Stairport has officially released the next major iteration to their Scenery Animation Manager (SAM), bringing the plugin to Version 3! To announce this release, Stairport took to their social media and the Aerosoft forums to  show off the latest updates of their extremely popular plugin for X-Plane. 

Scenery Animation Manager (SAM) has been a staple in the X-Plane community since the release of their major first add-on, World Jetways back in late 2019, and the release of SAM v1.1 earlier in the same year. Stairport has then recently gotten into the scenery business with products for both X-Plane and Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Earlier this year in April, Stairport announced their plans for v3 of SAM, including the details of what it will look like and the new UI revamp and teasing at integration with 3rd Party Addon, “Better Pushback”

Raphael Jacob from Stairport stated in the forum post:

“The user interface has been fundamentally rethought. While it was previously function-based, we have now integrated all functions into the typical flow of a flight. Depending on the flight phase, the available functions are displayed, which enables a fast usage.”

Jacob then goes on to mention integration of SimBrief and 3rd party add-on “BetterPushback”

“In addition, we have adapted functions in various places. For example, during flight planning, the planned and current aircraft weight is displayed (or imported from Simbrief, if applicable). The selection of the runway at the departure airport and the parking position at the destination airport are directly preselected for the FollowMe. On the Departure page, you can now control the third-party plugin BetterPushback in addition to the FollowMe.”

Jacob also then addressed the scenery developer community,

“However, we have not only made it easier to use for end users, but also for scenery developers. Airports configured in SAM3 do not require the definition of jetways or VDGS systems, these are registered fully automatically. Nevertheless, there is still the option to set doors, takeoff position and other values individually. Of course, custom jetway objects can still be included. Also, a VDGS display can now be used correctly for multiple parking positions. In addition, there is an automatic configuration tool for Marshaller, which does the registration in seconds.”

For those afraid of updating to the future, SAM V2 will no longer be supported, but still will still be online via the installation manager SAM Suite.

To check out the latest gizmos brought with SAM 3, check out the Aerosoft Forums to download it into your sim today.