My CYOW Ottawa International 1.2 is has been released in MSFS in-game Marketplace. If you were holding out until you can conveniently buy it right inside the sim - wait no more, you can do it now.
You would still get updates earlier if you buy it on my website, and I would not have to pay sales commission 
But of course I understand people that prefer the convenience of keeping everything under one roof.
While I like to add nice airports, I mostly do so in places where I fly a lot, now, when there is an airport that looks great, I do make exceptions! Hence I bought Ottawa and spent a long while having a close look at the airport and…
..I must say it’s really awesome, fantastic job @RomanDesign!
Really goes into the elite company of the best airports of MSFS in my mind. Great attention to details overall and loads to explore. Some of the highlights for me were:
Runway and taxiways looked good overall, a few places where markings looked a bit odd and it looked like the old taxiway bled through (at least in one place), but those are really just minor things overall! A bit of a shame with the blurry roads and ground textures outside the main terminal (not the elevated one but the others), but I understand this might be a limitation of the SDK/sim.
Once again good job and I can really recommend it, even if you don’t typically fly to Ottawa, now you have a good reason to do so! One of my favourite third-party airports for sure 
Thanks a lot for a detailed opinion, that’s almost a review. Can do me a huge favor and like it and rate 5 stars in MSFS, if that’s where you got it? If you got it on my site - leave a review there.
Everybody who buys this in MSFS Marketplace - please do me a favor and rate it 5 stars and like it. I spent literally several hundreds of hours creating this airport and the sales now will determine if I can continue creating MSFS airports. This is way too much time to justify as a hobby, it needs at least to compensate the time invested. I had a great fun doing it, so I hope very much that I can continue. But I do need support, and ratings should help. I haven’t flown once while working on it, because it left no spare time at all. I hope to finally make my Reverb G2 VR worth buying and start doing some VR flights
Awesome release as always. I’ve got every scenery you’ve made so far and will continue to get any you create in the future. Your work is right up there with the best of the best.
Thanks! It means a lot to me.
I finally got to see my CYOW airport in VR, and I have to say it is stunning! Really looks great, parallax windows surprisingly have depth and I just enjoyed it so much! I hope MSFS VR is optimized much better soon, because I’m struggling with high-end 3080 / 3900X / 64Mb RAM/2Tb SSD system…
BTW I am building a VR Control Box to make controlling aircraft functions in VR more manageable.
@RomanDesign any chance CYOW will appear in the Xbox version? I bought it the Flight Simulator store on the PC version and it looks great
As a matter of fact, yes - the latest update is in the QA queue, so I hope it will be released soon for both PC and Xbox.
While you’re at it, any chance you’re working on a payware Toronto scenery? I love your free scenery but but definitely go for a payware that is more detailed.
Unfortunately no, those are based on Google photogrammetry, so they can’t be payware. Besides, those are pretty much at the limit of what’s sensible in terms of an FPS hit, so I wouldn’t add more anyway.
I just made a maiden flight in VR + DIY Motion Platform with my CYOW on the latest sim update - check out the video here: My DIY 2DOF Motion Platform for MSFS - adding a whole new immersion level to VR, on a budget - VIDEO
I’ve bought all three of your airports on Xbox and I’ve been very impressed. The only disappointment for me though is there is no branded static planes in ottawa which I could see in your photos.
On Xbox we really lack liveries and stuff and it can break immersion. At least with airport makers that stick branded planes in we get a bit of real world sim in there.
Hopefully you can add one in future updates.
Also I wish third party devs would stop over optimising their sceneries.
I’m tired of pop in happening when I’m less than half a mile to the airport on Xbox. Ottawa does it with items popping in everywhere. I bought fsdg Rhodes and alll the hotels and main stuff pops in when you are virtually on top of them. What’s the point of popping in scenery?
If the Xbox can cope with New York and Tokyo as photogrammetry it can deal with a few buildings!
The planes in my screenshots are just random liveries downloaded at flightsim.to and MSFS randomly populates planes with random liveries from what you have installed in the sim. There are two schools of thought regarding static airplanes at sim airports: most simmers seem to prefer (like I do) that there would be no static planes other than a notable scenery items (like museum models, or fire brigade training plane like I have at CYOW) for the following reasons:
This has nothing to do with developers “overoptimizing” sceneries. We have no control of when the object appears. We can specify different LOD to appear at different object size on the screen, and theoretically I could prevent something from showing up from afar even in the lowest LOD, but why do that? All my objects have no minimum size for the lowest LOD. That means that only the sim itself regulates when the objects will show at the lowest level of detail (simplified and optimized shape without small details), then the more detailed LOD shows up as you get closer. There is nothing I can do to make the object appear earlier than sim decides it wants to show it. Apparently it’s dependent on size somewhat, and many other factors. The “bird” sculpture in CYOW tends to only pop up when you are really close to it, for some reason, and I can’t do anything about that. I can’t force objects to appear sooner. Asobo has to optimize that in the sim. They do bugfixes for that often, it’s a known problem, not cured yet.
As far as I recall, XBox only has 16Gb or shared RAM - that’s both GPU RAM and system RAM together. By comparison, my PC for example, has 64Gb of RAM plus 10Gb VRAM. So Asobo did have to really cut some corners for XBox in terms of conserving system memory at least. All of us PC users are suffering from scenery pop-ups compared to pre-XBox builds. This is a direct result of memory optimizations for XBox, because of the shared codebase. Let’s hope Asobo will figure it out. They introduced adjustable “pre-caching” settings on PC at least, and it improved, but not eliminated pop-in.
Thanks for getting back to me and for your detailed answer.
I think one plane would be nice somewhere but I understand your point.
Regarding pop in, It definitely needs adjusting and refined, it doesn’t make sense to me that these models should pop in that close. I’m not saying it shouldn’t at all but buildings and planes (that can be seen from the air) should not be popping in when you fly over them at less than 1000ft.
I agree completely. Even on PC in VR, with pre-caching set to Ultra, I see scenery objects pop in in a disturbing way. Let’s hope for Asobo to sort it out and make it pop in farther away, and preferably fade-in instead of just pop-up so it’s less noticeable.
Have you thought of doing CYYC by any chance?
It’s possilble, if nobody else is working on that. I’m workin on CYOO now, with CYQB most likely later, followed by CYYJ
Just a minor thing, but it seems there’s a terrain issue/bug with the YOW scenery I have installed. For some reason the apron slopes down significantly by the parking stands at the terminal building, unrealistically so.
Oddly enough, there was a previous version where the apron actually slopped upwards, so I don’t know if perhaps Asobo fixed this on their end or not but things are sloping down now.
Also, it would be great if YOW could get some airline gate assignments for AI traffic, but that would honestly be like adding a second cherry on top of this cake!
CYOW Terminal kinf of goes in steps, so the terrain had to be shaped accordingly. Just flattening the airpot would not be realistic. Unfortunately MSFS seems to have multiple bugs with their terraforming tools/engine. The sloped terrain can be unpredictable and can change with sim updates, and people report sunk wheels for some objects/aircraft - which is an MSFS look, thinkgs should stick to the surface. Hopefully future MSFS/SDK updates will have more stable terraforming. I will take a closer look when working on the next update, but I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do to fix that. All I can do is elevate or sink some areas, and everything should stick to that ground, but sometime it doesn’t. Those bugs are minor though, and we’ll see when SU11 settles down, where we stand. If updating the airport can fix that, I will do an update. We’ll see what dev support says about that matter.
