Hello everyone, and welcome back to the blog post (quite some time right?). We have recently released 12.1.4 as a beta, and we highly encourage you to check it out here. There is some nice content released, that makes for an exciting appetizer for the new year. Whilst we don’t expect to be on this beta for too long (famous last words), most of the new additions will likely be subject to long-term feedback. Please message in support!
One of the major additions for this release is more content and updates for our scenery gateway artists!
New Default Assets
For those unaware, back in November, we welcomed Justin (MisterX) to the Laminar team. He likely needs no introduction, as his scenery work is the stuff of legend amongst the community. So we’re really excited to have him join the team, and Justin represents another infinity stone amongst our third-party hires!
Over the winter period, Petr (Our in-house legendary artist) and Justin went to town on some new scenery assets for X-Plane. Some of which, were highly nominated on our Discord feature requests. These assets include;
Trucks
Emergency/Fire Training Equipment
Airside Operations
De-Icing Equipment
Hopefully not to state the obvious, but these are not dynamic. So please don’t start placing these in areas that will obstruct the “simulator flow”.
We will have some more inbound assets over the coming months, so keep an eye peeled.
X-Plane Gateway
Whilst we didn’t highlight each airport in our initial release posts for 12.1.4, we did have a staggering 1400+ updated entries that we’ve included in our latest cut of the gateway. Take a look below (note, there are approximately 100 airports missing from this list)
Because of our new semantic versioning, internally we’re looking at having these cuts more frequently. Some of you have already noticed our update cadence has been picking up, and hopefully cycling in these updates more regularly will be refreshing to our gateway artists.
Gateway artists, take a bow!
Hi, these new objects are highly appreciated!
I’m a little disappointed that there are only US-styled versions available. Most European tractor units are shorter and more “square” than “round”. All of the trucks (fuel trucks, big trucks, small trucks, de-icing truck, snow removal equipment) always look a little out of place in European submissions… I know there are some European-style trucks hidden within the X-Plane library, maybe they could be made available?
Of course, the whishlist never ends… Fire trucks and more police car variety (without emergency lights turned on…) would certainly enhance the scenery further, but this is a great step forward!
You never know!
Welcome Justin! And thank you.
Hope you keep expanding those assets for gateway artists! (firetrucks would be nice for that training area!)
And hey, if LR decides to make some of those dynamic, that will be very welcome 😀
Vehicle assets are very good, but far too American Centric, we need more variation, X-Plane is used all around the world as well as America and Europe, Justin should be well aware of that, as he was the one who fixed Laminar’s earlier decade fixtation on only two singular areas…