Are taxiway markings accurate at non-handcrafted airports?

[JRBarrett 3,074]

8 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

 

Jan,

I’d first like to take the opportunity to thank you for your wonderful series of WED tutorials on YouTube. I have been through the entire series, and have found them extremely helpful in learning how to maximize the accuracy of my home airport in XP11.

I do hope that the MSFS SDK will provide a tool similar to WED or ADE, and that something similar to the XP scenery gateway will be established for user-submitted modifications. I find the overall quality of the MSFS default airports to be very good indeed, but considering that most default airports were procedurally generated from Bing aerial imagery, there are some types of data that cannot be derived from imagery....

[hangar 661]

21 hours ago, FlyingInACessna said:

For those of us who fly on VATSIM, this is an important thing to get right. Do default airports have at least accurately-named taxiways and taxiway signs? Are they based off of the AFD? I know FSX had accurately named taxiways, so I’d really hope MSFS does as well. 

Will there be taxi markings at the AI generated airports? I'm betting yes. Will the markings accurately represent the real airport? I'm betting a big NO way.

[FlyingInACessna 656]

Alright, well hopefully Asobo sees this & will think about taking steps to correctly model global taxiway data and taxiway sign data, or at the very least introduce a scenery gateway system so that we can spread out the workload among the simmers 🙂 

Still incredibly excited for this release! Just a bummer that this one area seems to have (?) (still having trouble getting complete confirmation, but I did watch a video of a landing at KSAN and there were no runway turnoff taxiway signs) some issues and that FSX & X-Plane beat it out in their roll out.

It also looks like the taxiway signs that do exist in the sim are way too small from what videos I’ve seen. Those things are ginormous so that even in the cockpit of a 747 they’re easily legible.

[briansommers 74]

just give me my X-cub and Alaska and some deep remote areas in Canada and I'll be good for a looooooooooong time.
Where I'm flyin' I don't need no stinkin' taxi lines!

[brucets 94]

5 hours ago, Chock said:

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.

I have been playing MSFS frequently since 2000 and have never gotten past the default jets. I'm a CTRL E guy! If the new sim doesn't have similar default jets and simplified navigation -- I'm not a buyer. I'm 82 and cold dark starts and FMC's are not in my future! Heck, it some times takes me 3 days to complete an 800mi flite! Very disappointed there is no default 737-8/900! I'm willing to spend some $$$ on this new sim, but sans the simplified jets -- I'll be sticking with FSX-SE!

Bruce

[FlyingInACessna 656]

Update: Looks like at least Renton has accurate taxiway signs and markings from Frooglesim's video! Hope the rest of them are similar. Renton wasn't handcrafted, right?