Denver International Airport V2.0 - Free Upgrade

I'm very happy to announce that development for KDEN - Denver International Airport V2.0 is underway! KDEN V2.0 will be a huge upgrade over the current version, and most importantly, as always, will be free for all current users! You may have seen the video during the X-Plane 12 alpha, but now that KSEZ for MSFS is done and the port to X-Plane (a much smaller job) is underway, serious development for KDEN can now begin.

Some of the things you can look forward to in KDEN V2.0 are:

• Brand new terminals with dramatically more details and better textures

• Brand new tower

• New terminal layout

• 3D interiors for all the terminals of dramatically high quality. You can even see interiors through skylights

• Improved ground texturing

• Improved texturing for buildings throughout the airport

• Animated 3D people that actually look fairly descent (similar to those seen here)

• And one feature I'm sure everyone will be very happy to hear, better performance!

Wait... better performance?! How do you add loads more details and millions more triangles and get better performance? Aggressive LODs. In the current versions of KDEN, the LODs are very large, so you get almost the entire airport being drawn at once, and that includes over 110 high poly jetways with no LODs and no instancing thanks to animation. In this new version, jetways will have LODs, terminal details will be segmented so no more than half a terminal will be rendered at once (because who needs to see the interior of a terminal half a mile away?), and various other optimizations. In all, I'm hoping for modest gains in fps.

How do we know this works? Fun fact: The current version of KDEN you're using, there's 13,860 cars. Each car has close to 10,000 tris at the closest LOD. That's close to 139 million triangles, the current terminals are under 1 mil each 🤯. And yet the cars have fairly minimal fps impact, thanks to extremely aggressive LODs. That same methodology will be applied to the terminals, and every applicable part of the scenery.

So when will KDEN be ready? When it's ready haha. Last time I gave a release date, I was almost 3 months late (largely due to factors beyond my control), so I won't be doing that again! What I can say is while development is underway, the KSEZ port to X-Plane has priority. That being said, I don't expect Sedona to take very long.

So without further ado, screenshots!! Please keep in mind this is in the early stages of development, so there may be some oddities