So …… above and beyond the few historical airports and aircraft and flights that have already been made for MSFS, wouldn’t it be great if past aviation history, especially the golden years of the 1920s and 30s, could be included in MSFS in some big way, part of the core Sim. The main thing would be the great old airports, the “golden oldies”.
I am sort of trying to do it in YouTube:
But it would be great to have it in the core Sim. The Sim would be an HISTORICAL digital twin as well! Might be another revenue stream for MSFS? Please vote if interested. Cheers.
Pair with Local Legends & Historical Aircraft Releases
Now that we have local legends and historical aircraft being introduced into the sim, it would be great to pair that with historical scenery and airports as well. Imagine as each of the local legends are released, an airport or small city, town, or area that looks like the historical era the plane is from is also released! Imagine taking a flight over 1940’s or 1950’s New York or Chicago in a DC-6!
Historical Scenery Turns On or Off Automatically Based on Date in Sim
It would be great to be able to design historical scenery that not only provides this experience (which I am sure is technically possible today), but which also can be switched on or off based on the sim/flight’s date (which I imagine is likely not possible today).
I’d just like to add to this that it would be nice to see defunct airports added in general, typically in their final form before closure, along with the option to enable/disable them. This should include airports like Meigs, Stapleton, Tempelhof, Kai Tak, Fornebu, and Riem, among others. I know the devs have mentioned interest in possible historical things, and I think these would be a step in the right direction towards that goal. There should be more emphasis on things that can no longer be experienced in person in sims, as that is the glory of simulation is being able to recreate what once was, but no longer is.
A recent thread about DEN got me thinking that it would be cool to be able to roll back to old airports similar to the Google Earth feature. Specifically Stapleton, but I’m sure others have somewhere that no longer exists that they want to fly into.
This has been a long standing wish of mine since it first appeared that FS9, the so-called “A Century of Flight”, might involve something like this (it does not, just includes historic airplanes). It would be good to have the capability to change the “era” of the sim, say on a decade basis or perhaps even just to a choice of the late 1930’s, the mid 50’s, the early 80’s and perhaps something earlier like the mid 20’s. What I mean is to be able to change the scenery (and the navaids), at least broadly, so that the cities and towns would be appropriately sized, with at least a few period landmarks added, and all of the later landmarks removed. So, as an example, Manhattan in the late 30’s had the Empire State Building but not any of the newer towers and sliver buildings, no JFK or IDL airports, and LGA (NY Municipal Airport back then) and EWR with the appropriate runways and terminals. All of this, to accommodate the growing number and quality of period airplanes.
Failing this sort of era-selection, is it possible to run two installations of MSFS on the same computer (not at the same time) one of which would be tailored to at least one of the eras? I imagine that it might be possible for the more computer-adept of our numbers to at least erase the modern buildings in most cities, and indeed many have done this with FS9 and such things as the California Classics sceneries.
I’ll vote for this, as it covers what I would also call the concept of “Eras”.
My “wish” is that MSFS would incorporate the concept of “Eras” into the 2024 sim. Probably too late at this point if not already coded, but it may be possible in a future update?
An “Era” is defined as a time period specified by a start date and an end date.
If MS/AS added an “eras” tag to the metadata of an object - be that scenery, aircraft, navaids, etc. etc. as described by the OP & others, and provided an option in the MSFS GUI for users to choose a time period to fly in (or tied it to the existing time/date options) then one could fly entirely in the present or any time period in the past [Edit, now that the Dune addon is released: or future!]. There would have to be a conflict resolution process put in place to decide which object was displayed in cases where the eras metadata overlapped, but I think that should not be too hard to resolve.
It would make what community & 3rd-party developers are doing so much easier.
Here are three other posts that discuss situations where "Era " functionality would help:
[WIP] Contiguous U.S. - Golden Age of Air Travel - 1958 navaids
We are working on a Kennedy Space Center scenery which will include a SimConnect client that will detect the “era” and appropriately load the relevant landmarks (rockets of different era on the launch pad, etc.). This will be, we believe, a first “temporal” scenery for MSFS2020.
Interestingly - you cannot select “era” earlier than 1991 in MSFS2020 user interface, although setting earlier date programmatically does work. We will have to create a separate UI for user to be able to set a date earlier than 1991.
I was actually thinking of this the other day. It would be wild to be able to fly in a city in 1900 and see long gone structures, prechanged landscapes, etc. Heck, I’d even like to be able to see centuries before that!
Thanks to satellites, it’s easy to digitally cobble the world together. But to render correct cities going back decades and centuries would require much detective work. Anyone can get the artists to put together the buildings, but people will need to find old maps and building pictures to supply to those artists.
Now that I think about it, imagine an engine that would search the internet for: "All pictures of buildings, homes, landscapes, and maps of NYC in 1900. Then it slaps it together in a rude walkable/flyable render, it matches multiple pictures of the same structures and provides them to an artist to put together to place in the map. Hmm.