I wish it was possible to describe the geometry of a landing gear in more detail than as just one contact point per gear. (And the simulator should then use such information of course.) Any aircraft with something more complicated than three trivial single wheel gears would need it.
I mean for gears that have several wheels on separate axles on a bogie. It is then the bogie that is connected to the oleo strut. There is no way to get the simulator to understand how the bogie behaves when the ground under the wheels on different axles is at different height.
Just consider a very common airliner main gear (left and right), with two axles, two wheels on each axle, and the axles on a bogie that can rotate a bit around its horizontal axis, and the whole bogie then connected to the shock (oleo) strut that can move a bit up and down. Can you currently describe the geometry of that, which isn’t even that complicated, to the simulator? Nope. It’s described as one single contact point that compresses upwards when it touches the ground and weight is applied.
I am sure that with complicated animation one can make it look better. (Or even by using code in WASM or perhaps JavaScript.) Making sure the main gear is parallel to the runway when necessary even if the aircraft nose is high, even before the simulator considers it to be on ground. Adjusting things so that the the bogie starts rotating towards horizontal as soon as the back wheel of the 3D model touches the runway, and only when the bogie is fully horizontal (all wheels touch the runway) would the simulator consider it to be on ground. (And it would then work the other way around on take-off.)
Is that what you mean, did the best airliners in FSX do it that way?
But do you agree that ideally there should be a way to make the simulator itself understand and properly and automatically animate the geometry of a multi-axle landing gear, without each developer of such aircraft having to fine-tune it themselves with separate animations for the bogie rotation?
I’m still puzzled at how tires, etc are treated as single-point contacts, negating width, pressure, and thus contact area. That’s before we get into multiples and bogie/trailing link design. Ground physics are such an afterthought in flight sims, even though takeoff and landing roll are immensely critical phases and so many mishaps happen on the ground.