Renowned for their Gatwick Airport and the Bulldog aircraft rendition in X-Plane, Origami Studios is marking their first foray into the world of MSFS through a partnership with iniBuilds following the announcement of Gatwick for MSFS.

In the announcement post, Origami's main developer, Dellanie, began by thanking its user base for supporting Origami Studios through their purchase and use of the aforementioned products for X-Plane. "Seeing pilots really enthusiastic about both the Bulldog and Gatwick has been incredibly encouraging, and we will certainly be continuing development on new products in future."

The Airport is a comprehensive redevelopment of the original X-Plane version, which is done together with the scenery development team at iniBuilds, Dellanie elaborates "Gatwick is one of the most popular and busiest airports in the UK, and we were incredibly excited to bring a rendition into the ecosphere."

The product has been redeveloped from the ground up, and it bears little to no resemblance to the X-Plane version, parts of the terminal complex has been shoved back to the drawing board for "more optimal UV/Texture mapping", and the groundwork incorporating more details, grounded with custom satellite imagery and the full harness of Microsoft Flight Simulator's features.

The rework of Gatwick for MSFS ultimately brought the airfield up to date with current airport's layout, which includes a new A380 pier and replicated construction scheme around Pier 6.

Closing off the statement is a short FAQ on the release date of the product. They estimate the release of Gatwick Airport to be in the “Summer of 2021”, With the price having not been confirmed.

Anticipating a flood of questions relating to X-Plane development support; Origami conveniently suppressed any spark of speculation by confirming their continued commitment to the X-Plane platform, even teasing that there’s some X-Plane projects that are brewing behind doors:  “Not at all. In fact we have things cooking for X-Plane that we can’t quite show just yet. We just see MSFS as an opportunity for all pilots to enjoy our content.”

One thing this is missing, which the developer noted, is that there is no safedock implementation, elaborating that it is out of their control, where the simulator lacks an api to control aircraft positions. In contrast to Gatwick for X-Plane 11, Origami enjoys the flexibility of implementing Safedocks and Jetway movements powered by the SAM Plugin.

The final query Origami Studios had cleared up was that Gatwick Airport will not be including static aircraft, justifying its exclusion that it is “cumbersome and gets in the way” of more advanced 3rd party static/AI solutions.

The airport will see its availability in the iniBuilds store, and the MSFS Marketplace, in the meantime join and keep up to date with news about Origami and iniBuilds through their Discord servers:

> iniBuilds
> Origami