X-Plane 12 Dev Deep Dive - Ep 6: Airports

[Sethos 4,300]

 

Edited June 27, 2022 by Sethos

[molleh 451]

the default airports are one of XP11's strongest features, and all those improvements are just going to make them that much better. XP11 (w/ the most current Scenery Gateway airports) is the only flight sim i've used to date that doesn't make me immediately start searching for payware or freeware airport options the second i load into a given airprot, lol.

[NZ255 309]

That speaks volumes about the scenery gateway program. It was the exact opposite in versions prior. You were lucky if your local airport had buildings! 

[Sims Smith 302]

Laminar created a big problem. Do I put all spare time to update all my airports or do I take a break enjoy flying in X-Plane 12!!! 

[jcomm 5,890]

One feature I really would like to have is the seemless update of runway numbers, just as I recently experienced in MFS.

Lisbon airport had it's two runways updated from may 18 to may 19 2022.

Loading MFS on may 18 still showed rws 03 /21. Starting may 19 the runways had changed to 02 / 20, and the magvar had already been updated to 24º / 204º...

This is as simple / effective as it could be 🙂

Edited June 28, 2022 by jcomm

[mSparks 2,086]

6 hours ago, Sims Smith said:

Do I put all spare time to update all my airports

Yes.

[molleh 451]

8 hours ago, Sims Smith said:

Laminar created a big problem. Do I put all spare time to update all my airports or do I take a break enjoy flying in X-Plane 12!!! 

Well the nice thing is that each update includes most of the recently approved Scenery Gateway uploads, so you shouldn’t have to go searching for updates yourself unless you want to check if one was updated for a recent runway addition or something like that.

that being said I would love an option built-in to the sim UI to download the newest airports from the gateway. 🙂

[mSparks 2,086]

15 minutes ago, molleh said:

well the nice thing is that each update includes most of the recently approved Scenery Gateway uploads

Reasonably sure sims smith was referring to the airports he uploaded to the gateway.

And even if not, WED is an absolute pleasure to use for anyone who ever liked building train sets. Its like a trainset simulator on steroids. Flying around it before during and after is really just a nice addon. Reminds me, I'd really quite like to be able to land on the trains....

Edited June 28, 2022 by mSparks

[molleh 451]

Just now, mSparks said:

Reasonably sure sims smith was referring to the airports he uploaded to the gateway.

And even if not, WED is an absolute pleasure to use for anyone who ever liked building train sets. Its like a trainset simulator on steroids.

Oh yeah, sorry I assumed they meant “my airports” as in the ones they had installed, not ones they were actually creating - my mistake. 🙂 I’m extremely thankful for the amount of hard work that the gateway contributors put into giving us quality airports to enjoy.

[Sims Smith 302]

1 hour ago, molleh said:

Well the nice thing is that each update includes most of the recently approved Scenery Gateway uploads, so you shouldn’t have to go searching for updates yourself unless you want to check if one was updated for a recent runway addition or something like that.

that being said I would love an option built-in to the sim UI to download the newest airports from the gateway. 🙂

I agree and this been brought up many times. I will add the link when I find the response in their developers blog.  They are reluctant to add new infrastructure to support this at scale and want to stick to "Quality Check" thus wants to space out the release of new airports with patches.  This cycle airport update is too slow in today's "streaming" culture and user expectations. 

Laminar Research will need to address the backlog issue.  It takes weeks and months to get feedback when an airport is submitted. If a fault is found wait many more months.  One person approving so many airport submission doesn't make sense. It doesn't scale.  They need a early peer review system with other experts involved to weed out issue which will improve the final quality of submission and reduce the time to get an airport accepted in gateway.