Open-Community Development

I see this being talked a lot on the SDK forum. But I’m posting this long analysis here because I cannot stress how important this is. It fits perfectly into the sim’s design. And is a logical evolution to have.

Similar to X-Plane’s sharing or Wikipedia. ANY user could participate. Anyone could edit, correct, build on one another, enhance, and overall make airports more accurate to their real-life counterpart. Then, with moderator approval, the scenery could be automatically shared with all users. Unless, of course, they override the scenery with something else.

To prevent abuse and ensure quality control, Asobo/Microsoft could send out a request for knowledgeable and trusted volunteer-moderators to make sure only the best and most accurate work is shared with the world.

Take an example: This is Salt Lake City International. Not necessarily a massive or famous airport, but it will do:
SLC2020
It looks… Decent. The taxiways and runways look amazing. However, there is no ATC tower, Delta hangar, a few jetways, and fuel storage tanks. The massive parking lot is completely empty. The parking garage is apparently a warehouse. The missing tower is especially sad because the SDK itself includes a scenery object labeled “KSLC_ControlTower01”.
And if you look closely, there are trees on the apron. TREES ON THE APRON.

Now take a look at FSX (mostly) default SLC.
SLCFSX
Sure it’s missing a few buildings and the parking lot is now non-existent. No doubt the taxiways, runways, grass, and overall texture resolution look terrible in comparison to FS2020, but at least it has an accurate ATC tower, fuel depot, and hangar. Even the terminals have recognizable shapes (Ramp towers). FS2020 does not.

Imagine if someone fixed these small details and added them to the database.

As others have pointed out, this could be expanded to customized POIs, buildings, bridges, and even fixing terrain. Maybe those with the skills and passion can turn their home airfield into a payware-quality work-of-art for all to enjoy.

Maybe you could model your house for the one person besides you who happens to notice.

To be fair, quite a few FSX airports were hand-edited and/ hand-modeled. SLC included. The fact that the AI is able to create what we got now all from 2d satellite pictures and some minor tweaking is extraordinary. Bravo to the developers. But nothing will be as perfect as good old manual editing. Asobo/Microsoft do not have the time to manually edit thousands of airports and landmarks. But the community does. And I for one, do not want to shell out hundreds of dollars on overpriced scenery to fix simple problems when a shared community development system could fix these for free.

A small question I have is why airport grounds seem to ignore bing’s 3d building data and instead replace terminals and with auto-gen apartment buildings? Food for thought.

The AI could of course be improved. In fact, they may already have an improvement under wraps. That’s the beauty of AI. But again, nothing beats manual editing by a person who is familiar with the place. I myself can think of a few airports and locations I would love to fix-up.

With the power of the Azure servers, the opportunities and potential for such a system are infinite!

Anywho. Thanks for reading.

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4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Scenery Gateway System