iniBuilds Scenery Development Update - December 2025

[mattY]

Hello!

It’s been a very busy year for the scenery team! Taking a look at the year as a whole, we’ve covered a massive amount of ground across the globe. From the icy runways of Antarctica to the deserts of the Middle East and the bustling hubs of the United States & Europe too! We’ve worked tirelessly to fill gaps in the world of Microsoft Flight Simulator and bring you some truly special projects, so we hope that you’ve managed to pick up an airport or two of ours throughout the year!

2025 Recap
This year brought with it some of the biggest projects to date, from a complete London Heathrow overhaul with the premium edition earlier in the year, to our latest and best received project - Manchester! Expanding on our Enhanced scenery line, the likes of Dubai, LAX and JFK saw their MSFS24 versions released, bringing these mega-hubs to the appropriate standard and making use of MSFS24 SDK tools and LOD’ing - a challenge we wanted to nail!

We expanded upon our UK and European catalogue, with London Gatwick Premium, another testament to the incredible community that is present in the aviation industry, with some fantastic community members who work at the airport and provided amazing insight and information. We also added another enhanced product, Leeds Bradford V2, with a brand new terminal being added, we always want to ensure that our projects can be some of the most up-to-date sceneries available to the sim. Other European airports include Svalbard and Larnaca, to great airports that provide a variety of route options for year round coverage, especially Svalbard, which is a great destination for the winter time, providing a real challenge with the weather conditions!

We also ventured into the unique and frozen region of Antarctica, releasing Wolf's Fang Runway, pairing perfectly with the A340 Airliner release and Cape Town, we want to provide you with those real-world counterparts and allow you to recreate historic routes! Each release taught us something new regarding optimization and environment texturing, and we’ve been applying those lessons directly back into our future projects.

This year, we emphasised the idea that the most important aspect of creating scenery is gathering the latest and most accurate references possible. This usually used to happen through SME’s such as those who worked at airports / fly into airports. This year we focused on adding another layer of data collection. This year we had numerous opportunities in getting team members on site at the airports we are creating. We are incredibly grateful to have worked directly with Airport Management and Authorities at both Providence and Manchester, who graciously allowed us to tour the airfields and work alongside them to capture the data we needed.

Having this level of access allows us to see the details that satellite imagery simply misses, from the specific wear and tear on the taxiways, grunge on terminal buildings and so much more.

For George, one of our Scenery Team Leads, the trip to Providence (KPVD) stands out as a highlight of his 2025. Being able to visit the airport firsthand provided invaluable insight that went straight into his workflows towards the final product.

"The highlight of my year was definitely the research trip to Providence Rhode Island (KPVD). It was a fresh experience to gain knowledge and was an extremely insightful one. Touring the entire airport with the ground operations team, gathering reference materials and learning about the history of the airport."  – George, Scenery Team Lead

Similarly, our time at Manchester, working with MAG, allowed us to capture the airport with an incredible level of detail, ensuring that the key placements of structures, textures & overall feel was as lifelike as possible. We love taking you behind the scenes on these trips, so if you missed our deep dives into how these visits went, be sure to check out the forum posts below:

Providence Research Trip: Providence BTS 👈

Manchester Research Trip: Manchester BTS 👈

iniBuilds Winter Wonderland Sale 🎅
The iniBuilds Winter Wonderland sale is now underway, bringing festive savings across a wide selection of our sceneries! Upgrade your simulator with amazing airports and destinations from around the world and enjoy savings of up to 20% off selected scenery products. Whether you’re planning short hops or long-haul operations, it’s the perfect time to expand your collection and discover something new this winter.
Check out the sale here: https://inibuilds.com/collections/sale
Exclusions apply.

Announcing: iniBuilds Dallas Fort Worth (KDFW) Premium for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024!

Which moves us nicely on to today's main topic, we are incredibly excited to formally announce our next major US project. We are heading to Texas to bring you Dallas / Fort Worth (KDFW)!

This is a project we have been wanting to tackle for a long time. As one of the busiest airports in the world by aircraft movements, recreating the scale and complexity of Dallas is no small job. Work has been quietly underway behind the scenes for months, ranging from detailed ground poly work to getting the unique architecture of the terminals correct.

We are applying all of our updated techniques to Dallas. This includes a heavy focus on performance optimization without sacrificing the visual fidelity of the enormous terminal areas & aprons.

The scenery team has been actively working on adapting our workflow to handle a hub of this size. As Greg, Head of Scenery explains, the journey to Dallas actually began with the challenges we tackled earlier this year:

"It’s been an exciting and busy 2025 in the scenery department. Adopting MSFS2024 as our core development platform gave us new opportunities to introduce levels of detail and quality previously not possible.

We saw the fruits of this labor recently with our Manchester release. It was an amazing experience to have so much direct input from the teams on-site, resulting in the most accurate layout representation we’ve released so far. That experience paved the way for what came next.

Early in 2025, we had a commercial opportunity to work on Dallas Fort Worth. We jumped at the chance to produce what will be, by far, the largest project we’ve ever done.

Thanks to that opportunity, we procured an incredible amount of on-site reference material, allowing for an incredibly faithful recreation. Of course, such an iconic airport wouldn’t be much fun if it didn’t run well, so we’ve kept performance at the core of everything. Our testing team is hard at work ironing out any kinks, and so far the results have been stellar."

These are two of the five fire stations across DFW, specifically ARFF Station 01 & ARFF Station 02. On the left of each slider, you can see the foundation modelling stage, showing the basic shape being formed. On the right of each slider, you can then see the texturing and detailed modelling stage. It's always cool to see how these projects come together from day 1 to release!

We’re deep into the development of this project, with work ongoing, we’re excited to have this project on the release schedule horizon. Whilst we can’t confirm any specific date as of now, you shouldn’t have to wait many more months for it! With well over 200 nonstop destinations worldwide from DFW, we’re pretty certain it’ll become a community favourite, especially for those American Airline ops alongside the variety of aircraft used too!

Our Next UK Project…
Finally, we want to look ahead to our next project back on UK soil. Following the release of Manchester and Leeds Bradford v2, we are thrilled to announce that we will be continuing our coverage of the North of England with Liverpool John Lennon Airport (EGGP)!

This is a fantastic airport with a rich history and a unique approach over the Mersey, and much like with all of our other UK airports, we want to do it justice.

With that, and similar to our Gatwick and Manchester projects, we are issuing a call for help. If you work at Liverpool John Lennon Airport, or have airside access and would be willing to assist the team with reference photography or technical data, please reach out to us! 

Capturing the real life feel of an airport relies heavily on high-quality reference material, and assistance from the community is what allows us to push that extra amount in realism. If you can help, please contact us by emailing our management team at management@inibuilds.com.

Thank you ❤️ 
We’d like to extend our thanks to every one of you that made this year so successful. 2025 has been a milestone year for the scenery team, learning plenty to make our sceneries better in terms of performance, quality and scale. Your support has allowed us to develop projects that may not have been possible previously, so thank you for providing us with these opportunities! We can't wait to kick off 2026, bringing you releases such as Dallas and Liverpool, along with several other un-announced projects we have in the pipeline. 2026 will be a truly global adventure; as we tackle an airport in a region we have not done before, to some global hubs that have been untouched in flight simulator thus far.

To ensure you don't miss out on those future announcements, make sure to join our Discord community here: https://discord.gg/KnUbZfHj8j

From everyone here at iniBuilds, we wish you a happy holiday season, here’s to a fantastic 2026!

iniBuilds Team ❤️