Even with stock models which are (far too) optimised in some cases, I guess you could go totally bonkers with them and choke the user experience if you place enough of them.
Some of the initial Asobo premium airports still run absolutely horribly and outside of buildings they only use the stock stuff.
Maybe there’ll be some sort of limit that prevents uploading something too heavy.
The video clip made no mention of placing objects. The guy afterwards who said it was possible looked like he was going to cry so it’s a bit vague.
I would be very happy if the World Hub would allow us to remove taxi light poles from the middle of taxiways and aprons. If so, I would certainly contribute.
Does anyone know if this is possible or are we all just guessing?
I hope they said that only to appease the person asking the question, and that they’re not actually going to limit volunteer efforts in order to protect the interests of payware developers. It sounds like they really don’t know to what extent this tool will be used or where it’s going to wind up. They outsourced this to a single developer.
A lot of that payware is just capitalizing on the deficiencies of Flight Simulator. They don’t need to keep things ■■■■■■ so somebody else can make a buck. And really, there’s nothing stopping amateurs from doing this already, making their own airports and sharing them freely, using the existing developer tools. The thing is, it’s a ton of a work making a detailed custom airport. There’s an enormous amount of artistic work involved from 3D modeling, image processing, to texture creation. The World Hub could never replace that without remaking 3DS Max and Photoshop along the way, so there will always be a third party market for these airports. For starters, the hub looks like a means of merely facilitating how users check in and check out edits using the existing scenery design tools. It’s not yet a robust custom content creation system from I can see.
The demo video in the stream showed options for editing airport lighting. I think stuff like this is what the World Hub will do at a minimum.
Correcting signage, lights, markings, intrusive trees, that should be like phase 1 of this effort. Phase 2 might hopefully allow users to check out grids from anywhere in the world and edit them using the whole capabilities of the SDK, followed by weekly scenery updates that are sent to the users, rather than waiting for the next full sim update. The more enthusiastic people are about using it and asking for new features, the better chance we have at seeing a true World Editor rather than a stock airport fixer-upper.
This is a great idea, but sadly this appears to not be planned anytime soon. And the fact is this very limited version of the World Hub took 18+ months to pull together, so something broader is, at minimum, 2+ years away realistically if it ever happens.
The weirdest part of the SDK Q&A was the fact they not only didn’t deny this, but actually sort of affirmed that was the case by saying the World Hub wasn’t even about how airports look (!).
“An interesting comment…‘adding custom objects will absolutely kill scenery developers.’ It is true that if you want a really nice airport, you may want to provide it through the marketplace as a product…the aim of the World Hub is more to refine the data of the airport rather than how it looks like.” - 42:30 of the SDK Q&A
Yeah, to me that only means they don’t have the capability for custom 3D assets, and that this remains the realm of third party add-on designers. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I hope that doesn’t mean there will never be such capability. Again, I don’t think they really know what they have yet or what it’s potential is. It sounds like this is being developed outside of the usual teams. It might have taken this long to get the hub going, but there’s just one guy working on it. It hopefully takes off from here with a much bigger scope.
We are just speculating on a 1 minute video and a couple of quick answer by the team, Alizeé said they will provide us a list of what is included and what is not prior to alpha stage, most likely alpha stage will be available with su12 beta (pure speculation!)
Imho, the WorldHub is gonna have pretty much everything the xp gateway has
May I quote your right points @Speed1994
- You can edit any existing airport in the game
Yep, this is is quite clear in the video, we can
You can add whole new (missing) airports
Think that at the moment is not possible, there is
no evidence of that in the video
You can use any base game objects
That’s a key point. Eric said that we will be able to use any library item. But keep in mind that in msfs we can’t at the moment rebuild buildings with the base library (no facades like in xp).
And of course custom 3d objects is a “no no” , like in xp. Do anyone really want on his hd every object added in the world by any developer? Seriously?
You can edit/add procedures and ATC frequencies
At the moment there is no tool in the scenery editor to do that, you can play only with com frequency
So it is unlikely we’ll have that in alpha stages. Plus, the notes in the SDK docs about editing navaids and procedures emphasize the modifying those data can be dangerous, so better avoiding user to play with those.
You can edit airport/runway/taxiway/apron elevations, slopes, and profiles
That’s the whole point of the WorldHub, and likely will have that option (look at the editor layout in the video)
Let’s hope that during the alpha stage,.tester could gave suggestions to the team to obtain a wonderful World Hub
It’s pencilled in for SUXII as of last months dev update and they’ve opened alpha registration so fingers crossed.
Thank you for the clarification of whether my points appear to be included
Definitely not, it would get out of hand really quickly! I say leave that to the fully third party mods. Although I wouldn’t mind if Asobo added more regional/variety autogen objects to the library in the distant future
Agreed, I was thinking along the lines of editing ILS’ in XPlane that are attached to the runways. Nothing like editing SIDs and STARs, or RNAV approaches. (As well as editing the com freq.) Sorry for the ambiguity.
Well, there’s no way Asobo or anyone else will individually be able to keep up with changes globally over the years, so a crowdsourced method would be the best option. Probably not using custom objects due to optimization and other issues, but I wouldn’t dismiss the broader use case out of hand if you care about any sort of accuracy long term in the sim.
It would take a while to broaden the uses of the gateway, and starting with airport fixes makes sense. But there doesn’t appear to even be a vision of what this could be used for long-term (in fact, the developers tamped down on potential uses explicitly in the discussion), which is a bad sign.
After watching the SDK Q&A where World Hub is introduced, here are some observations and questions I have as a result.
Observations
• Checkout for 2 weeks according to the demo. In locked status during that time
• There is only a single approver to review submissions
• Can only update existing airports
• Edited in Developer Mode Light Scenery Editor
• One person at a time can check an airport out
• Updated airports will be added to core sim for all in a later patch
• Alpha testing in progress
• Only Base objects, not customer objects can be edited
• Will be a limit on how many airports are checked out by a single user at a time (3-5 possible?)
Questions
• What is reviewed during the approval process?
• What can be edited in the Light mode of the editor?
• Can’t the AI be updated so that it can help address many of the common issues?
• Should there be community standards established for developers to follow?
• Should a discussion thread (heavily moderated) be created for the community to crowd source issues at airports to help save developers time auditing airports on their own? A possible discussion thread structure could be categories for each airport type. (Airports with Instrument Approach Procedures, Airports without IAPs but have paved runways, Grass, gravel, or dirt airstrips without IAPs but have runway markings, Grass, gravel, or dirt airstrips without IAPs, or markings, Seaplane base, Heliport, and Helipad. Under each category, a separate thread is created for each airport with a structured method of posting issues with that particular airport.
Just out of interest, can you comment on if anyone has already been selected and admitted to the Worldhub Alpha or is the selection of Participants still undergoing by Asobo?
Could we discuss a similar initiative to the scenery gateway for airports, for world scenery more generally?
Case study: Crete is a beautiful island, and quite well represented in MSFS, with relatively good satellite imagery. However, it’s clear that its hundreds of wonderful olive tree farms don’t have olive trees on them, and that breaks the immersion.
I’m imagining a project where volunteers hand place trees over the textures, making up for the shortfalls in AI placement.
This is just one example, but I think some of us with a bit of spare time and a strong desire to see our favourite parts of the world made as real as possible, could be leveraged by MSFS / Asobo or a volunteer project manager, to fill in the gaps that the AI can’t / won’t.
Obviously tools / models would need to be made available with user-friendly tutorials, but maybe something to talk about? We could place 3d bridges over the photogrammetry ones, boats on the satellite textures where they’re baked in etc.
Hmm, I think you just may have reinvented Scenery Addons.
J/K - I think I get the gist of it, you’re probably thinking of something like the old days of Google Earth, where community made models were used to populate the world with detail in a time where photogrammetry wasn’t available.
This would mean, some kind of sim-network-wide server upload system for auto-gen (AI) adjustments. I can only guesstimate at how much trouble it’d be, but technically it would doable, provided there is enough justification for the efforts involved.
The main effort here, mind, is most likely not that of setting up such a system. It’d be instead, the continuously necessary job of curating these community made additions as they’re submitted.
One cannot imagine such a system being completely open to any uploads whatsoever, as it’d only take one troll and, you know…
The question then becomes: “Is the trouble/cost of authoring scenery in-house (as Asobo does presently) greater or lesser than that of curating and maintaining this community-fed addons gateway?”
I do not know enough about Asobo’s internal affairs to arrive at a meaningful answer, though I’d like to think the answer would be that in favor of this idea. (perhaps this is just wishful thinking, who can tell?)
Assuming this is indeed the nature of the idea, then it gets my vote. It’d save countless many specific downloads for scenery upgrades, and it’d massively benefit the novice/xbox userbase who aren’t aware/capable of the means to improve their sims with non-marketplace addons.
Apologies, I thought the coming scenery hub was for airports only. Hopefully the case study I’m thinking of at least demonstrates a specific wish for the type of scenery which we can one day work on.
It is. What he means that there’s already a full SDK available inside MSFS for making scenery add-ons, which you can then package and place on flightsim.to for people to download for free, if they whish to do so.
Well in that case my suggestion is not the same and should not have been merged. I am suggesting centralized management of scenery projects for curation and addition to the main scenery gateway.
It has nothing to do with 3rd party websites like flightsim.to.
