Scenery Gateway System - World Hub

What methods would be enforced to avoid people trying to replace buildings or prevent others from replacing better versions? This could turn into a managing nightmare.

I think in this case, content would be moderated by Asobo to prevent any sort of foul play

Precisely.

The whole pipeline should be under the moderation of Asobo.

You choose some form of scenery to work on, such as a remote airfield. Handcraft it, and submit it to Asobo. Once it’s approved by them, only then will it be implemented.

As for for your point about this system preventing others from providing better versions, this is valid because different people can have different levels of skill set.

So perhaps a user profile system should be used where their level of competence gives their work more weightage over others. Or Asobo can gauge all the different models submitted and implement the one with the best visual fidelity to performance impact ratio.

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Hope the devs read this. This is an important aspect. At the very least, editing taxi lines, naming, parking spots and what AI can use which gates. The default airports are a big improvment as it is, but the naming and parking/gate assignments are somewhat of a mess.

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I want to highlight this. Of course I’d love if users could submit more complex content, but I do see why Asobo might have some hesitation about that. Concerns about copyright, concerns about hurting the 3rd party dev market, and the challenge of moderating it all.

But I see no disadvantage to at least crowdsourcing taxiway fixes and such. Move lights in the middle of the road. Perhaps correcting terrain features or misplaced bridges. Not so much adding assets as adjusting assets already there.

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Theres no obligation to submit anything. Whats to say you edit an airport for yourself. We did this in FSX and P3D for years. Custom parking and gate assignments. Doesnt necessarily have to be shared, although its always nice as a community.

We at the very least need a means to edit default airport scenery.

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First of all, that’s dope.

Second, there’s a recent interview with Jörg Neumann who gives some hints on the topic, but he says he can’t comment much on it at this time. Maybe in one or two months he says. He is explicitly referring to the idea of deploying your work into the base sim for everyone. Since the YT translation is a bit AIish, here’s a short transcript of the important part:

“Is there a way for the community to say hey, I wanna get my place into the sim being more beautiful?”

JN: “Yes, that is a very good question. And I want to do it in a way being structured enough. No one prevents anyone from building a model of their house and get that into the sim. No problem. There is a map editor, and you can import it, and then you have your house. No problem.”

“But does only this very player have that [house] or does everyone have it?”

JN: “Exactly, that’s exactly the point. Currently only the player has it, and I want to do it in a way everyone in the world will have it. And there are some … uhm … I can’t really talk about that much today. But I have an idea how we can make this really great. How we can really build the world together. Hopefully in a month or two I can finally talk about that. But I think it’s gonna be great.”

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Here you have an example of (KJFK) from the gateway. Works pretty much like any other version control/pull request system. Given how big the community is I consider similar system a ‘must have’ in MSFS!
https://gateway.x-plane.com/airports/KJFK/show

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LOVE the idea of relying on AI but a major problem with is how outdated the bing data is. A 3 local airports near me are at least 7 years out of date and show grass strips that have all since been replaced with asphalt and significant other infrastructure. Hence the importance of the suggested solution above and the need for it too be implemented as soon as possible so that it becomes THE system.

That’s great to hear!!

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YES ! - you have my vote and creative skills :+1:t2:

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Users’ edits going into the base sim is everything. I’m surprised Microsoft and Asobo didn’t have this operational when they launched the Alpha. They could have had thousands of user edits before the game launched.

Some ideas if this thread is being mined:

  • Users not only contribute to the sim scenery, but to the library of 3D objects in the Gateway itself. For example, once people add 3D objects for a couple of farm houses, barns, grain bins, silos, elevators, telephone poles, and fencing, others could use these objects and take on basically 90% of the Midwest scenery design. But there should be a huge library of 3D objects users can search through.
  • Make the scenery gateway tool extendable and open itself. We should be able to create plugins others can use to automate scenery design.
  • World map showing user edits. Useful for highlighting areas that need attention, finding places to visit, identifying potential conflicts that need to be resolved such as overlapping edits, and reporting edits that violate the rules.
  • Leaderboard, achievements, and weekly featured contributors to promote participation.
  • Tools to fix DEM and texture issues in the existing scenery. Users should be able to flatten water hills, correct misaligned water and road data, and create masks for shallows and reefs.
  • Make it super easy. We should be able to go into dev mode, search the object library, start drawing on the map, and then click Submit changes. No messing around with building and compiling packages, unless you want to make a stand alone add-on.
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Love these ideas! Make the process simple and game-like to gain the interest of a wider audience, motivating them to contribute as well

While I appreciate the thought, I don’t want community generated freeware automatically loaded in to my sim as an official update.

Optional, per individual fix, would be more appropriate. Sort of like how freeware already works, eh?

Why not, exactly? It’d basically be user-updated Asobo/MS-approved airport layouts so that we always have accurate taxiway names and runway names, along with any updates that come to instrument systems along the way, etc.

Everything would be overseen and approved by Asobo, and it’d really enhance all airports above what they currently are based on AI generation. And best part about this is that if this becomes a reality, we’ll receive the tools we need to edit default airports ourselves so you could easily override someone else’s edit.

Have you ever used XP? This is probably THE feature that makes XP so incredible in my opinion - community sourced airport creations. Someone used the gateway system to edit JFK and hand placed all of these custom objects (see this posted by a user above: https://gateway.x-plane.com/airports/KJFK/show). Obviously not payware quality, but spot on accuracy in placement and it makes it feel so much more immersive. For free. No hassle to download anything.

The issue with having download freeware airports and manage them yourself is just that… you have to actively go online and find the airport you are looking for, try to verify its accuracy (as it hasn’t been approved by anyone), and then install it. You have to actively think about whether or not you have the updated airport before a flight.

With XP’s scenery gateway system too, you can download older versions of the airport if you don’t like someone’s in-the-sim edit. Easy way to self-reinstall the old airport. Because most people are going to want the new airport, it makes more sense to require users to reinstall the default, old airport if they don’t like the updated version.

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You’ve summarized the process and the benefits really well.

Community driven, hassle free, Asobo quality assured, and most importantly, free for everyone forever.

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The way that the gateway works in XP is that scenery is only accepted if it uses objects that are officially a part of the X-Plane object libraries. No third party library objects are accepted. That prevents any potential copywrite issues. The same idea would need to be adopted by the developers if the scenery is to be added to the sim as updates. It would have to be managed by Asobo and they would have to provide the object libraries.

This doesnt stop people producing freeware and hosting that elsewhere so people can download it but I think any idea that people can model areas from Google and just upload that to a gateway administered by MS and Asobo is just not realistic.

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The SDK already provides a library of default textures and objects.

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This is way too restrictive. Folks will want to add their own custom airport buildings, control towers, and local landmarks.

It’s also unnecessary. There’s already precedent for hosting third party content like this, whether it’s YouTube, Wikipedia, or even the MS Store which is hosting third party add-ons for Flight Simulator. Microsoft won’t be held liable for copyright if it’s honoring copyright claims, enforcing the rules, and holding users accountable. Submissions to the 3D object library could be moderated and accepted like everything else. Users that are obviously ripping off Google Maps photogrammetry could be banned out right. If there’s a dispute, say someone is ripping third party aircraft models for static display, a DCMA could be filed on that object in the library and the submitter would have to “show their work”.