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Scenery Review: OMDB – Dubai International Airport by FeelThere


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Scenery Review : OMDB – Dubai International Airport by FeelThere

 

Introduction
Feelthere have been active in the world of flight simulation for quite some time now, with my introduction to them being the E-Jet series for FS2004, which I greatly enjoyed. Unfortunately, a few of their products hit below the bar, so when I saw their rendition of Dubai Airport for X-Plane 11, I was intrigued to see how it would fare. 

 

Dubai International Airport is the primary international airport serving Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and is the world's busiest airport by international passenger traffic, with eighty-eight million passengers in 2017. Spread over an area of 7,200 acres of land, Terminal 3 is the second-largest building in the world by floor space and the largest airport terminal in the world. The Emirates hub is the largest airline hub in the Middle East as it handles 51% of all passenger traffic and accounts for approximately 42% of all aircraft movements at the airport. If you're a fan of the mighty A380, then this is the airport to visit.

 

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First Impressions
Upon first loading the airport, I was greeted with a beautiful-looking runway, however, I immediately noticed some lack of textures, specifically a ground base texture. I will discuss this in a later section, as well as a fix, plus other enhancements. The airport itself is a bit more up to date, featuring the new gates on the north side, and an updated airport layout.

 

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Exploring The Scenery
Starting off with the main terminals, the design is quite basic, yet Feelthere have modeled the exterior to an acceptable quality, albeit without any interior details, which are (of late) becoming a standard in today’s airport environments. The tower seems accurate enough when compared to photos of its real-life counterpart, and overall, if one is happy enough just looking at the exterior, then the modelling here is perfectly sufficient. Moving towards the clutter around the airport, there is plenty of it to be found, with lots of crates, carts, and other airport objects scattered throughout the airport.

 

This comes at a cost however, and for my system, which can handle X-Plane 11 in almost any scenario above 30FPS, (save for DD Design Chicago Airports) this particular scenery did take its toll, dropping the framerate to the high twenties and low thirties in OpenGL, with all my settings cranked up, minus the AA which is set at a conservative two times. When switching over to the Vulkan API, I saw a slight increase into the thirties, but it rarely went into the forties. This would be something to think about when you are looking to purchase this scenery, as it is a hard hitter even on a powerful PC.

 

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Textures
Going back to something I mentioned at the start of the review, and I must say that when it came to the texture work, I found the textures themselves to be quite repetitive. This was later confirmed when I happened to view the airport’s scenery files. Feelthere shipped Dubai with a total of 132 textures for the entire airport, of which fifty-two of them are Normal files for PBR, eighteen are LIT files for the night lighting of the terminal textures, twenty-seven files for stains, dirt, and runway markings/textures, and just thirty-five files that are used to texture the vast majority of the models. This means that there is a sad lack of variation in the airport 3D model textures, and it really shows. The runway and taxiways look great, and credit where credit is due, Feelthere impressed me with the runway, with the skid marks reflecting the light perfectly and giving it the rubbery appearance it should have. This sadly is one of the highlights of the texture work, and it leads me into part two of the textures.

 

Feelthere Dubai has no ground poly for a texture. It instead sits upon the default X-Plane 11 airport texture, leaving the entire airport looking very out of place and flat. I noticed this on the first load and immediately exited the simulator to correct this. Using Ortho4XP, I created tiles for the entire peninsula of Dubai, with the immediate vicinity of OMDB being created in zoom level 19. This gave the airport its much-deserved ground texture and allowed the runways and taxiways to shine in their new background. I also installed the X-Asia freeware enhancement pack so as to bring the entire city to life, and this included new buildings, autogen, and custom landmarks. These two changes helped the airport look much more in place and I would highly recommend using them together.

 

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Lighting
The lighting at OMDB was nothing overly special but it does make use of X-Plane’s impressive global lighting effects by default. I’ll leave the photos to show how it looks as there was nothing of note that stood out. The terminal's interior lighting is very basic and consists of textures that “glow” at night, and though the effect isn’t overly convincing, it does the job.

 

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Conclusion
Dubai airport by Feelthere is one of those airports that came out late, but which is a little cheaper than other offerings. Sadly, it does not stand up to the quality of other versions of Dubai, as it is hard on performance, only covers the airport and nothing else, and sadly lacks detail and texture work. For $19.99, it needs some updates to become a better representation and make it worth the money.

 

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If you’re looking at adding Dubai Airport to your collection, I would highly recommend first looking at other options at the Org before going for this rendition. In saying that, with a bit of work from Feelthere, I do believe it could be pushed up a notch, but as it stands in its current form, I would have to say, think carefully before purchasing. 

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OMDB – Dubai International Airport by FeelThere is now available from the X-Plane.Org Store here:

 

OMDB – Dubai International Airport

Price at time of writing US$19.99

 

Features:

  •  SAM animated jetways (SAM 3 is required-free)
  •  Custom terrain mesh
  •  Custom lighting
  •  Custom ground textures with specular reflections
  •  Custom ground lines, runway markings, and detail textures.
  •  High quality PBR building textures with night lighting

 

Requirements:

X-Plane 11
Windows, Mac or Linux
4 GB VRAM Minimum - 8 GB+ VRAM
Download Size: 1.1 GB

Current version : 1.0 (April 6th 2022)

 

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Scenery Review by Joshua Moore
16th May 2022
Copyright©2022: X-Plane Reviews

(Disclaimer. All images and text in this review are the work and property of X-PlaneReviews, no sharing or copy of the content is allowed without consent from the author as per copyright conditions.

 

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  • Stephen changed the title to Scenery Review: OMDB – Dubai International Airport by FeelThere

I have not seen the performance issues mentioned here (were those FPS measurement before or after the Ortho creation) but will agree that like other recent FeelThere Xplane releases it isn’t very special. However Dubai is an important point on world air routes these days so as a choice of subject it makes a lot of sense.
 

On ‘ I would highly recommend first looking at other options in the Org store before going for this rendition’ what are the other options for OMDB? I can’t see any other on the Org store. What am I missing? All I can see under the United Arab Emirates is this OMDB offering by FeelThere and OMMA by Taimodels

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4 hours ago, Medellinexpat said:

On ‘ I would highly recommend first looking at other options in the Org store before going for this rendition’ what are the other options for OMDB? I can’t see any other on the Org store. What am I missing? All I can see under the United Arab Emirates is this OMDB offering by FeelThere and OMMA by Taimodels

Thanks for spotting this, it was actually an error on my part 🙂

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