16 hours ago, jrw4 said:

 I'm much more interested in accurate taxiway depictions, lighting installations, etc. 

Taxiway depictions and signs are bound to be a much better accuracy with the gateway. And should not increase file size at all or be a very small increase.

16 hours ago, superspud said:

I certainly wouldn't open the floodgates in that way. It would be a right old mess. 

It would not be a "right old mess" if they didn't design it right and the Admin users didn't properly review airport uploads etc.

Edited December 22, 20214 yr by Greazer

On 12/15/2021 at 10:03 AM, Shack95 said:

Agreed, there’s loads of amazing freeware airports out there using custom assets. However, I see several problems with allowing custom assets for the Scenery Gateway airports. First, it could quickly result in huge download sizes. Since it won‘t be optional, that would be a real problem for many of us. Moreover, the more complicated the system the more prone it would be to all sorts of complications (e.g. bugs) which might make the approval process a nightmare (they already struggle to cope with approving payware addons for their marketplace). Therefore I‘d rather they kept it simple. We will still be free to download as many freeware and payware airports as we want, so no need to take risks here.

I 100% agree with this. I've been hitting the SDK pretty hard over the past 2 months, and one thing that I've (much to my surprise) learned is that there are a vast array of assets available in the stock libraries. I've been sitting here going through them for a couple of nights now. There are things in there that you would never know about unless you just sit there and look for a while. I'm sure there is a way to browse them all easily, but it would be nice if they were in the SDK documentation somewhere. Some examples of things I've found: decals for dirt patches, oil stains, piles of trash, tire marks, and construction debris. Stacks of wooden pallets, tool boxes, fences, wind barriers, fuel tanks, toll booths, cars, rows of cars, shipping containers. The list goes on an on, and for most of them the modelling is quite good. For the most part, you should be able to produce a reasonable facsimile of just about any small airport in the world using the provided assets. You just won't be able to add the custom items unique to the particular airport, but you could always share the base airport in the gateway and the add the custom items to a second package that works with it and share that separately on flightsim.to. 

21 hours ago, superspud said:

I'm not against it at all. I think it would be very cool to upload full fat airports. 

I will bet Asobo will be jolly very extremely against it. 

I remember someone talking about submitting a scenery file to the marketplace and saying they needed to supply every texture's original PSD file to prove they'd created it. I barely even know what a PSD file is, let alone be able to supply one. 

I'll bet they would, If I use a Google Earth image in my airport and give it away for free, life is good. But if Asobo puts it in the gateway, then that might change the status of the package to a "for profit" status since it would be part of the proper MSFS infrastructure which is a profit generating endeavor.

4 hours ago, Greazer said:

You will never be uploading full fat airports.

You will upload small file airports that make use of asset libraries.

That's the whole point to reuse library assets and keep the size of gateway airports to a minimum.

Not to mention MS not wanting to host many GBs of Google Earth data replacing their own. 

14 hours ago, MDFlier said:

Not to mention MS not wanting to host many GBs of Google Earth data replacing their own. 

Only a stupid designer would permit full fat airports when users have thousands to download and copyright breaches 🤣