The current thumbnail generation system is producing inconsistent and broken results, affecting the usability of the aircraft selection menu.
Observed Issues:
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Incorrect Lighting: The camera is often positioned on the shadow side of the aircraft. This results in dark, backlit thumbnails where liveries are unreadable.
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Erratic Zoom/Scaling: The framing logic is failing to normalize the size of the aircraft. Some planes are zoomed out too far, while others are cropped or cut off. The FOV is far too high, making the thumbnails have a fish-eye look to them.
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Visual Inconsistency: The UI fails to enforce a unified background style, creating a disjointed look between default and 3rd party content.
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Text errors: The text for each aircraft tile cuts off and makes it harder to read, with wasted space below. This space should be used to display the aircraft information in a more readable way.
Instead of the current erratic behavior, the generation system needs to be fixed to ensure the camera is always on the lit side of the aircraft and that the zoom levels are standardized for all models. To resolve the visual incompatibility with 3rd party content, the system requires an on-demand regeneration capability. This allows thumbnails to be re-processed for each aircraft and all of its liveries with the corrected lighting and scaling rules, ensuring they match the visual standard of the base content.
Here is how the tiles look right now:
Here is an example of how an aircraft tile would look with corrected consistent visualization:
18 Likes
I agree and would also like to add that it would be nice if they were pictured from the side so the livery can actually be seen. Some of the quartering angles make it impossible to see what the livery looks like without having to select it and load it completely into the sim.
9 Likes
Additionally I would think having the creator/owner logo would be useful as a small corner icon (like fenix icon, PMDG etc) it should be a small part of the thumbnail but would help quickly identify who did which. especially if the same thumbnails are used in the marketplace?
10 Likes
Can we just accept these are the worst menus on a videogame ever and just redo the whole UI/UX from scratch.
This isn’t some random underfunded indie game. These menus are unusable and unacceptable. I’m even ok with 2020’s menus back.
14 Likes
For the love of god, yes please. The menu and UI in 2024 has been the change I absolutely hate the most.
I’ll settle for consistent thumbnails but honestly I’d much prefer just getting the 2020 menu back instead.
7 Likes
Voted. 100% agree. Also a side view so we can actually see the aircraft and livery would be nice.
7 Likes
Some of the thumbnails have been regenerated lately, but the main issues highlighted here still persist, even within basegame aircraft
Exactly that!
Specially the Plane selection interface, as pointed out by @Neonf0x6338. I’m also puzzled how an AAA Title like MSFS 2024 has ended up with a menu like that.
Aircraft manufacturer, type, and developer in a single unformatted line of text, with all the unutilized empty space below.
Not to mention, that of all the aircraft available, only 6 are being displayed at any one time, with the whole list to be scrolled through from left to right, instead of top to bottom, with a reversed scroll wheel orientation (at least for me…), with preview images loading to slowly to just drag the slider along (which has you zooming through empty boxes, that will eventually populate, once you stop dragging the slider, and wait for a second…)
Then, at the same time, almost the half left side of the screen is reserved to show the specifics of only that one aircraft, that the mouse pointer is currently hovering over, and only for as long as that is the case…
It is a totally unorganized mess, unacceptable tbh, and I wonder, who has approved of this?
1 Like
