I wonder if there was a manual fix since it was bug-logged? I think that may be the case and not the auto engine. Might be wrong, however!
Cheers! 
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They are usually pretty quick to mark these “fixed-on-live”, so I thought it intriguing it hadn’t been, but I had the same sentiment as you.
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Looks like I filed the report on November 12, 2022 " Request #174646 Airport 1O2 (Lampson Field) has no buildings at all". My request was marked Solved, but clearly it was not. I did come across another airport with flat textures (KADF) but I hesitate submitting another request in fear of breaking the system with too many complaints for flat airports.
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I wanted to, publicly, thank you for your attentiveness to the bug reports I’ve posted here regarding all these airports.
I highly appreciate your involvement in helping see these fixed.
I absolutely notice, and this effort makes a big difference to my regular, everyday (pretty much!) GA flying experience.
Please send thanks, too, to those individuals who are involved on the development team who are fixing these.
These efforts make a difference!
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I feel I must be in the massive minority, in that I rarely ever see bug reports of this kind being posted other than my own.
Does no one else fly GA to small airfields?
I’m working on my last MSFS achievement – World Traveller – which has me doing short hops to all sorts of small airfields.
Today, I just picked a spot in Idaho at random and the first airfield there was totally flattened and un-rendered.
I really, really, really hope the AI for 2024 has improved upon this. I know there must be thousands of flattened airfields awaiting my discovery and it leaves me feeling a bit dejected.
The sim is doing a poor job here and that needs to improve at a core level. Leaving these to the community to fix is just too much given the volume.
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I’ve seen it, heres why i don’t report them.
If a developer wants to release a game where this is acceptable, I let them do it. Beta testing and bug squashing used to be a job people got paid to do. Now it’s pushed off on the end user. I’m not here to provide free labor. How much time and energy have you put into writing these reports? The developers know about the problem. How many have been fixed? Now they create a tool for people to do their job out of the kindness of their heart. I’m not going to enable that behavior from any dev. If you don’t care to make your game work correctly. That’s totally their problem and not mine. This is reason number one I won’t buy fs2024. Ill fly this one till the servers shut down or they break it with an update. Then I’ll move on with my life.
Fully expect to be flamed for my opinion…don’t care.
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Absolutely fair point. You won’t get the flame from me.
I feel caught between a rock and hard place here.
I hate being an enabler, but I also have seen many of these fixed and I fly to many of them regularly, so it matters to me.
I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do. You’re right, I’ve poured countless hours into reporting bugs on this forum and I’d bet the report-to-fix ratio is probably not too favorable.
What do we do? I want a sim that works, and this is the unfortunate state of software development in the 21st century.
My expectation is a software tool would be developed (in-house) that would go through and check airports, obviously that isn’t something that has been developed or it isn’t doing its job well enough.
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Clearly, airport structures are often not being displayed, or displayed incorrectly. I fly almost exclusively as a bush pilot and have seen this problem at virtually every bush airstrip & airfield around the world in one form or another.
But is is the fault of poor MS/AS code, good MS/AS code not running as expected, or the fact that the AI’s learning / training is not up to the task of identifying these structures correctly?
Or, to put it another way, are all these Flattened Autogen Airports actually bugs?
See @CharlieFox00’s post:
and his comment:
We’re literally having to outsmart the AI.
In my mind, these Flattened Auto-Gen Airports are not bugs if one defines a bug as: “Code that is not working as designed”.
The code appears to be working just fine, in that structures are rendered where the AI says they should be rendered. It’s just that the AI’s interpretation of the input data is often very poor. More types of input data, more accurate data, better pattern recognition, etc. all would help generate a more accurate output.
(also see his comments here)
This work may not be the responsibility of Microsoft or Asobo developers, but those responsible for the AI systems.
If I’m correct, and there is little that MS/AS can do, I see little point in reporting every one of these airports as a bug. Since most airports are generated procedurally, you will eventually end up with 10,000+ bugs!
Rather I’d suggest we treat these airports as candidates for the World Hub, though this too is far from perfect:
Perhaps we need to be talking now about a clearly defined process for forum members to do this, in a similar way that they report bugs today.
I’ve chosen to let it go.
If the AI is supposed to generate airports with buildings and due to a flaw or bug with its design it cannot, then I do not think the responsibility of fixing all these should fall on the hands of the community.
To me, the World Hub should be about enhancing a base AI generated airport, not a solution to fixing what it failed to generate as a baseline.
I will die on this hill.
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Thinking on this further, what is the point of having an AI do any of this work for smaller airfields if it is going to require a superior human to come back and clean up its mess?
We might as well just have the humans do the job from the outset.
Then we wouldn’t have closed airports, active airports with massive yellow Xs on their active runways as though they were closed, trees encroaching on the safe zones of the airport, flattened buildings, weird ICAO names for farmer’s dirt airstrips, highway frontage roads identified as airports, etc., etc., etc.
The AI needs to be fixed or the community members doing its job should be paid. Period.
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Believe me, I totally backed off today when I ran into so many more messed up airfields in Idaho, Oklahoma and South & North Carolina.
I cannot beat this, nor do I want to take the time and effort to write all those bugs up.
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Hi,
I tried CharlieFox00’s approach with KRBL and KBYI, and while the polygon was setup to exclude the same buildings mentioned in 0O4, removing that exclusion for those airports did not help. (Just to double-check to see if he’s doing something different, @CharlieFox00 … all you did was un-check those two checkboxes and adjust the polygon as needed?)
You cannot add or edit buildings in the World Hub. So, unfortunately, I don’t think this is a panacea with the World Hub, at least right now. Additionally, there are somewhere around 1200 participants in the alpha, but there are only about 4-5 of us actually submitting on a regular basis. It would take a long time to get to 10,000. It also takes a long time to do a single airport, especially if you want to do it well. I’ve done about 20 airports so far, and it’s taken me hundreds of hours to do them (no exaggeration).
I think that the ideal solution is to have the airport generation system trained and fine-tuned on these airports with their missing buildings. Blackshark.ai can re-generate the entire world in about three days.
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There was a thread where several people were reporting this problem. Many airports we’re listed. One of the moderators instructed everyone to report them on a case by case basis instead of all in one thread.
I unchecked those boxes, but they do not show the buildings until the next update into the sim. It will not do it instantaneously. However, my understanding is that if you load the created airport folder into your community folder and restart the sim, it will show them, but I have not verified that.
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Wow, that is nuts. I will try it tomorrow. Thanks!
Even if it works out and we can fix these, I still believe that the world generation system should be optimized. In my opinion, World Hub developers should be there to enhance airports, not make up for the failings of a system.
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Agreed. It is why I wrote: “More types of input data, more accurate data, better pattern recognition, etc. all would help generate a more accurate output.”
@CharlieFox00 wrote in the post I linked to previously:
IMO, it is unrealistic to expect that Microsoft could somehow acquire the data for the thousands of airports, airstrips & airfields where it currently does not exist, and even if they did, and assuming they created a tool that allowed the creation of one airport per day - maybe also unrealistic, as per @N316TS’s comment:
I’ve done about 20 airports so far, and it’s taken me hundreds of hours to do them
One person creating these would take 38+ years. Or, 38 contractors could do this working non-stop five days a week for 1-2 years.
That’s an ~5% increase in the current “800 people” I recall Jorg mentioning were working on MSFS in last weekend’s presentation. I can’t see the budget decision makers approving that additional expense for airports that may only be visited by a small minority of the 15 million users of the sim.
So, like it or not, we are stuck with:
a). The teams that run the AI & other procedural systems improving their ability to render airports, or
b). The World Hub - particularly if, over time, enhancements and functionality is added to do more things, more quickly, and more easily. I’m not suggesting this is going to happen any time soon. The World hub is still in alpha. It make take another complete cycle of MSFS before it is really good enough to do what we want it to do.
That would not not stop MS/AS adding a few smaller bespoke airfields to every WU, the choice based on their telemetry data (i.e. which are the most used small airstrips / airfields covered by the WU area), but that still would be a very small percentage of the overall number.
Yeah, don’t forget, there’s airport construction all the time, and the aerials are also being updated, so all that work on one airport gets to be repeated over and over and over…
It really needs to be fixed - the AI has to do a better job in the first place. But even on our end - a big portion of the time spent is aligning to the new aerial, which should theoretically never happen. The other portion is fighting the wonky SDK UI that just doesn’t offer an easy way to edit.
I’d love to get in and out without having to load an entire sim session. I still hear wind and traffic as I’m editing. Using the dev cam, which is basically the drone cam. Can’t align anything to a common reference point or azimuth, no grid or guide lines (other than taxiway width), blah.
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I’m also a nut job. 
I research airports to death. I just submitted a relatively simple airport, and it takes 4-5 minutes to read the changelog I left on it. I don’t think Microsoft would ever hire 38 N316TS’s. (Alas!)
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Sorry, I said I would check it “tomorrow.” And “tomorrow” became four days later.
Unfortunately, it did not work for me. These were my polygon settings:
I compiled KRBL and KBYI, added them to my Community folder, restarted the sim, and voilà, the buildings still aren’t there (this is KBYI):
I’m out for a few weeks, and when I return, I’m taking a break from the World Hub alpha and I’m resuming my retirement from the forums. So if someone else wants to take the reins on this, please feel free. Those airports are not checked out in the World Hub.
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Okay, bear with me here. At one point I had received a response from a wh mod about this on a thread in the dev forum, but I think the response has since been disappeared.
However, another user quoted that response and that’s all that remains (embedded in a quote in the link below). Either way, that response is where I got the notion that unchecking those would fix things after the re-compile. With the deletion, I’m now wondering if that was ever the case, or maybe I’m just going crazy. Too bad it’s what I’ve been working off of since…
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