Asobo and MS will quite obviously not want to get into legal disputes with Google or any other coypwrite holder over content they are hosting on their own servers so they will be strict about what they do choose to host. And what I said is restricted only by law. People can still choose to upload scenery to any of the hosting sites you mention. Although they too may start to restrict what they allow if they get wind of the fact that copywrite material is being used without the owners consent. It is illegal to use other peoples IP without permission, end of.
As for an official Gateway, MS & Asobo are legally obliged to make sure they dont host content that breaches law and your suggestion that they could simply wait for disputes to occur then go through some sort of complicated drawn out “proof of ownership” process is just not realistic in my opinion as a business owner.
Dont forget, the purpose of a Gateway, assuming the aim is the same as the XP one, is so that scenery becomes a part of the actual sims file system. MS & Asobo would not want any potential lawsuits for including scenery in their product or for any community member to remove permissions to use his or her textures and models in the product at a later date. Restricting models and textures to Asobo library objects only removes any such problems.
This is exactly how it works right now on similar services.
The MS Store already does this, and the Scenery Gateway would be no different in this regard. MS is using their servers to host and transmit third party content to users, and at a profit. Whether the scenery goes through the MS Store or Scenery Gateway, it’s the same. The Gateway simply streamlines the process.
And excluding textures and models from the Gateway doesn’t remove a potential copyright violation. Even sticking just to the Gateway dev tools and not any extra models or textures, if users are copying scenery from Google imagery or from other scenery add-ons, the potential is still there for a copyright violation. Then that unrealistic back and forth process of claims and appeals begins. Microsoft is protected from liability of what its users do on their systems under agreements like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is why things like YouTube and the MS Store can even exist in the first place.
What other gateway service is there that acts as a depository for community scenery that is then added to an official flight simulation product that is sold commercially, other than X-Plane?
By store you mean the marketplace within the sim I assume? That is for commercial developers partnering with MS who produce their own artwork and scenery. No doubt the contract that exists between the developers and MS makes it abundantly clear what rules those developers are expected to follow when submitting scenery and they are legally bound by it. Unlike the public who flout the law commercial developers are rather more careful about where their artwork comes from.
We will see what MS does but I suspect you are going to be sorely disappointed if you expect the sort of flexibility that you want for a gateway that puts community scenery within the official sim product.
X-Plane’s gateway is not necessarily a good model for how Flight Simulator community scenery should work. That’s a small team that probably doesn’t have the means or want to manage a service like corporate Microsoft could.
Both the in-game Marketplace and the MS Store. They both allow users to sign up and distribute free content. They probably operate under similar rules and conditions. Users sign up and agree to a license agreement, host their content on Microsoft’s hardware and software, and Microsoft is not directly liable for their actions.
Gateway developers (aka the sim users at large) could just as easily be held to the same or similar license.
The public ARE the commercial developers. It does not matter if it’s an app-store, scenery gateway, or internet content host. All of these places host content created by the public. The public signs up for an account, agrees to a license, and is bound to it. It is the public at large that is posting content to the MS Store and YouTube. Copyright violations are routine, but these services handle them, just as a scenery gateway service could. If users violate their agreement or copyright laws, they are legally liable and face consequences.
I’m already disappointed with the state of some of the features in this simulator. Whether or not they botch the Gateway too, the specific matter of copyright holding such a system back is a non-issue. My main point here is that the Scenery Gateway is no different than other services like the MS Store, which are tried and true examples of how to handle copyrighted material.
Not sure how this fell from second place, but having accurate taxiway names and airport layouts is far more important to most of us than a press any key to start screen going away or than a replay system, which they’ve already confirmed they are working on.!
And it’s falling further down!
I’d love a replay system too, but definitely not more than having accurate airport markings and taxiway signs Think about the possibilities crowd sourced scenery editing could bring!
Not sure if it was mentioned already, but I want to add:
It would be great if the scenery can also be part of the data streaming functionality. I’m not sure how feasible this is or if it’s currently implemented to any degree, but I could imagine users having to download more and more airports over time becoming a problem with storage.
I already have downloaded 10 GB of community content, and this is onlythe A32NX mod and the liveries megapack V7. Imagine all this extra scenery on top of that.
It wouldn’t really be any different than downloading the default airports within the sim. All this would do is replace those airports with the edited layouts.
That would also depend on the degree of creativity they allow. If they go the XP way and only allow onboard tools, then it would not cost much space. If they allow custom models and textures, then it could get quite large - unless they stream parts of it.
Having made a bunch of airports for the xplane gateway, I agree that this would be massive for MSFS. Alpha testing is underway for ADE which is good news.
I fully support this, for example, New Orleans KMSY at the moment is not updated to the new terminal. If they release world editor tools for the community We can get these airports updated in no time.
Please give users the ability to edit / modify default airports using the SDK. Currently, when you open a project, it scraps all of the base scenery that already exists. We need a way to edit airports ourselves to make small adjustments so that we can fly in an accurate world.
Taxiway names are incorrect throughout the globe, and this is the only way we can easily crowdsource fixes. We need the ability to modify taxiway and gate names, as well as sign placement and general airport objects / layouts. We need the ability to modify what already exists rather than just starting from scratch.
My first request was to get this system running so that we can publish fixes to the scenery gateway system, but the dev team misunderstood the scenery gateway system as being primarily for custom placed world objects and not airport updates… We want a scenery gateway system to function in a way that allows us to edit default airports and upload airport scenery fixes, not necessarily custom objects. Trying to switch this over so that we at least get the ability to modify the default airports to provide accurate-to-life taxiway names.
Not sure we’re going to see this anytime soon based on the Twitch stream. Even if Asobo was gung ho about jumping on this, it sounds like it would be behind a long list of other fixes taking priority, but they’re still hemming and hawing on this would even work as if it’s barely been considered. It seems like concerns over users ripping off Google’s photogrammetry was the main point of contention, even though with an end user copyright and code of conduct agreement, as well as moderation, this really doesn’t have to be a problem.
Just minor tweaks like changing the taxiway names weren’t even addressed.
To be honest, I don’t even know how this is going to work. It seems like scenery that is not coming from Bing or the AI database cannot currently be streamed. Even the official DLC and airport updates have to be downloaded and installed as a package. So any user edits would likewise need the same as well. That means waiting for the biweekly update and then getting a huge file containing a massive amount of scenery most folks will never see. Over time the scenery downloads will balloon to massive sizes.
I’m thinking we’ll need to take this into our own hands. Any thoughts on how a third party could possibly implement the scenery gateway? Again, I don’t see how it’s going to work if we can’t stream the changes. A third party gateway would just be a compilation of freeware scenery that balloons to massive sizes has to be regularly downloaded and installed.
How about we ask the Bing guys instead of Asobo? We ask the Microsoft team in charge of Bing to implement an Open Street Maps/Wikipedia style editor for user edits of 3D terrain, objects, map metadata, vector data like roads, buildings, landmarks. Then the Flight Sim team can just recompile the base scenery on their next update cycle from the Bing Maps imagery.
I was pushing for this hard. Even asked a question about it (see #4 top voted question on the Q&A questions list). They misunderstood it and talked about how they have people updating airports if you submit a bug report. That’s not what we’re asking for
Think about the possibilities crowd sourced scenery editing could bring!