Anyone who knows me in the flight simulation community knows that the Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport (DFW) is one of my absolute favorite airports in the real world. I have very fond memories of visiting DFW as a child in the mid to late 70’s. Watching the airplanes/airlines including American, Braniff and seeing the awesome Concorde all fill my awesome memories of this incredible airport. As a young adult living in the DFW area, I spent many hours in this airport awaiting flights when I traveled for personal and business in the early to mid 90’s.
When MSFS 2020 released, DFW was one of their included hand-crafted airports. While it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t too terrible until the summer of 2022 when Microsoft/Asobo released their US Cities Photogrammetry package. As the city of Arlington, Texas was included in this package, it messed up the terrain in and around the DFW airport to an almost unusable condition. Now two years on and even though there is a rather lengthy forum post about these issues on the MSFS forums, DFW airport is still an airport in shambles unless you remove the US Cities Photogrammetry package. Once removed, the airport is functional once again but still not perfect.
In previous versions including FSX and P3D, the DFW airport had been available as a payware add-on from FSDreamTeam. I’m not sure why FSDreamTeam has been reluctant to release their version for MSFS, but four years in there’s no chatter about it on their forums. But for the past few months there have been rumors that Imaginsim (creator of KATL, WSSS) was working on a version of DFW. Just a few days ago these rumors were proven to be true as it was announced on FSElite that Imaginesim would release DFW for MSFS in the future. But hold the horses….I’m just not impressed with their previews and I’m not the only one.
It appears Imaginsim has lost credibility within the flight sim community as they have all but abandoned both their KATL and WSSS offerings which are both in need of some continued development and polish.
T-Minus Two Months and Counting
As we’re just about two months away from the release of MSFS 2024, I’m personally going to hold off on purchasing the Imaginsim version of DFW (even if it releases before) and see if Microsoft/Asobo have finally resolved the issues with DFW in the new sim. Of course, I have been rather reserved in what I’ve purchased in the past few weeks just as I mentioned here a few months ago. And while we assume most, if not all add-ons for MSFS 2020 will work in MSFS 2024, I’m just not going to spend my money on the Imaginsim version of DFW until I see how things look/act in MSFS 2024.
What are your thoughts on DFW and the future release of the Imaginsim version of the airport?
Until next time…
Happy Flying!!!
Jerry
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