NFTO – Queen Lavinia Airport – Niuafo’ou – Tonga v1.0
Hi everyone, this is my very first scenery project, Queen Lavinia Airport on the tiny remote island of Niuafo’ou which belongs to the kingdom of Tonga in the South Pacific.
I originally started this project shortly after P3D V4 was released, because I had an Air Hauler 2 company based off Faleolo International Airport (Samoa) which was part of the excellent NSTU package by ORBX. Additionally, I bought the old Tonga Domestic Airports scenery by PacSim to have some more destinations to fly to, but NFTO was missing from this package and in fact completely missing in the default database (probably because it only sees one flight every few weeks and there are only a handful of reference photos and several years old videos found on the internet, so much of the scenery is more of an artistic interpretation than an exact represantation of the real world). So I decided to create this small addon and I used it as a test project to learn Blender and the various P3D developer tools. However, after some basic modeling I abandoned the project because I just didn´t have the time to do all the photoreal optimization and autogen annotation. When P3D V5 was released with a new database that included NFTO, I wanted to restart my work but again didn´t have enough time tp do all the tedious autogen and photoreal ground busywork. When MSFS was released, I made a fresh start with my old models because MSFS let me focus on the immediate airport scenery while providing a acceptable surrounding photoreal area with some decent looking, plausible autogen for the South Pacific island setting. After some struggling with the SDK, I´m now almost ready to release this small addon. I know that it still has some visual glitches (modeling and texturing was done more than two years ago and I was really inexperienced with Blender back then) and I know that the place is too remote to generate much interest, but I´d still like to know what people think about it to improve my skills for future, maybe a little more relevant projects.
To install, just unzip the tgd-nfto folder into your MSFS community folder.
Cheers, Fabian