VTCC Chiang Mai International XP12: the first payware Chiang Mai X-Plane has had

On 5 August 2026 a 48.96 MB file appeared on simMarket carrying two logos side by side: ARTISAN DIGITAL CO.,LTD. and SiamFlight. It is the first payware Chiang Mai anyone has made for X-Plane. Until that morning, the X-Plane pilot who wanted VTCC had three options, all of them free and two of them older than X-Plane 11: a 2011 conversion of Martin Strong's FS2004 scenery, a 2012 conversion of Prasong's, and whatever the X-Plane Scenery Gateway had.

Two weeks later the entire public record of this product consists of a press-release rewrite on simFlight, one Twitch-style stream with 107 views, and a store page that still says "Review it now" because nobody has. There is no X-Plane.Org thread. There is nothing on AVSIM — a search there for "Chiang Mai" returns 36 results, all of them screenshots and holiday chat going back to 2014. Reddit, which is where sentiment-at-a-glance would normally come from, is structurally unavailable to us and would not have helped here anyway.

So this review is not an aggregation of opinion, because there is no opinion to aggregate. It is a reconstruction from what can actually be verified: the developer's own catalogue and its ratings, the parent MSFS product this is clearly derived from, the developer's screenshots read carefully, the state of the free competition, and a set of checks on the store listing itself. Where the record is silent, this review says so rather than guessing.

The one thing that can be established with confidence is provenance, and it is better than the store page makes it look. Artisan Digital Co.,Ltd. is described on its own simMarket publisher page as a visual effects company in Lampang that started making simulator content in 2026 — which reads like a debut from nobody in particular. It is not. The product page itself is titled "VTCC/CNX Chiang Mai International Airport XP12 v1.0.0 | SiamFlight", the support address is SiamFlightTH@hotmail.com, and SiamFlight's own simMarket vendor page gives its support link as artisandigitalth.com. They are the same operation. SiamFlight has twenty Thai and regional airports on simMarket and has been shipping since at least 2023.

Sources read for this review: 22.

What you are actually buying

	XP12 (this product)	MSFS version (same team)	X-Plane Gateway
Price	€13.99	€13.99 simMarket / AUD 23.99 Orbx	Free, ships with the sim
Released	5 August 2026, v1.0.0	12 May 2023, now v1.1.0 (14 July 2026)	Recommended pack approved 24 September 2021
Download	48.96 MB	245.67 MB (740.10 MB installed, per Orbx)	n/a
Platforms	Windows, Mac, Linux	Windows only	all
City content	not listed	Doi Suthep, 700th Anniversary Stadium, Old City night lighting	none
Ratings	none yet	5/5 from 6 on simMarket; 5/5 from 1 on flightsim.to	n/a

The feature list is short and specific: custom objects for the terminal, Wing 41, the ATC tower, the Tango Squadron museum, the cargo terminal and the new parking building; Wing 41 hangar and Special Operation Air Wing spawn points for both aeroplanes and helicopters; gate numbers and apron, taxiway and runway markings; hand-placed guidance signs; a hand-placed taxiway and runway light system; full day/night lighting; hand-placed ground objects.

Two absences matter. The MSFS listing for the same airport promises custom jetways in two styles and a run of city landmarks added free after release — Wat Phra That Doi Suthep, the 700th Anniversary Stadium, the Old City's night lighting, added between v1.0.1 on 23 May 2023 and v1.0.3 on 5 September 2023. The XP12 listing promises none of that. What you are buying is the airport, its fence line, and nothing beyond it. At €13.99 that is the same money for materially less content than the MSFS product sold under the same brand.

The version requirement is unusually clear and worth quoting: X-Plane 12 (Not for XP11). There is no XP11 build, and there is no back-compatibility fudge. There is also no minimum point release stated anywhere — not on the listing, not in any news item, and there is no published manual to check. If you are running an old 12.0.x install, the store gives you nothing to go on.

What the community consistently praises

Honesty first: the community has not praised this product, because the community has not spoken about it. What the record does support is praise for the thing it was made from.

The MSFS Chiang Mai is the version the IVAO Thailand division marks as [Recommended] on its scenery list — the endorsement of people who control traffic into VTCC for a living, virtually speaking. It holds a displayed 5 out of 5 on simMarket across six ratings, though the spread is five fives and one four, which is a true mean of 4.83 rather than a clean 5.0. flightsim.to's store shows 5/5 from a single review. Orbx and iniBuilds both carry it. Threshold covered the release on 15 July 2023 without a word of criticism; FSElite covered the same team's Don Mueang in November 2023 and described a developer with an update roadmap and an open inbox.

That reputation was earned by maintenance, not marketing. The MSFS VTCC ran v1.0.0 (12 May 2023), v1.0.1 (23 May), v1.0.2 (5 June, pushback fixes for smaller aircraft and toned-down sequenced lights), v1.0.3 (5 September) and then, three years on, v1.1.0 on 14 July 2026 with MSFS 2024 support, new jetways, higher-resolution ground markings and terminal interiors. The XP12 port landed three weeks after that refresh, which is the most useful thing in the whole record: this is not a port of the 2023 scenery, it is a port of the version that had just been rebuilt.

The developer's own screenshots corroborate the feature list rather than flattering it. The Lanna-style pitched roofs over the domestic and international piers, the old tower and the new one standing together, the Tango Squadron hangars and the Wing 41 revetments on the western side, the multi-storey car park, the guidance-sign poles, the ground clutter around the stands — all of it is there in the 2560×1440 promotional set, and all of it matches the real field's layout, including the military half that most third-party airports quietly fence off.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Nothing "keeps coming up", because nothing has come up. The problems here are structural, and they are visible from outside the product.

No public record at all. Still open. Fifteen days after release: zero store ratings, no X-Plane.Org thread, nothing on AVSIM, one YouTube stream (DankestOsprey, a ToLiss A321neo real-ops flight, 107 views). The product sat at #38 in simMarket's weekly bestsellers when this review's product list was drawn and had slipped to #47 by 20 August 2026. Buyers are being asked to trust screenshots.

The support website does not exist. Still open. simMarket points customers at artisandigitalth.com for support on both the Artisan Digital and SiamFlight vendor pages. Checked on 20 August 2026, that domain has no DNS record whatsoever — not a parked page, not a redirect, nothing. Support in practice is a hotmail address and a Discord server, and the Discord at least is real: created 29 March 2022, 258 members, 20 of them online when we looked. Everything the developer has written in public — the MSFS forum dev diary, the update posts, the store copy — is in English, so a European or American buyer will be understood. They will just be one of 258 people in a small server, with no ticket system and no website behind it.

Requirements copied from the wrong simulator. Still open. The listing recommends 8 GB or more of VRAM for a 48.96 MB scenery. That figure is inherited from the MSFS product's spec block and tells an X-Plane buyer nothing useful.

No documentation. Still open. There is no manual, no installation note, nothing about library dependencies or where the package should sit in scenery_packs.ini. For a scenery this small, whether it leans on a third-party object library is exactly the question a buyer needs answered before purchase, and the store does not answer it.

Everything outside the fence is stock. By design, but worth knowing. The developer's own approach shot — short final to runway 36 at dusk, which is the best image in the set — shows suburban autogen houses under the aeroplane that look nothing like the roofs of Nong Hoi and San Phak Wan. That is X-Plane's default scenery doing its job, not a defect, but if you were expecting the MSFS version's Old City lighting on the downwind leg, it is not here.

Performance and stability

There is no independent performance data. Not one frame-rate figure, not one crash report, not one "runs fine on my 3070" post exists anywhere we could reach.

What can be said is circumstantial and points one way. The package is 48.96 MB, against 3.51 GB for WDF Avia's VTSP Phuket, the nearest comparable Thai payware airport for X-Plane 12 (€20.22, released 18 January 2024, now v1.7, and it bundles an Ortho4XP mesh). A scenery that small cannot be carrying heavy custom texture work or its own ground mesh, which normally means it is cheap to draw. The screenshots show hand-placed light objects rather than blanket lighting, which is the expensive-looking choice done the inexpensive way.

Treat that as an inference, not a measurement. The honest statement is that nobody has published a frame counter next to this airport yet, and a €13.99 purchase two weeks after release is a purchase made on trust.

Who should buy it

The X-Plane pilot who flies Southeast Asia regularly. Buy it. VTCC is the fourth-busiest airport in Thailand — 9.5 million passengers in 2025, up 4.79% — with a single 3,100 m runway wedged into a valley, and until three weeks ago X-Plane had no serious version of it. Bangkok–Chiang Mai in a turboprop or a narrowbody is one of the better short sectors in the region, and this makes the destination worth arriving at.

The buyer who already owns the MSFS version and assumes this is the same product. It is not, and you should know that before you pay. Same price, roughly a fifth of the download, no city landmarks in the feature list, no promise of the free POI updates that the MSFS product received across 2023.

Anyone who wants VTCC to look like the MSFS airport looks in the marketing. Do not buy it — or at least, wait. The X-Plane version is the airport only, and the surrounding city is whatever your sim already draws.

The buyer who will not spend money on an unreviewed product. Do not buy it yet. There is no rating anywhere, no forum thread, no video review, no manual, and a support website that does not resolve. Nothing about that says the scenery is bad; it says the evidence is not in. Wait for the first ten simMarket ratings.

The pilot who only ever passes through VTCC once a year. Do not buy it. The Gateway airport that already ships with X-Plane 12 — JarekP's submission, approved 24 September 2021, built on Jan "Litjan" Vogel's March 2021 cleanup of Digachan's 2019 3D layout — has taxi routes, ramp starts and truck routes, and it is free. It looks like a Gateway airport, but it works.

Where it stands today

As of 20 August 2026 this is a fifteen-day-old product with an empty comment thread and a genuinely good pedigree, and those two facts are in tension. The pedigree is not in doubt: the same team's Chiang Mai for MSFS is the one Thailand's own IVAO division tells its pilots to install, it has been maintained for three years, and the X-Plane port was cut from the freshly rebuilt July 2026 version rather than the 2023 original. The record is in doubt, because there is none.

The value question is sharper than usual for a Thai regional airport, because the baseline is not nothing. X-Plane 12 ships with a Gateway VTCC that has 3D buildings, working taxi routes and AI-friendly ramp starts. €13.99 has to buy a visible step up on that, and on the developer's own evidence — Lanna roofs, the Tango Squadron museum, hand-placed guidance signs, Wing 41 modelled rather than blanked — it plainly does. What it does not buy is the surrounding city that the MSFS listing sells for the same money, or a manual, or a support site that loads.

Both things stay true until somebody publishes a frame counter and a landing. If you fly northern Thailand in X-Plane, this is the only serious game in town and it is made by people who have built twenty Thai and regional airports already. If you do not, the free airport in your sim is already better than the reputation of free airports suggests.