Yeah. Be sure to vote on the Q&A thread!
Completely agree with that…
1 Like
Agree with you taxiway signage and stand markings would be great.Nearly impossible to find the correct stand most of the time.Also more night lighting around the stands.
1 Like
Yesterday I landed at on of the larger non-hand-crafted airports and received the usual taxi instructions to parking. I happened to have the airport diagram out and I started checking the taxiway information. Much to my surprise the taxiway information matched the airport diagram until the last taxiway. The next time I landed I received taxi instructions to a gate. The taxiway directions and signs matched the airport diagram! I have no idea if these taxiways have been updated since August. Even though the taxiway information was mostly correct, remaining inaccuracies is still a high-impact problem. It would be helpful to know the source(s) of the taxiway and airport information. Generally gate and parking detail information are not on airport diagrams from the FAA. When taxi instructions say to take taxiway A to Gate B29, is Gate B29 IRL on taxiway A?
I agree with this issue. A realistic flight simulator can’t miss it.
1 Like
Yes I agree! I mean if they had the capabilities to get taxiways accurate 14 years ago in fsx, then why can’t they do it now?
Seb said something about them creating a system to get taxiway names updated so that NavBlue charts match!
1 Like
They’re incredibly small… need to get Asobo to up the size. The font is also off & looks arcade like.
Recently started flying on the various ATC networks, it straight away (literally on my first flight) became very obvious to me the taxiway signs are extremely difficult to read! Not only are they too small, the text appears to be too low in contrast to the background at some airports and on top, the characters seem to jitter about.
1 Like
Yeah… this is really frustrating and seems like a pretty simple fix. Going to push for this at the next Q&A. I’ve already pushed the airport / scenery gateway system, but they missed the part about sign size / readability. These signs are maybe 1/2 or less the size of real international airport signs.
1 Like
I think it’s also important to understand that, even if they were the correct size, reading the signs is inherently more difficult in the sim than in real life (for various graphics/pov related reasons). So if anything they should err on the side of being too BIG.
1 Like
I disagree, the taxi signs are big enough to read if they are the correct size.
Size 1 & 2 are for small airports with runways up to 800 and 1200m respectively. So GA only, which means you are closer to the signs to read them.
Size 3 is for a regional airport with runways up to 1800m. You’d visit this airport rarely with an A320, and if you do it’s still readable enough.
Size 4 is for the usual commercial airport. Very readable in my opinion.
Note that all signs currently are size 1, which is less than half the size of what it should be at a medium sized commercial airport.
@ the reason why the devs aren’t addressing the sizes yet: they see you want correct taxi way names and probably went like ‘hmm, that’s kinda though to implement. Let’s wait until we have resources that are free to do this.’ Another reason why you should split topics with multiple requests. 
2 Likes
Fair enough. I actually think you should just message Jorg directly though. Probably the easiest / most effective way to get this changed, and it probably isn’t a hard fix.
The email you can use is msfsim@microsoft.com.
Write em I nice email saying that you wanted to elaborate on another element of fixing taxiway signs. Explain with detail where you got your sign size numbering from (what documents etc) and how you added the correct sizes using the scenery editor to see how they look. They’ll definitely take it into consideration.
I did the same thing after the last live stream and gave info about the airport / scenery gateway system.
1 Like
The thing is I came across a post in the forum of one of the 3rd party dev and they said that the size of the taxiway signage can’t be modified even by the 3rd party devs in their airport addons because its not possible yet probably due to sdk limitations and hence addon airports are also coming with the default size. I don’t exactly remember the post but I saw something like this…
1 Like
I find it strange why they left that out. FSX had all 4 sizes + a special runway exit version.
Although I don’t know if default FSX airports actually used more than 1 size. I seem to remember that they all used size 2 or 3.
See, I don’t think that screenshot accurately captures the difficulty of reading the signs. For one thing it seems to be zoomed in. But more importantly it’s perfectly still. In the real world, the difference between making out detail in something still and something moving isn’t that great, because our eyes naturally “lock on” and track the object, essentially keeping it ‘still’ in the center of our vision.
But on a monitor a moving object is a whole different ballgame. Even a fairly slowly moving object is smeared across the screen thanks not just to the game’s motion blur but response time blur and shifting interpolation patterns as it moves across the pixels. While you can somewhat compensate for that with mouselook, it won’t be perfect and it will draw attention away from taxiing, especially if you have to zoom in at all, and especially if you’re trying to move and lean around the window frame for a better view, as you would effortlessly in real life. The effect would be better with VR/Track IR of course, but we can’t all afford that, and it’s still lower resolution than the human eye.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take realistic sizes - it would certainly be an improvement over what we have. But I have some trouble with the signs even in the C152 at my local airfield, which is supposedly using the correct size. I think a boost of say 10-25% above that wouldn’t go amiss, and might “feel” more real than literal accuracy.
1 Like
I think it’s more about the font and contrast. This font isn’t as clean cut, and the lighting on the signs looks unrealistic.
1 Like
Even if they didn’t get the taxiway labels to match, if they just had an in game Airport Diagram that we could use, it would ameliorate both of these issues quite a bit.
2 Likes
Agree on taxiway signage and size. At least for the USA, there are standards for all airport environment features - signs, markings, lightings, taxiway sizes, etc. I know this would be perhaps too much to take on, and that perhaps it isn’t standard in most of the world, adopting this as a standard would at least work as a start.
Point is there are standards available if Asobo or a third-party developer wants to get it right for a specific country.
In addition to the size of signs, I’m also seeing some of the smaller airports where the taxiway lighting appears random and in some cases appears ON the actual taxiway. That is also a total immersion breaker in addition to being just wrong.
Would love to see this improved in the sim as I’ve not experienced this concern in any previous MSFS or competing products to the scale of error we have here.
2 Likes