Airport Enhancement Package: The Future

I am thrilled to finally reveal Airport Enhancement Package V2.0 - the largest and most ambitious update for AEP ever!

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AEP: What does it even do?

Since release, Airport Enhancement Package has become my post popular scenery, for good reason! It drastically improved the quality of all default airports vs just one. But since release, alot has changed in X-Plane...

Back in 2020 there weren't many default assets (under 50 buildings if I remember correctly). But since then, not only have far more assets been added (now there's over 100 hangars!), but the quality has increased dramatically.

With more assets than I can handle replacing, and an already good baseline quality, this leaves AEP in a bit of an awkward position - what does it offer that isn't default?

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The Re-evaluation

This led me to seriously re-evaluate AEP's position in the X-Plane ecosystem. While replacing key assets such as ground textures, common buildings, and service vehicles offers value, I came to the realization that what AEP truly needed was a revolutionary shift: It needed to add to airports, not just replace assets!

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The Future: Procedural Generation

With over 36,000 airports in X-Plane, this isn't something that I could do by hand. So after months of development, I created software that reads and understands the global airports. Based on this data, it then procedurally generates overlays that enhance these airports with:

• Tire skids on taxi routes, runways, and service roads, using assets appropriate to the airport and route.

• Additional clutter at gates and near buildings - parked vehicles, towbars, fire hydrants, bollards, cones, and more.

• Grunge, oil leaks, rust, which give the airport an authentic, used feel.

• Random ramp clutter such as spill‑kit barrels, waste‑fuel containers, chocks, and cones.

The results were far better than I could have imagined; airports feel fuller, they feel used, and they have more depth, all while staying true to the incredible Gateway Artist's original design!

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Of course, as mentioned before, just because AEP now adds to airports doesn't mean it no longer enhances the assets themselves! AEP 2.0 includes nearly 1,000 custom assets, including:

• All new pavement

• Most service vehicles

• All new cars

• All of the legacy hangars (and some of the new ones)

• Various clutter objects!

There are a couple more exciting features, but I'll save those for a future post!

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Release?

This is by far, the biggest update to AEP ever, and I believe with it's massive scope, this will be one of the most impactful scenery releases for X-Plane! Before it's final release though, there are a few things that need finishing:

• Baggage cart variants

• The old long metal hangars

• Cargo area clutter (a variant of gates)

• Stability testing for the big feature yet to be announced 👀

• BETA TESTING!!!

Yes, you read that right, I need your help! AEP is a massive package and will need testing across a variety of systems and locations! If you're interested in being among the first to use it, stress test it, and help shape the final release, please reach out via the Contact page or Discord!

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FAQs

• What is the upgrade price?

  • While this is a whole new version of AEP, like all my updates, this update is free to all existing users!

• What is the licensing implication of overlays being generated on default airports?

  • The default global airports are licensed under a GNU GPL license. Therefore the overlays portion of AEP will also be under the same license as they're considered a derivative work. It will be fully independent of the AEP core package, and a separate download (though it will be included in the same purchase). I would like to give a huge thanks to all the gateway artists of the X-Plane community - they've created something incredible and are an irreplaceable part of the X-Plane community!

• What about 3rd party airports?

  • If a 3rd party airport uses a default asset that is replaced, they will also get the replaced version. This is a non-issue in every case I can think of.

  • The overlays will be handled by exclusion zones - if the author doesn't place exclusion zones the overlays will show on top of their airport, resulting in an airport with more equipment and more grunge (not necessarily bad!). The solution is simple: Devs should ensure they have exclusion zones, which they should and probably already do have.

• Distribution

  • There will be a future post that discusses more on this, but rest assured it will be a very user-friendly experience!

• No, the overlays are not AI generated; just educated guesses powered by close to 30,000 lines of C++, a few thousand lines of config, a healthy dose of bugs and nullptrs, and way too much coffee!

• If you have another question, please don't hesitate to reach out via the Contact page or Discord!

I do want to leave a small note here: Just because AEP exists doesn't mean the default assets are bad by any means - LR's artists have to make their scenery work on an incredibly tight memory/vram/polygon budget to work on all hardware with tons of addons. Within those confines, their work is incredible. AEP targets users with mid-higher end hardware who have a larger memory/vram/polygon budget, and therefore can offer higher resolution, more details, etc.