If you look at that leaked 747 video (where the guy takes 20 minutes just to taxi off) from Domodedovo, Moscow, you can see that the lines and markings on that ramp area are a total disaster and nothing like they are in real life. The satellite image of that airport is not the best, so only a human (or Azure 3.0!!) could really glean where those meek and worn lines really run. I have flown to that airport many times in real life, and the markings are in a sorry state...so they always send a follow-me car to guide you from the runway to the stand and vice-versa 😉

If you compare that to the "handcrafted" Scenery Gateway airport in X-Plane, the difference is night and day. Just as night and day of course as the graphics are when he later booms and zooms  that church in the city center 😃 where the new MSFS wins 10:1.

Cheers, Jan

Edited August 1, 20205 yr by Janov

If they have created 37k airports I am not concerned if some of them no longer exists. I am not expecting a perfectly modelled world and the vast majority of simmers won't even realise or care if a particular airport is no longer there in real life. 

The sdk/tools will be available to all so I expect someone will setup a "xplane gateway" website and taxi way signs will be fixed and no longer be an issue for those concerned about them.

While I understand these concerns, when I read the tone of some of the posts, it makes me think others on these forums rate p3d and xplane very highly and msfs has a very high bar to reach to match those sims. Thats not the case with me.

 

Edited August 1, 20205 yr by sanh

2 hours ago, Farlis said:

I saw that in a glimpse of a preview video where the person flying (with no clue of how to read ICAO codes) said: "EDDI? Well that doesn't help me much" and I was like: "Why the heck is Tempelhof showing up on the Navmap?! It has been closed for ages! And they are selling this as having up to date NavData? Is that a joke?!"

The process of creating airports is probably not connected to the NAV data.

Even if some guy sketched up this airport by hand... they were doing 37k, I guess such things slip through with that workload.

Edited August 1, 20205 yr by tweekz

11 minutes ago, tweekz said:

The process of creating airports is probably not connected to the NAV data.

Even if some guy sketched up this airport by hand... they were doing 37k, I guess such things flip through with that workload.

I believe usually NavData does contain airport information. Not layouts but ICAO, IATA code and position and height data, runway name, length and width, and ILS if available.

Edited August 1, 20205 yr by Farlis

7 minutes ago, Farlis said:

I believe usually NavData does contain airport information. Not layouts but ICAO, IATA code and position and height data, runway name, length and width, and ILS if available.

They probably just went through a list of airports. When they model it, it is in the sim. To "deactivate" that airport (no lights, etc) woud probably require handwork again.

Understandable they don't do that with all the airports in the world. But annoying with such a big airport. Fixing this should not be a problem however.

Can anyone post post screenshots of the blank taxiway signs, by eyes arent what they used to be and cant see clearly in people's videos.

1 hour ago, tweekz said:

The process of creating airports is probably not connected to the NAV data.

That might be the case. From what they have shown in the Airport episode we only know about the a part of the features. However I can't stress enough of how much I hope you're wrong on this. Some of the very few airports I checked seemed to have the correct lighting for example, and quite obviously this info must come from navdata as the orthos won't help much here. If there's no connection to navdata then every feature not visible on the orthos (which is a lot) would have been complete guesswork. Afaik this has never been the case with any past sim and would be a major step back.

Edited August 1, 20205 yr by badderjet

1 hour ago, tweekz said:

They probably just went through a list of airports. When they model it, it is in the sim. To "deactivate" that airport (no lights, etc) woud probably require handwork again.

Understandable they don't do that with all the airports in the world. But annoying with such a big airport. Fixing this should not be a problem however.

It is just puzzling to me that this carried over to the pre-release and Beta phase. This should have been fixed months ago. That it isn't leads me to suspect that there is going to be tons of this stuff on release.

1 minute ago, Farlis said:

It is just puzzling to me that this carried over to the pre-release and Beta phase. This should have been fixed months ago. That it isn't leads me to suspect that there is going to be tons of this stuff on release.

It's also puzzling that you can slam a A320 into the ground on realistic setting. With a lot of games you ask yourself: "Didn't they try it out once?". I guess there is so much around it, that sometimes obvious things get overlooked / no time to fix them properly in time.

Since flying tubelines with professional level add-ons I never quite understand why developers even bother to make basic models of these aircraft. An Airbus that does not have automatic stall and bank angle detection, a 747 that doesn't properly follow a flightplan like the real thing, including automatic descent calculation, is just not worth the time of anyone.

So why do they keep on wasting a developers hours on a rudimentary approximation of a jetliner that could be better spent on different parts of the sim, like for example getting ATC finally done right and adjust trees to their normal sizes so that they are not the height of the Sidney Harbour bridge, or making sure that they don't grow out of buildings like they currently do in Las Vegas or L.A. or that the Azure AI does not magically put humongous wind turbines in the middle of Hamburg ?

Edited August 1, 20205 yr by Farlis

12 minutes ago, Farlis said:

I never quite understand why developers even bother to make basic models of these aircraft. An Airbus that does not have automatic stall and bank angle detection, a 747 that doesn't properly follow a flightplan like the real thing, including automatic descent calculation, is just not worth the time of anyone.

So why do they keep on wasting a developers hours that could be better spent on different parts of the sim

Erm, because it's fun? Also, for people who, with a similar view to saving time, don't want to spend twenty minutes figuring how to turn on the radio, this gives them a taste of stuff.

It's very easy to be snobbish about this kind of thing and it's especially wrong to do this if you have been flight simming for years, because if you have, you've kind of grown up with the increasing fidelity of simulated airliners. So you've had a very gentle learning curve which has gradually allowed you to learn all that proper stuff as the increasing fidelity of fancy add-ons has improved, and those simple airliners offer this to similarly new users.

You may recall that when PMDG brought out their 737 NG for FS 2004, loads of people could not get the second engine started because they'd never had a flight sim aeroplane which needed a bleed air transfer to crank up the other rubber band. To be dismissive of others who might find themselves similarly bemused when they just want to have a go at driving a big plane, is in my opinion, not a very welcoming attitude. Nobody is born knowing this stuff.

Edited August 1, 20205 yr by Chock

7 minutes ago, Chock said:

You may recall that when PMDG brought out their 737 NG for FS 2004, loads of people could not get the second engine started because they'd never had a flight sim aeroplane which needed a bleed air transfer to crank up the other rubber band.

I do remember actually. I was one of those people. I still forget at times that the NGX automatic Pack system is not the same as that of the 777 or 787 where you don't have to switch them off yourself before starting the engines. 😉

But it is not rocket science. If Microsoft had actually modelled their 737 back then more closely to reality then I would have known, because the sim would have told me how it's done. As opposed to PMDG who expect you to read the original FOM. 😉

And I'm not being dismissive of others, I'm dismissive of the approach that the default aircraft have. They are way too oversimplified, because they are either capable or incapable of stuff that their real counterpart is not. And I personally don't want that in a SImulation. I expect that from GTA V but not from a serious sim.

 

I'm not asking them to have a complete failure model, and all real life system interdependencies. But an Airbus without a properly functioning Airbus logic, is no Airbus.

Edited August 1, 20205 yr by Farlis

Yup, this is true. But I think we ought to cut people new to this kind of thing some slack. If people like their default A320, and then get into wanting to take a step up because they hear people saying, yeah, the FSL Airbus is more like the real thing, it would hopefully intrigue them and interest them in the challenge.

Another factor here is that when someone is new to this stuff, they might be somewhat alarmed at the prospect of an add-on airliner costing more than even the Super-duper deluxe version of the sim costs. But with a gentler introduction to things, they'll eventually see why those things cost as much as they do, and that if you like the challenge they offer, it's worth the price of entry.

We've grown up with that increasing cost as well, so it too is a bit easier to swallow. Imagine if an add-on 737 for FS95 had cost 139 quid, we'd have binned all this flight simming off and bought Doom instead. 🙂

Edited August 1, 20205 yr by Chock

6 hours ago, Janov said:

I think there will be quite a few of those "and nobody saw this??" posts coming up when the 18th rolls around.

I believe that a lot of the alpha testers from this forum saw and reported it (serious simulation users). The bulk of the "wild" alpha crowd probably does not even kow what a taxi sign is or that it is supposed to have letters and arrows on them.

Keep in mind that the alpha testers were (are!) bound by an NDA, so they couldn´t come here and splurge about stuff like this.

With the approach that Asobo took to modeling the whole world, there is no way that even a large team can go over 37000 airports and model ground markings and taxiway signs accurately. I do lots of airports for X-Plane, and the crowd-sourcing approach of the Scenery Gateway is the only way I can think of that might accomplish this.

There are some other "OMG, why did nobody ring an alarm bell??" features that are (appearantly) missing (visibility slider, replay function) - but I am sure those WERE noted by the testers and Asobo will probably add those later - if public demand exists.

Cheers, Jan

 

It really would we wise for Asobo to give us some tools for Airport/Scenery editing and use the X-Plane strategy for continuously updating the global airport database as we fix and enhance them. Would save the developers a ton of work and let them concentrate on other areas of the sim. My ultimate hope would be that such tools would even allow us to model and texture the airport buildings while keeping consistent with the program assets; there is so much good airport imagery becoming available (google, bing etc...) that would now allow us to do pretty accurate renditions of the more "obscure" airports that Asobo or payware developers will likely never get to.

I also want to thank you Jan for everything you have contributed to X-plane and hope you get "onboard" with MSFS as well. Your X-plane videos taught me how to design my home airport (CYQL) - much appreciated!  

Hmm, kind of a big deal for those that like to taxi from the gate to the runway.  And what about atc instructions to the runway, how is that handled I wonder?

Oh well, no doubt it'll get sorted one way or another.