After seeing what x-plane can do I am just baffled. What went wrong at Asobo’s office regarding airports?
When building a flight simulator I would personally think the order of importance is:
Airplanes
Airports
Scenery
Apparently to Asobo it is
Trees
Grass
Rocks
Honestly I just don’t get it, default airports are so, so, so incredibly bad. I rather quit flight sim alltogether than fly into those things. Luckily there are lots of stunning payware alternatives and even more amazing freeware options. But that’s not the point. The point is that airports should be a priority in a flight simulator. I really hoped 2024 would do better in that regard.
When the World Hub was still operating (and it’s supposed to reopen at some point), there were quite a few airports that got significant upgrades, and were included in the streaming data base.
There is also a list of smaller airports are much more detailed than most of the ones we see most days. Not sure if they were all part of the world hub updates, or if some party in MS/Asobo has been doing updates on airports in the background.
In any case, here’s thread covering some of the updated airports.
Yup, I agree. I have about 80 paid-for airports. None of them perform as badly as the “Asobo hand-crafted” KATL Atlanta. It is a stutter fest and looks cheap.
I definitely agree with the supposed “hand crafted” airports that we paid for and seeing the quality or.. lack of quality.. Queenstown airport was absolutely diabolical..
But…
If you are meaning as in…, the 100,000 odd airports from megaports such as Istanbul airport all the way through to your aerodromes and grass strips i mean…
I much rather have what we have than wait the next two decades for every one of those hundreds of thousands of airports to be made properly..
Also..
What would that mean for the many jobs and businesses it has created in the name of airport/scenery and planes software developers
I even think that it’s a total wast of time from Asobo to include all those default aicrafts.
The only thing that should matters to them is that the skeleton of the simulator works great and the SDK is fully complete and functional. To add functionality, implement technologies, etc…
It takes a lot of time to create ONE beautiful airport and far more to create ONE realistic aircraft…
It’s not their job to do that, there’s plenty of professional and amateur devs specialized in this field since decades to do that. And they do it thousand times better.
Asobo must focus on the things that only them can do and I’m pretty sure it’s a big task enough…
I understand what you’re saying and I want to point out I do not imply I want them to make a handcrafted version of every single airport. I just want default airports to look better, like they do in x-plane, where all the taxi signs and gate signs are correct and where buildings and terminals don’t look like prisons.
Have to say the default XP12 airports are very nice for defaults and I don’t feel the need to switch to payware ones (so far). If MSFS did them this nice I would not feel compelled to purchase any airports. Maybe that is the issue though. They rely on MP scenery sales to keep the sim funded.
also stuff breaking in default airports is quite sad as it takes ages to be fixed.
For example in LSZG, they changed in the sim the runway designation from 06-24 to 06C-24C (the textures are still correct), leading to no navdata being available at one of the main IFR-multi engine piston training airports of switzeralnd and homebase of the lufthansa aviation training.
The bugreport about it was just included in the big list of by now hundreds of airports that need fixing and probably wont be fixed anytime soon.
What is worse is, that the only payware scenery that fixes this is unable to correctly disable the default scenery and as the scenery in question is part of the glider airports pack, it can’t even be disabled without loosing many other airports.
A functional world hub could help so much in these things (however as it is a handcrafted default airport, probably the world hub couldn’t even overwrite the problems in that case)
