Frequently Asked Questions

On the MSFS Marketplace we sell two versions of add-ons: Scenery Enhancement and Aerial Imagery/Scenery. The Scenery Enhancement add-ons do not include custom ground textures and are intended for Xbox users and as a cheaper alternative for PC users who do not have the storage space for our ground textures. The scenery elements and water masks of these versions match with the default (Bing maps) ground textures. The Aerial Imagery/Scenery add-ons are equivalent to the add-ons on simMarket with the Premium textures being used. The Marketplace add-ons do not include terrain elevation data (mesh/DEM), but since the default elevation data has been updated with World Update 8, the difference between our mesh and the default one is not that big anymore.

The add-ons we sell on simMarket include scenery as well as multiple versions of custom ground textures and mesh in different resolutions, so you can choose the one that suits your preferences and hardware best and switch between versions anytime. For maximum flexibility, aerial imagery, mesh and scenery are also put together as separate add-ons and can be used independently of one another.

The add-ons that you purchase on the MSFS Marketplace are installed automatically.

The add-ons that you purchase on simMarket are installed by moving the downloaded folder(s) to the “Community” folder inside your MSFS installation directory.

If you used a custom location for your Flight Simulator installation, then proceed there (e.g. E:\Flight Simulator\Community\).

If you used the default location for your installation, then you can find the “Community” folder under one of the following paths:

– C:\Users\[Your User Name]\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Packages\Community\

– C:\Users\[Your User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Packages\Community\

– C:\Users\[Your User Name]\AppData\Local\MSFSPackages\Community\

Important: Windows 10 by default hides the “AppData” folder, so you will have to go to “View” in the menu of File Explorer, and select “Hidden items” so as to see it.

The add-ons that you purchase on the MSFS Marketplace are updated automatically.

For the add-ons that you purchase on simMarket, you will receive a notification via email when a new update is available. Please make sure that you have accepted to receive emails from simMarket. To install the updated version, the folder of the prior version has to be deleted and the newly downloaded version installed (as described above).

The add-ons that we sell on simMarket include (1) custom ground textures, (2) mesh and (3) scenery elements like boats, night lighting, vegetation etc.

1. Custom ground textures have barely any impact on MSFS performance and do not require powerful hardware. If your PC meets the minimum requirements to run the MSFS and your graphics card has at least 4 GB of video memory (VRAM), it will not have any issue running our ground textures.

2. The mesh (DEM) is an experimental feature that has become more and more heavy on the hardware with the last Sim Updates and World Updates and can now cause stutters even on high-end PCs, depending on the mesh resolution, size of the area and graphics settings. Since Sim Update 9 it also uses a lot more memory (RAM) than before. Most mid-range PCs with 16 GB RAM can run the 2 m versions on El Hierro, La Gomera and La Palma, the 4 m version on Fuerteventura and Lanzarote and the 10 m versions on Tenerife and Gran Canaria. Running the 2 m versions on Tenerife and Gran Canaria currently requires a high-end PC with more than 32 GB of RAM.

Update 2022-08-10: There are some reports that even the 2 m versions of our mesh run much more smoothly under Sim Update 10 Beta and DirectX 12 enabled. We haven’t tested it yet, but one of our customers wrote about it on the MSFS forum: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/old-bug-resolved-third-party-dems-working-perfectly-in-dx12-even-in-high-tlod-4-00/529674. We will test it once the Beta of Sim Update 10 has ended and it is officially released.

3. Our scenery elements (e.g. boat models) are optimized for performance and meet the MSFS’s requirements for maximum number of polygons, draw calls and texture sizes per level of detail (LOD). The performance impact is therefore negligible.

We have tested some payware airports that are currently available for the Canary Islands (Sim-Wings Tenerife Sur, Sim-Wings La Gomera, Sim-Wings La Palma, Just Flight’s Lanzarote, MK-Studios Fuerteventura and MK-Studios Tenerife Airports) and they all work well in combination with our add-ons.

Our textures prevail over any aerial images included in these airport add-ons, so there are no visible boundaries between different textures.

Our mesh was not compatible with some of the airport add-ons at first, but we have provided optional updates that fix the compatibility issues where it was necessary, so even our mesh is now fully compatible with any of these airport add-ons.

We also tested several freeware airports for Tenerife and didn’t find any issues.

Update May 2023:

Since Sim Update 12, our textures no longer automatically take precedence over aerial images included in airport add-ons. So, you have to manually deactivate these other textures in order for our textures to show up (see next question).

Since Sim Update 12, you need to manually disable aerial images included in airport add-ons in order for our textures to show up.

This is how to do it:

1. Open the folder of the airport add-on: MSFS-Installation\Community\[Canary Islands airport add-on]

2. Look for a file called “layout.json” and save a copy of this file to another location so that you can restore it if necessary.

3. Now open the original “layout.json” file that was left in the airport add-on’s folder with Windows Editor.

4. Look for the lines which mention a CGL file (they are always at the top of the layout.json file; if not, there is nothing to do). Then delete the following (highlighted) section and save your changes:

This will disable aerial images included in airport add-ons eliminating the conflict with our textures.

You need to do this with MK-Studios Fuerteventura, MK-Studios Tenerife Airports, Sim-Wings La Gomera, Sim-Wings La Palma, Sim-Wings Gran Canaria and Sim-Wings Tenerife Sur.

JustFlight’s Lanzarote and Wolkenblau’s Tenerife North do not contain aerial images, so there’s nothing to do here.

We would love to release all of our add-ons that are on the Marketplace for Xbox, but the MSFS seems to have a memory leak issue on Xbox at the moment. This can cause stutters which increase more and more during the flight, especially when using 3rd-party add-ons.

We did release our La Gomera add-on for Xbox (which passed Microsoft’s internal testing), but had it delisted from the MSFS Marketplace a few days after its release due to reports of performance issues. We thought that the memory issue was triggered by our large ground texture file and recently released an add-on for Lanzarote without ground textures, again for PC and Xbox. While we didn’t receive any reports of performance issues with Lanzarote yet, the mixed ratings led us to believe that some people do have issues with this add-on as well.

For this reason, we will not release more add-ons for Xbox until the MSFS’s memory issue is solved by Asobo. The performance of our add-ons on Xbox is not what you can normally expect from our add-ons and we don’t want to sell add-ons that don’t run 100% smoothly on everyone’s Xbox.

By the way, our add-ons are not the only ones affected by this: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/constant-ctd-s-on-xbox-with-3rd-party-scenery-airports/478953. The “out of memory” issue on Xbox has been confirmed in a Developer Q&A that you can find here: https://youtu.be/BApcXZ7uid0?t=635.

Update 2022-07-12: Asobo recently collected data on the memory issues on Xbox (https://forums.flightsimulator.com/…/xbox-series…/526255). The latest development update says that they are still evaluating the collected data in order to provide solutions. We are still waiting for this to be solved before releasing more of our add-ons for Xbox. We have reason to believe that Sim Update 10 could fix these problems.