ULLI St. Petersburg X V3: Digital Design's priciest Pulkovo runs on their oldest sim

The promotional screenshots for this scenery have a billboard in them. It stands beside the airport approach road at dusk, lit from within, and it advertises the 2018 FIFA World Cup. That is not a gotcha — it was perfectly accurate on 15 July 2018, the day simMarket listed ULLI St. Petersburg X V3, which happened also to be the day of the final. It is just the clearest possible marker of the moment this product stopped moving.

What it is, underneath the hoarding, is Digital Design's Pulkovo: ULLI to controllers, LED to passengers, the airport 23 km south of St Petersburg that handled 20.9 million people in 2024 and is Russia's second busiest. €21.00. Requirements, as printed on the store page: Prepar3D V4.x. Not FSX, which the older V2 covers. Not v5. Not v6.

Digital Design themselves did not stop. Evgeny Baturin's studio rebuilt this same airport from scratch for Microsoft Flight Simulator, on sale 18 September 2024 at €19.50, and again for X-Plane 12 on 5 November 2025 at €18.00. They also ship Prepar3D v5 builds of Salzburg, Tenerife, Liverpool, Leipzig, Tivat and Lyon. Pulkovo is the one airport in their catalogue that got a v4 build and then never got a v5 one — and Prepar3D v5 arrived on 14 April 2020, v6 on 3 July 2023. So the oldest platform in the ULLI family carries the highest price tag.

Then there is the store page itself, which is the reason anyone is reading this: five stars, all-time #30 on simMarket's bestseller list, a page that looks like a settled community verdict. Five days after Prepar3D v5 launched, on 19 April 2020, simMarket ran ULLI as its daily giveaway. simFlight's write-up of the promotion says Digital Design were "offering ALL simulators versions" of the scenery that day, free. A rank built partly on a day when the price was zero is a different object from a rank built on eight years of sales.

We read twenty-six sources for this: every ULLI listing Digital Design have on simMarket plus three third-party MSFS storefronts, three AVSIM threads, the official MSFS forums, a full written review at simFlight.DE, seven news items across FSElite, Threshold and simFlight, and the only video that exists. Reddit is blocked in this environment, so the usual sentiment-at-a-glance check is missing — and for a product this old and this niche, that matters less than usual, because there is barely any sentiment left to glance at.

What you are actually buying

One scenery of one airport, plus a wedge of southern St Petersburg, compiled against the Prepar3D v4.3 SDK. 1.32 GB. SODE jetways, a GSX docking profile, dynamic lighting, automatic seasons, hand-placed autogen and a set of city landmarks — the Lakhta Center, Strelna, the Heli-drive heliport, the power station.

Digital Design have no storefront of their own. Their simMarket vendor page lists an email address and a Facebook group as customer support, and nothing else; the "Sold by" field on every product is Digital Design themselves, through simMarket. So there is no second first-party price to check this against.

Product	Simulator	simMarket	On sale since
ULLI ST. PETERSBURG X V3 P3D4	Prepar3D v4.x only	€21.00	15 July 2018
ULLI ST. PETERSBURG X V2 FSX P3D	FSX, P3D v2.x / v3.x	€21.00	19 April 2016
ULLI ST. PETERSBURG V2 FS2004	FS2004	€21.00	—
SAINT-PETERSBURG PULKOVO AIRPORT MSFS	MSFS 2020 and 2024	€19.50	18 September 2024
SAINT-PETERSBURG PULKOVO AIRPORT XP12	X-Plane 12	€18.00	5 November 2025

If you already own V2 at simMarket, the upgrade to V3 is €8.50 and the discount is applied automatically to the account that bought V2. That is the single best deal in this table and it has been sitting there since 2018.

Cross-store comparison needs a warning. The MSFS rebuild is €19.50 at simMarket, $23.22 at Contrail, AU$32.95 at Orbx and £16.50 at iniBuilds — but simMarket's terms state that "All prices stated on SIMMARKET include the respectively applicable value added tax," which for a session with no country resolved means 0%. These are not like-for-like figures and we are not calling any of them cheapest.

The thing worth saying plainly: the P3D v4 SKU is the most expensive ULLI Digital Design sell, and it runs on the oldest simulator. Nobody has adjusted it in eight years.

What the community consistently praises

Performance, first, last and by a distance. It is the one claim every source makes independently. Digital Design's own feature list promises "Friendly FPS"; Niccolò, buying two days after launch, wrote "Great fp impact, very lite whit a so complex area"; Dmitrii on 24 October 2018 called it "Cheap, easy on FPS and very detailed"; Alexander on 25 July 2018 noted the city "has still nearly no impact on FPS." The Russian-language review from launch day praises Baturin specifically for not chasing 4K textures that would stutter on mid-range machines, and for handling dynamic lighting carefully. That restraint is why an airport plus a city runs.

Night lighting is the second. The V3 changelog lists custom 3D runway and taxiway lights, updated light effects, dynamic lighting and a wet apron in precipitation, and the reviews back it. It is the one area where a 2018 Prepar3D scenery still looks current, because dynamic lighting was the headline v4 feature and Digital Design used it properly rather than everywhere.

The terminal is right, and it is worth knowing why that is not obvious. Pulkovo's centralised terminal — the Grimshaw building with the folded gold roof — opened on 3 December 2013, and by 14 February 2014 all flights had moved into it. The original ULLI shipped in December 2014 with the old Pulkovo-1 next door modelled as a construction site behind red-and-white barriers. V2 in 2016 brought Pulkovo-1 back as a live building with jetbridges. V3 put 2K textures on the main terminal. The scenery you buy today has both buildings, which is what the real place looks like.

The surroundings are the fourth thing, and several buyers rate them above the airport. Alexander, 25 July 2018: "The city is stunning." Pablo, two days after launch, on the approach over the bay and the Soviet housing blocks: "One of the best approaches by far." Dieter in November 2019 said it blends into Orbx so cleanly he cannot see where one ends and the other starts.

And the SODE jetways fixed the loudest V2 complaint. Two separate V2 buyers — Philipp in February 2017, David in November 2016 — docked it a star specifically for static jetways sitting motionless on the apron. V3 lists "Support SODE jetways" and "Support GSX docking system," and the complaint disappears from the record after that. That is a developer reading his own store page.

What keeps coming up as a problem

The platform ceiling. Still open, and permanent. Prepar3D V4.x is what the requirements field says, and there has been no update, no v5 SKU, and no statement that one is coming, in the six years since v5 shipped. Digital Design demonstrably know how to do this — six of their airports carry P3D4-5 or P3D5 badges on the same store. Pulkovo did not get one. If you are on v5 or v6 you are buying a scenery the vendor does not claim will run.

The terminal textures. Still open. This is the only substantive criticism in the V3 reviews, and it came from someone who loved the rest of it. Alexander, 25 July 2018: the textures on the building itself "lack a bit," and it "looks a bit old compared to the rest of scenery." He still gave five stars. Nobody has revisited it because there has been nothing to revisit.

The ground vehicles. Still open. Dieter's four-star review of 4 November 2019 is the only sub-five rating the V3 page has ever received, and it is entirely about the GSE: the vehicles look poor, and they drive across the taxiway and straight through parked aircraft. V3's changelog claims "Updated models of ground vehicles and moving buses, cars, etc." That was sixteen months before Dieter's review.

Ground-texture bleeding. Fixed, in 2016, by email. Worth recording because it is the only support incident in the public record and it went well. A buyer named christiaan hit shimmering and texture bleeding on the runways in the FSX/P3D V2, emailed Digital Design, got a fast reply with a known fix — an ALT file for the World/Scenery folder — and wrote "Top service from Digital Design." Separately, AES support broke on the V2 update and was restored in AES v2.42a. Baturin answers his email. He just has not opened this project in eight years.

The record itself is the problem. The AVSIM Prepar3D thread announcing V2 in 2016 has zero replies. The AVSIM FS2004 thread from December 2014 ran to 34 posts, but half of it is people concluding they would stick with the freeware Pulkovo 2014 from the Russian AVSIM — "I'll be passing on the payware," wrote one; "payware quality," said another of the freeware. No written review of V3 exists anywhere. The only video is a 2015 AirDailyX livestream of the first version with 315 views. The newest store review is dated 7 February 2023, and seven of the nine were posted in 2018.

The currency problem, stated plainly

A scenery is a snapshot of an airport, and this snapshot is from summer 2018. That was already true of the buildings. It is now also true of what you will find parked at them.

Since 2022, Pulkovo has had no scheduled service to the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, North America, Australasia or Northeast Asia. The traffic is domestic Russian, CIS, Turkey, the Gulf, Central Asia and China. If you fly in expecting the Lufthansa, Finnair, KLM, easyJet and British Airways tails that made ULLI an interesting European destination in 2018, the real airport no longer has them, and neither does anything you can reasonably fly in from. That is a straightforward accuracy-and-currency point of exactly the same kind as an out-of-date terminal: it changes what a plausible flight into this scenery looks like. In the comments under simFlight.DE's 2024 review, readers said the same thing about their own hangars — one noting that virtual pilots have followed the real route map, and that it shows in sales.

None of that is the scenery's fault. It is a reason to be honest about who is still flying there.

Performance and stability

There is no stability problem in the record. Not one crash report, not one out-of-memory complaint, no CTD thread anywhere, across eight years. For a 1.32 GB Prepar3D v4 scenery that also carries city autogen, that is genuinely unusual, and it is the strongest single argument the product has.

Frame rates are the same story from every direction. The design brief was explicitly FPS-first — the V2 page advertises "Friendly FPS and low VAS usage" and V3 keeps the promise while adding dynamic lighting, volumetric grass and 2K terminal textures. Buyers on mid-range 2018 hardware report no trouble. Nobody in eight years has posted a "does this tank your frames" thread, which for a Russian mega-airport scenery is close to a compliment in itself.

The two live caveats are configuration, not code. GSX is recommended rather than required, and the SODE install is a separate step; and if you are running the scenery on a Prepar3D version it was not built for, you are outside what anyone has tested. We could not find a single documented account of V3 running in P3D v5 or v6, in either direction. That is not evidence it fails. It is evidence nobody has written it down.

Who should buy it

If you fly Prepar3D v4 and you want Pulkovo, buy it. This is the only serious ULLI for your simulator, it performs beautifully, the night lighting is excellent, and €21.00 for an airport plus a city is not a bad rate even in 2026. You are the profile this product was built for and it has not been bettered on your platform.

If you own V2 and you are on v4, take the €8.50 upgrade. SODE jetways, the reworked ground, the 2K terminal and dynamic lighting for the price of a coffee round. Easy.

If you are on Prepar3D v5 or v6, do not buy this. The store does not claim compatibility, the developer has not shipped a v5 build in six years, and there is no public account of anyone making it work. Spending €21.00 on an untested outcome is not a purchase, it is a bet.

If you are on MSFS 2020, MSFS 2024 or X-Plane 12, buy the modern one instead, not this. Digital Design's 2024 MSFS rebuild is a genuinely different product — 4.1 GB, furnished terminal interiors with animated people, custom GSX profile, VDGS — and it is €1.50 cheaper. Bert Groner reviewed it at length for simFlight.DE on 25 September 2024 and ended with a flat buy recommendation. The X-Plane 12 version followed in November 2025 at €18.00. Buying the P3D v4 SKU when you own a current simulator is simply paying more for less.

If you are shopping by simMarket's all-time bestseller rank, be careful here. That rank is real, and so is the free day in April 2020 that helped build it. They are not the same fact.

Where it stands today

The honest summary of the source record is that everyone who bought this scenery liked it, and there are very few of them left. Zero negative sources. One four-star review in eight years, about the baggage tugs. The complaints in this review are almost all about the product's situation rather than its contents — which is a real distinction, and it cuts both ways. Digital Design built a good airport in 2018 and it is still a good airport. It is attached to a simulator generation that has been superseded twice, at a price that has never moved, on a store page whose five-star average is genuinely 4.89 and whose newest opinion is three and a half years old.

The comparison that settles it is internal. The same studio, the same airport, rebuilt twice since — MSFS in September 2024, X-Plane 12 in November 2025 — with interiors, animated crowds and a GSX profile, and both cheaper than the 2018 Prepar3D build. When a developer's own newer work undercuts their old work on both price and content, the old work has become a legacy SKU rather than a live product, and the store is the only place still treating it as current.

One thing to watch, because it says something about the studio: buyers on the official MSFS forums spent from September 2025 asking Digital Design to make ULLI available in MSFS 2024, and by 26 January 2026 it was. Baturin is still there, still shipping, still listening. He is just not listening about Prepar3D, and there is no reason left to expect that he will.