Taxi2Gate's Hong Kong VHHH: the €23.99 version is the one you shouldn't buy

Two Hong Kongs sit on the same shop shelf. One is dated 6 December 2014 and costs €23.99. The other is dated 24 April 2020, costs €25.00, and — if you already own the first one — costs €12.00. They are the same airport by the same developer, sold a few clicks apart on the same store, and nothing on the older page tells you the newer one exists.

That is the whole buying problem with Taxi2Gate's original VHHH, and it is worth being precise about it, because the scenery itself was never the problem. In 2015 the AVSIM verdict on Taxi2Gate versus the incumbent ImagineSim rendition was "No contest". Owners still describe frame rates in the forties at 4K with a PMDG heavy parked at the gate. This was, for a good five years, the Hong Kong everybody flew into.

Then Chek Lap Kok kept building and the scenery stopped. The Midfield Concourse opened in 2016. The Sky Bridge went in. The third runway was commissioned on 25 November 2022 and the full three-runway system on 28 November 2024. The rebuilt Terminal 2 opened its departure facilities on 27 May 2026, three months before this review. The product on sale for €23.99 models an airport that stopped being accurate somewhere around the year Brexit was voted on.

There is a version that catches part of that up. There is also a rival that catches up more of it. The one thing there is not is a reason to pay full price for the 2014 build unless your simulator cannot run anything newer.

This review is drawn from 27 sources: both simMarket listings and their full star breakdowns, the developer's own site and update pages, nine forum threads on AVSIM and the PMDG forums dated between 2015 and 2024, three video pieces, and the trade press coverage of the 2020 update and of Taxi2Gate's 2022 return. Reddit is blocked in this environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing; for a product this old the archive of dated store reviews does that job better anyway.

What you are actually buying

A 317 MB scenery of Hong Kong International as it stood in 2014: custom ground textures and photo scenery, custom mesh, hand-placed autogen, full-detail buildings, static clutter, fencing, an AFCAD, volumetric grass, night illumination and SODE-driven moving jetways. Two runways, because in 2014 there were two.

Product	Sims	Price	Notes
VHHH (this one), 6 Dec 2014	FSX SP2/Acceleration, P3D v1–v2 as listed	€23.99	Runs in P3D v3 and v4 by hand. Free "General Update 1.2" on the developer's site
VHHH V2, 24 Apr 2020	P3D v4, P3D v5	€25.00, or €12.00 upgrade for owners of the above	Adds the Midfield Concourse, the T1–satellite airside bridge, the HK Link Road. Still two runways
WF Scenery Studio VHHH, 7 Aug 2020	P3D v4.5, v5	€23.90	PBR, dynamic lighting, VDGS — and the third runway 07L/25R, added by update
ImagineSim VHHH (legacy range)	FSX, FSX:SE	£11.99	The older rival Taxi2Gate beat in 2015

Taxi2Gate do not run a store. Their site's buy link points at simMarket's catalogue page, so simMarket is the price and there is no cheaper direct channel to go hunting for. Read the €23.99 with care all the same: simMarket's terms say displayed prices include the applicable VAT, which for a browsing session with no country resolved means 0%, so the figure at checkout can be higher than the figure on the page. That caveat applies equally to the €25.00 V2 and the €23.90 WF listing, so the comparison between them stands.

The €12.00 upgrade is the number that matters, and it is stated on the V2 listing rather than on this one. An AVSIM poster in November 2020 put his own upgrade at "$13". If you own this scenery and fly P3D v4 or v5, you are twelve euros from the better version. If you do not own it and fly v4 or v5, you would be paying €23.99 for the privilege of then paying €12.00 more.

There is no MSFS version of this airport from Taxi2Gate, and no P3D v6 build of either version.

What the community consistently praises

Performance, first and by a distance. This is the finding that repeats in every year of the record. "Brilliant, does not eat up frame rates like some sceneries" (August 2017). "Almost zero impact on frame rates… I can easily fly a PMDG aircraft in 4K here with FPS of around 40-45" (April 2018). "Looks great and very FPS friendly", on the PMDG forums in May 2020. A 2016 buyer ran it in P3D v3 alongside FlyTampa's Kai Tak with no out-of-memory trouble. For a hub of this size in a 32-bit-era simulator, that was genuinely unusual, and it is the reason the scenery survived as long as it did.

It buried the competition on release. The AVSIM thread of 30 November 2015 asking whether Taxi2Gate was worth it over ImagineSim produced a run of one-line answers: "far superior", "No comparison", "No contest". A German buyer in April 2015 catalogued exactly why — more built detail, more static objects and vehicles, moving traffic inside and outside the fence — and gave it four stars anyway on the strength of it.

The layout is right for the airport it modelled. "Gates are where they should be," wrote one P3D v4 user in 2018. A Hong Kong resident buying it in December 2018 called it really nice and was specific that his complaint was the unfinished Midfield Concourse, not the modelling. AES support arrived with version 2.38 of that utility, and SODE jetways work with heavy aircraft.

It pairs well. Several owners across 2016 and 2017 report flying it with DragonEye's Hong Kong area scenery for the surrounding high-rises and islands; the phrase used is that together "it feels just like the real thing". That is a compliment to the airport for staying out of the way as much as to the pairing.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The airport it models no longer exists. Still open, and now unfixable in this product. The Midfield Concourse opened in 2016 and buyers were flagging its absence by December 2018. "The new terminal is long overdue and it's about time it got updated," wrote a simMarket reviewer on 18 December 2019 — four months before the V2 that fixed it, and for a different product. This build has never had the concourse, the Sky Bridge, the third runway or the new Terminal 2, and the developer's fix for all of it was to sell V2.

Two runways where the real airport now has three. Still open in both versions. The clearest statement of it is an AVSIM thread of 18 November 2024, ten days before the three-runway system went live: an owner asked which VHHH had all three for P3D v5 and was told, correctly, that Taxi2Gate's V2 has two and WF Scenery Studio's has three. Nobody suggested the older build as an option at all.

No official installer beyond P3D v2. Mitigated by the community, never by the developer. From December 2015 — "there are no official p3d v3 installers actually from t2g" — through to a May 2019 AVSIM thread walking a novice through it, the recipe has been the same: run the installer, point it at the newer simulator's folder, then add VHHH above VHHH-Terrain in the scenery library by hand. It works. It is also 2019 advice for a product still sold in 2026 with a compatibility line reading FSX SP2/Acceleration, P3D V1, P3D V2.

Flickering and disappearing textures in newer simulators. Mitigated, with a known workaround. An AVSIM thread of 11 November 2018 produced both the complaint — "some gnarly texture issues" after a manual v4 install — and the cause, leftover default scenery BGLs that need renaming to .off. In the same thread one owner described the airport turning black behind him on climb out of 07R with FTX Global and Vector installed, and another running the identical setup saw nothing of the kind. Treat that one as unresolved rather than as a defect.

Support that owners describe as absent. Still open. A March 2016 buyer said he had asked about a P3D v3 update repeatedly over four months and rated Taxi2Gate the only company that had not updated their sceneries; a PMDG forum poster in May 2020 wrote that he had "not been impressed by the T2G 'support' which doesn't seem to exist". The developer's support page still links two forums: the iFlySimX board, whose forum subdomain no longer resolves, and a "Forum New" page on their own site that contains nothing. Email to support@taxi2gate.org is what is left, with the page warning that requests without an order number and a screenshot will be ignored.

Presentation that aged out. No PBR, no dynamic lighting — a criticism levelled at the 2020 V2 within a day of release, and true in stronger terms of the 2014 build. A 2015 buyer noted the approach lighting does not match the real thing. The night scene is competent static illumination and nothing more.

Performance and stability

The good news has not changed in eleven years: this is one of the lightest large airports of its generation, and owners running PMDG heavies at high settings report smooth frame rates in P3D v3 and v4 as well as FSX.

Stability is a two-part story and both parts are dated. In March 2016 a P3D v3 owner reported constant freezes and crashes to desktop and said the scenery was unusable on that simulator; in May 2016 another P3D v3 owner reported the opposite, with high settings and no OOM errors even with heavy add-on aircraft. The likeliest reading, given everything since, is that both were describing an unofficial install rather than a defect — this scenery was never built for v3, and how you get it in there decides how it behaves.

The installer itself is the recurring irritant. When V2 shipped in April 2020, the first AVSIM post about it was a complaint that the simMarket installer wrote three scenery.cfg entries, one of them pointing at a folder with no scenery in it, producing an error on startup. The legacy build shares that lineage. Neither version uses the add-on.xml method that P3D v4 and v5 owners expect, which is why every install thread ends with somebody being told to edit the scenery library by hand.

Who should buy it

FSX and FSX:SE flyers who want the best Chek Lap Kok their simulator can run: buy it. Nothing newer targets FSX. The alternative is ImagineSim's legacy VHHH at £11.99, which the community judged clearly inferior in 2015 and which has aged a further decade since. €23.99 is a lot for a 2014 scenery, but on FSX it is the only serious option and it will not cost you frames.

P3D v1 to v3 owners: buy it, and expect to finish the install yourself. V2 does not install on your simulator. This one does, officially on v1 and v2 and in practice on v3, and the manual scenery-library step is well documented.

Owners of this scenery who have moved to P3D v4 or v5: don't buy anything, upgrade for €12.00. You get the Midfield Concourse, the airside bridge, the HK Link Road and a supported installer. It is the best value in this entire review.

P3D v4 and v5 owners who do not already own it: do not buy this. Buy V2 at €25.00 if you want Taxi2Gate's airport, or WF Scenery Studio's VHHH at €23.90 if you want PBR, dynamic lighting and the third runway. On those simulators the older build is strictly the worse purchase at almost the same money.

Anyone who needs the airport as it is today — three runways, the new Terminal 2: do not buy this, and do not buy V2 either. For P3D the answer is WF Scenery Studio, with the caveat that its own buyers report incorrect ILS frequencies and no developer response. For MSFS the answer is WF Scenery Studio or iniBuilds, neither of which has anything to do with Taxi2Gate.

MSFS 2020 or 2024 pilots: this is not for you at all. There is no version, and no sign of one coming.

Where it stands today

Taxi2Gate are trading, but they are not here. After a long silence they posted on Facebook on 23 September 2022 that "after a pause" they would bring TFFR to P3D v5 and then move their catalogue to MSFS. They delivered: Pointe-à-Pitre for MSFS in February 2023, Orlando International in July 2023, updated to v1.1.0 the same month. Charles de Gaulle was named as next in line and the rest of the catalogue after it. Since mid-2023 the release log has been quiet, and Hong Kong has never appeared on the MSFS roadmap by name. Whatever the plan is for VHHH, three and a half years of silence is the current state of it.

That leaves the 2014 scenery in an odd position on simMarket's all-time bestseller list at number 36. That rank is a record of eleven years of sales into FSX and early Prepar3D, not a statement about the product in 2026 — and it is earned rather than inflated: there is no evidence this title was ever given away free, though Taxi2Gate sceneries have been discounted heavily in store sales. The star rating deserves separating out too. Nineteen reviews, averaging exactly 4.0, split 10 five-star, 3 four-star, 2 three-star, 4 two-star, none at one star. Read the dates on those and the shape is unmistakable: the five-stars cluster in 2015 to 2018, the two-stars arrive later, and the complaint in the later ones is not that the scenery is bad but that the airport moved on without it.

Which is the fairest summary available. This was a very good airport, built light enough to fly out of a decade-old simulator with a PMDG heavy, and better than anything else on the platform when it launched. It is now a historical rendition being sold at its original price, on a store page that does not mention the €12.00 upgrade sitting two clicks away. Buy it for FSX. Buy the upgrade if you already own it. Otherwise walk past.