the scenes.

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The project was initiated with regular on foot visits to the real airport. We spent days analysing key buildings and all infrastructures from a modelling point of view. The multitude of these visits was to gain a deep understanding of the aesthetics of the airport environment and surrounding area.

We spent many hours on foot around the airport collecting texture samples and reference imagery, as well as spending time in both remote and busy areas to get a feel for the environment (spatial awareness).

Important for us and for a Definitive experience is having accurate models of the main apron and terminal areas. From the above image, you can see how we’ve included every small detail to bring a true representation of Bristol to the flight simulator.

To make a realistic environment we focused importance on the ground and grunge as well as the buildings, ensuring it is accurate to the airports’ operations. X-Plane’s PBR rendering looks fantastic, so we’ve taken full advantage of that at Bristol. Sunset and sunrise look phenomenal, with the sun bouncing through cracks in the concrete but behaving differently for the grunge.

We’re proud to announce the launch of Adaptive Vegetation in our X-Plane Definitive products. The picture above shows a nice Autumn day at the flight school entrance, you can see the vegetation reflects an Autumn day with bushy orange leaves! Winter will change too; you’ll see leaves have fallen off the trees!

All of this will change on the fly, no simulator refresh needed, just change the date!

Bringing an airport to life at night in the simulator is a difficult task, so we visited the airport numerous times at dusk, morning and night to identify the nightscape look and feel. The flight school area is the most dynamic, with halogen glows and bright white casts.

Like everything in the airport, the lights were hand placed too. The A38 road linking the main terminal to the flight school area, on the lead up to runway 27, looks great on approach! You can also see the light casts being blocked by the trees too!

The airport looks great from above too! We’ve flown around Bristol in a PA28 from the flight school, and our atmospheric aerial imagery, when compared to that in sim, shows a true to life replication.

We are very proud of Bristol and launching our new range, and we can’t wait for you to try our Definitive sim experience!

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Thank you, Joe, for taking the time to give us some more insight into the development and also areas of the airport that stand out to you.

Bristol Airport (EGGD) Definitive Edition from Pilot Plus will be on sale for X-Plane 11 very soon. We’ll let you know once it’s released.

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Calum Martin
Calum has been an avid fan of Flight Sim since the release of FS2000 and has developed his love for aviation ever since.
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