Wondering about generic airport quality

[YVRLHRDXB 321]

4 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

I don't think everyone will ditch their simulator day one. A lot of the 3rd party plane I bought over the years won't be available to me for an extended period of time. As much as MFS 2020 will be an amazing evolution, we will need to wait for all the payware plane to be ported over.

The fact that 3rd party developers have been heavily involved with MFS2020 I would imagine a lot of the planes will be ported over sooner than later.

Going back to the generic airports...every airport is based on Bing satellite imagery. What you see in the satellite images is what you will see in the sim albeit the buildings will be generic.The potential for smaller 3rd party developers to upgrade small to mid sized airports is huge because you already have photo realistic ground textures so updating the buildings isn't a massive task.

[sd_flyer 6,042]

2 hours ago, n4gix said:

Much better, believe me. 👌

"Mileage can vary "

[orchestra_nl 931]

12 minutes ago, YVRDXBLHR said:

The fact that 3rd party developers have been heavily involved with MFS2020 I would imagine a lot of the planes will be ported over sooner than later.

Going back to the generic airports...every airport is based on Bing satellite imagery. What you see in the satellite images is what you will see in the sim albeit the buildings will be generic.The potential for smaller 3rd party developers to upgrade small to mid sized airports is huge because you already have photo realistic ground textures so updating the buildings isn't a massive task.

that is good news. If a 3rd party only needs to slope the runway properly, place realistic buildings and modify taxiways etc. we could see a lot of smaller airports becoming available.
Even better would it be if MSFS adopts the X-plane method of letting the community do their bit in updating the airports. I wouldn't mind spending an evening or two upgrading an airport. Off course there needs to be a method of deciding which contributions to implement or reject, and the tools must be easy to use in order to invite people to "do their bit".

[fppilot 4,371]

2 hours ago, n4gix said:

Much better, believe me. 👌

Bill, are they representative of the real airports. Building placement, building style, right count? Say Gary, or Lansing, or South Bend?  I understand that the objects must come from object libraries or such.  But for FSX I absolutely had to go to 3rd party object libraries to find buildings, towers, and hangars of a representative style or look.

The reason I ponder this is because we have not been shown any of these, especially not shown and called out by name or identifier.

[YVRLHRDXB 321]

8 minutes ago, fppilot said:

Bill, are they representative of the real airports. Building placement, building style, right count? Say Gary, or Lansing, or South Bend?  I understand that the objects must come from object libraries or such.  But for FSX I absolutely had to go to 3rd party object libraries to find buildings, towers, and hangars of a representative style or look.

The reason I ponder this is because we have not been shown any of these, especially not shown and called out by name or identifier.

As testers we were provided a list of random airports from around the world that needed to be tested for building placement, taxiways, etc..The few airports I tested were tiny airfields including grass strips in the middle of nowhere and even grass strips that had fuel stations or a single building were rendered in the sim. The building textures will be generic but any random airport in the world that has a building should be rendered in the sim. That;'s how impressive this sim is.

[TOGA-saurus 330]

The video “Feature Discovery Series 6: Airports” gives the pretty clear answer!

I don’t believe Alice Springs in Australia is considered one of the 40 “high detail” airports. However, you can see in the video just how much detail there is at this “default” airport.

Start the video from 2:40 

 

[hangar 661]

2 things I love about some of the default airports in XP11 are the pavement markings (realistic) and the blue lantern taxi lighting. Anyone know if these 2 things are done really well on the basic default airports fs2020? 

Oh, and I also love the fact that many of the runways are not perfectly flat and follow the counter of the surrounding landscape, does fs2020 do this as well?

[leonardus 33]

3 minutes ago, hangar said:

2 things I love about some of the default airports in XP11 are the pavement markings (realistic) and the blue lantern taxi lighting. Anyone know if these 2 things are done really well on the basic default airports fs2020? 

Oh, and I also love the fact that many of the runways are not perfectly flat and follow the counter of the surrounding landscape, does fs2020 do this as well?

I'm not too sure about that first question, but I do know that MSFS has confirmed sloped runways.

[Tuskin38 6,501]

3 minutes ago, hangar said:

does fs2020 do this as well?

Yes

[n4gix 4,947]

48 minutes ago, fppilot said:

Bill, are they representative of the real airports. Building placement, building style, right count? Say Gary, or Lansing, or South Bend?

When I saw KGYY in Alpha 1, I just about cried, it was so awful! 

When I saw KGYY in Alpha 5, I jumped up and did a "Happy Dance".

Both Lansing and Griffith looked remarkably good. I never visited South Bend nor Indy.

[n4gix 4,947]

17 minutes ago, leonardus said:

I'm not too sure about that first question, but I do know that MSFS has confirmed sloped runways.

Not just 'sloped' but 'undulating' as well!

[HiFlyer 9,359]

3 hours ago, n4gix said:

I haven't checked every airport obviously, but all of the non-handcrafted airports I have seen are quite stunning.

 

Fake news!!!

Well, at least some people seem to think so......

[decker89 110]

2 hours ago, hangar said:

2 things I love about some of the default airports in XP11 are the pavement markings (realistic) and the blue lantern taxi lighting. Anyone know if these 2 things are done really well on the basic default airports fs2020? 

Oh, and I also love the fact that many of the runways are not perfectly flat and follow the counter of the surrounding landscape, does fs2020 do this as well?

Yes. And on your last point yes and MFS does it better. You'll see

[Mace 1,927]

3 hours ago, YVRDXBLHR said:

Going back to the generic airports...every airport is based on Bing satellite imagery. What you see in the satellite images is what you will see in the sim albeit the buildings will be generic.The potential for smaller 3rd party developers to upgrade small to mid sized airports is huge because you already have photo realistic ground textures so updating the buildings isn't a massive task.

If Asobo's AI works well to sharpen and correct airport photos, then that would be a huge advance as you mention.  A designer may be able to focus more energy on the airport buildings.  Problem is a lot of the sat imagery is nice but doesn't look quite so good close up.  I think the AI is solving that issue but I'm not 100% sure yet.

[chuckyb 4]

KGYY is the closet airport to where I live, so I'm really interested to see how it looks.  I'm glad it was improved in Alpha 5.   I think I'm probably going to be doing a lot of flying to the generic airports.