As the new career mode is pushing people into stock airports that have previously gotten little to no attention from the masses, it’s becoming obvious to many people how dreadful the AI rendering of airports can be. There are buildings and trees blocking runways, AI pathing errors, errant parking spots, incorrect lighting, and many are just generally not setup to be used for careers.
There’s a big opportunity here, not just to polish the errors, but to enhance the sim by designating preferred runways and designating parking spots or ramp areas, or entire airports as useable (or not) for certain types of careers.
Please allow us to start fixing these errors and working toward better utilization of the sim!
Given the mostly streaming nature of FS2024 it would be cool also to have curated high quality freeware scenery addons (one example would be the Africa to go package) as part of the standard scenery. The most noticable advantage for the users of streaming packages would be that updates don’t have to be installed or cared for.
I read they are bringing this back in early 2025? Hopefully soon because this is a great system to improve the default airports that are often out of date or have broken taxiways. I would love to contribute.
Over in the dev forum, one of the leads mentioned that the world hub website is still closed and there’s been no official date announced for its reopening. That’s obviously a bummer, but also makes me hopeful because he also didn’t say that it’s never coming back.
Let’s hope it comes soon. BTW, yesterday I checked my edited airports from the FS2020 world hub alpha within LittleNavMap (with FS2024 scenery loaded), and it seems, the edits are all there - so, at least our work was not in vain.
Absolutely! I’ve been flying the airports I did in NorCal and the changes are still there. I have noticed a few odd things, though - sometimes the parking spots are rotated. And trees have crept back into areas I definitely excluded, especially in the approach zone of runways. The latter seems to be a general bug as even standard runway and taxiway exclusions aren’t always working.
In one or two of the Dev Updates last summer or fall, it was stated that the satellite imagery will be replaced with 2023 imagery. AFAIR, that applies to both MSFS 2020 and 2024.
You can use the full SDK to modify or create an airport for your own use, you can share the airport modified/created on a site like flightsim.to, or become a commercial developer and offer it for sale. But with the WorldHub, you can modify an airport and get it approved for release in the sim for everyone to enjoy!
On today’s developer stream, the necessity of the World Hub was acknowledged. There were also questions about whether we would get a lot of the improvements we’d been asking for, which was met with an affirmative, but vague answer.
However, there are apparently issues with GDPR website compliance due to the World Hub website effectively having a chat function. They said this was part of why the relaunch will likely be pushed back to the latter half of 2025.
With all the airport idiosyncrasies causing crashes and career mode failures, I’d say that’s a big bummer.
Per what Jorg said today, the “In Progress” part of the World Hub is the replacement of satellite imagery. I thought I also heard that the delay from release in early 2025 to after mid 2025 is due to 1) the imagery replacement with 2023 Bing data taking longer than expected – estimated to take a month longer than now and 2) the WorldHub website is noncompliant due to the chat function and privacy issues and must adhere to European law. Jorg said, realistically, this could take to after mid-year to get everything sorted out.
Jorg stated that the World Hub is important because it is “one way you can positively impact the sim world.” When asked about whether we can expect additional features, “Is that the plan?” he said “Yeah!”. It sounds like we’ll be able to do more with the World Hub, but they have to figure out exactly how it will work after they get the images replaced.
Although disappointed that it will take longer than originally planned, it sounds like they have listened to our requests for greater capability!! That is encouraging.
